Bloggasm

This interview was originally published over here

John Joseph Adams is the assistant editor at The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. He reviews science fiction for Kirkus and reviews audiobooks for Publishers Weekly. His non-fiction has also appeared in: Amazing Stories, The Internet Review of Science Fiction, Locus Magazine, Locus Online, and Science Fiction Weekly. He is an affiliate member of SFWA, and served as a judge for the 2005 Audie Awards. He maintains a blog, The Slush God Speaketh.

Simon Owens: When did you first decide to become a book reviewer and what motivated you to do so?

John Joseph Adams: I first decided to pursue book reviewing in February of 2004. Gordon and I were out having lunch one Friday afternoon and I was complaining about the rather dubious quality of certain audiobooks, after having spent my hard earned dollars on an audiobook whose performance I found wince-inducing. I went on to bemoan the fact that no one covers science fiction audiobooks; the primary source for audiobook reviews, AudioFile Magazine, hardly covers any science fiction at all, and I’ve never found their reviews to be particularly useful anyway. (I find them too short—they’re only about one hundred words—and they don’t say enough critically about the book or the performance.) So Gordon wisely suggested I pitch an audiobook column to Locus. He had recently shown me copies of Mystery Scene Magazine (the mystery equivalent of Locus), and I noted with interest that they ran audiobook reviews, so why shouldn’t Locus?

After that discussion, I wrote up a proposal and sent it off to Jenni Hall at Locus (who has since left there for greener pastures). She was the champion of the column and really got behind it, and if she wasn’t around at the time, I’m not sure it would have ever been published. So I’m quite grateful to her for that, as that column really got my freelancing career going, and I certainly wouldn’t have been able to get the PW gig if it had not been for my experience with Locus.

As to what motivated me to start reviewing—well, besides the fact that I wanted to see SF audio being reviewed, the usual writerly motivations for doing things: the desire to see my name in print, the desire to earn a little extra money, etc.

As it turns out, there already was a venue for SF audio reviews—SFFAudio, ran by Scott Danielson and Jesse Willis. Those guys do a nice job with what is basically an online fanzine (a for-the-love project), and had I known about that prior to all of this, I might not have bothered pitching a column to Locus. So I’m glad I didn’t find out about it until afterward.

SO: Do you think your editorial position at the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction made magazine editors more willing to let you review for them?

JJA: Certainly it did before, when I had no other writing credits to speak of. For instance, I know Charles Brown at Locus greatly respects Gordon, and so me being Gordon’s assistant probably had a lot to do with him giving me a shot. Prior to Locus, my only publication had been an article on post-apocalyptic SF for the brand new Internet Review of Science Fiction, and while that name carries more weight now, back then it was still an unknown quantity. So, sure, my position at F&SF surely helped out in that case.

Nowadays, I’m sure it helps out, but now that I’ve reviewed for Kirkus and Publishers Weekly, those name both probably carry more weight when it comes to reviewing. Those are two of the most respected review journals in the world, so being published there gives me mad whuffie.

SO: What’s the process for becoming a Publisher’s Weekly reviewer? Is it hard to become one?

JJA: Curiously, it was pretty easy. It wasn’t something I’d pursued on my own—I came across a job listing on the craigslist.org job board that said PW was looking for audiobook reviewers. Basically, all I had to do was send along my resume and a couple sample reviews.

At the time, I’d been published in Amazing Stories, The Internet Review of Science Fiction, Locus Magazine, Locus Online, and Science Fiction Weekly. I sent along my reviews (from Locus) of Sea of Trolls by Nancy Farmer, ‘Salem’s Lot by Stephen King (which a publicist from Simon & Schuster Audio told me was one of the best audio reviews she’d ever read), and (from Amazing Stories) The Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold.

After about a week to ten days, an editor at PW got back to me, telling me that she liked my sample reviews and asked if I would be willing to write a trial review for them (which I would be paid for whether they accepted or not); naturally, I said yes. A few days later, DHL delivered The World is Flat by Thomas L. Friedman to my door; in the package was a note telling me I had two weeks to review the book, along with a style sheet and a bunch of sample PW reviews. They liked my review (which you can read here), and I’ve been reviewing for the regularly since. This was only back in April, so thus far I’ve only had a total of four audio reviews accepted. But I’ve got two more I’m working on now, and plan to continue for the foreseeable future.

SO: You seem to listen to a lot of audio books. I listen to them voraciously while driving my car, but I tend to prefer nonfiction because I have a hard time keeping track of novels because of the constant distractions while driving. Do you have preferences for audio book listening as compared to regular reading?

JJA: I have about a 45 min. to an hour commute to and from work every day, so I listen in the car too. I find other ways to sneak some listening in now and then, however. For instance, at F&SF, when I come into work in the morning, the first thing I usually do is walk to the post office to pick up the mail. I listen on the walk. When I come back, I sit at my desk and slit open all the day’s slush and unpack the envelopes; I listen while I do that. Later in the day, after the rejections have been written and printed out, I listen some more while I’m packing all that stuff up. Basically, any mundane or mindless task that doesn’t require listening is a great opportunity to get some audiobook reading done.

I’m pretty versatile when it comes to listening to audiobooks. With my regular reading, I pretty much only read science fiction and fantasy these days; not because I don’t like other stuff, but because it’s such a challenge to try to keep up with it all, I don’t really have time to read out of the genre. For audiobooks, I like to listen to science fiction and fantasy too, though I’m much more open to other things. For instance, I almost never read non-fiction in dead-tree format, but I’ve listened to quite a bit on audio (and my first two audio reviews for PW were non-fiction titles).

I don’t really have a problem following fiction narratives on audio, though I think you can train yourself to be a better audiobook reader. I didn’t consciously do anything to improve my audio “reading” skills, but when I first started reviewing (and before that, when I listened only for pleasure), I found myself frequently rewinding the audiobook because my attention drifted or I was distracted by one of those abovementioned distractions. These days, however, I’ve noticed that I very rarely rewind at all. So I think it might just be a matter of training your brain to process the auditory narrative in an efficient way. Or something like that.

SO: Who are some of your favorite audio readers (mine are Bill Bryson, Douglas Adams, and Al Franken)?

JJA: I’ve never listened to an audiobook done by any of those guys, though I’ve heard good things about them. It’s curious to me that the three readers you chose are all authors as well.

But speaking of authors who are also good narrators, two of my favorite narrators are Neil Gaiman and Harlan Ellison. Gaiman’s performance of Coraline is absolutely top-notch, and Ellison I’ve described as reading with “a vibrant, infectious, gosh-wow! zeal.”

Other favorite narrators include: Stefan Rudnicki, Simon Prebble, Stephen Briggs, Ron McLarty, and Frank Muller, whose narration of the first four books of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series are my favorite audiobooks of all time. (Tragically, he suffered a terrible auto accident some years ago; he survived, but he still hasn’t recovered enough for him to resume his narration career—the possibility of which is “very small.”) I never got to review Muller, but I’ve reviewed all the others mentioned above in my Locus columns [1] [ 2].

SO: Do think that audio books are at a disadvantage to regular books because they have two slopes to overcome: performance and literary quality?

JJA: Definitely. The narrator of an audiobook is just as important to the overall success of the product as the author is. No matter how brilliant a novel or its author is, it will not succeed on audio if the production and/or narration is badly done. Audiobooks are also at the disadvantage that some works just don’t translate well to audio.

On the other hand, a really great narrator can turn an otherwise minor novel into something well-worth listening to. Their other disadvantage is that technology can get in the way of your enjoyment of reading. Whether you listen on an iPod (as I do) or you prefer CDs or cassettes—all of these devices have their pros and cons, and many of the cons are downright annoying.

And to tie this back to reviewing—one way in which the audiobook reviewer is at a disadvantage compared to a book reviewer is the audiobook reviewer can’t flip back through the text and re-read selected passages to reinforce his memory or to check facts. It’s very easy to do that with a paper book, but very nearly impossible to do with an audiobook.

(Related posts: Interview with Nick Mamatas, Interview with Jay Lake, Interview with Ben Peek, Interview with Alan Deniro, Interview with Chrisopher Rowe)

Go forth. Read: Fourteen Experiments in Postal Delivery By John Schoffstall

With a grunt, she forced it downward, splitting me from throat to pubes. She pushed me to the ground, dug her hands into the opening, and pulled apart my chest. My ribs shrieked and cracked. She reached into my body and pulled up huge dripping handfuls of intestines, liver, lungs, kidneys, ovaries. “Look at all this crap,” she panted. “Just look at it. Disgusting, oozy, icky, filled with shit and urine and slime. Look at all this crap inside you, Jess. How can you be such a perfectionist? How can you not forgive, roll the dice, and take your chances, like everyone else in the fucking world? How dare you demand perfection in others when you lack it yourself? How dare you? How dare you?”

via hannah

A.R.Yngve, Swedish writer/artist, discovered blogs in 2004, became addicted, and started his own blog in 2005. He published comic-strips in Sweden during the 1990s, then decided to become a writer instead. It took him a decade to find a publisher. In 2004, his young-adult SF/F novel TERRA HEXA came out in Sweden, and the sequel is due for a 2006 release. His short fiction has been published in Sweden and China (see http://yngve.bravehost.com/yngve_in_china.html).

Simon Owens: In an email to me, you labeled yourself an “ex-cartoonist.” Why is this? Have you given up on the art completely?

A.R.Yngve: Sadly, yes. I came to realize that
A) the comic-book market was in a terminal decline;
B) the Swedish market for comics was too small to begin with;
C) I was better at writing than drawing, anyway.
However, the comics experience taught me some useful things about prose-writing: To be economical, and to focus on the “climaxes” in a story.

Simon Owens: For 2006, you set your goals towards being published in China more. Is there something about the Chinese market that you find appealing?

A.R. Yngve: China is a growing market for SF, and the Chinese readers have this great curiosity about other cultures and genuine enthusiasm for the future. When you write science-fiction in the jaded West, encountering this attitude is very refreshing.

For example: I discovered the Chinese market only because a Chinese student emailed me. He had seen my novel ALIEN BEACH on my website, and asked for my permission to translate it into Chinese! (See what I mean?)

Simon Owens: How does the Swedish market for SF compare to other countries?

A.R. Yngve: In a word: TINY.

When I started writing SF novels, I did it in English because I figured Sweden was the last place in the world I’d get ANY science-fiction published. So when a Swedish publisher finally accepted my novel TERRA HEXA, I had to translate it BACK to my mother tongue! My ultimate ambition is still to get recognized “abroad”, i.e. outside Sweden.

Simon Owens: What are the five blogs everyone should be reading (besides your own)?

A.R. Yngve: -Only FIVE? Unfair, man! But OK, here’s a list that’ll get old soon:
1. http://drudgereport.com
2. http://gapingvoid.com (great cartoons)
3. http://rogerlsimon.com
4. http://saudijeans.blogspot.com (learn more about how people live in other cultures)
5. http://blog.wired.com/sterling/

Simon Owens: As someone who has published both genre and non-genre work, is there one you prefer over the other?

Benjamin Rosenbaum: In a strict sense, there isn’t any such thing as “non-genre work”. All art this side of schizophrenic scrawls and secret twin languages weaves itself in part out of ongoing conversations and conventions (just as much of it also rebels against those conversations). Art most often starts with a “yes, but…”

Genres are collections of those threads, vaguely organized according to historical conventions, as a navigational aid — whether for readers in a bookstore (genre as marketing category) or for creators trying to figure out how to tackle a problem of craft (genre as artistic tradition). Not only aren’t they boxes with hard borders, I’m actually not sure it actually means anything to talk about “mixing genres” or being “cross-genre” — the mixture is the primary artifact, after all; the genres are attempts to organize it usefully as a secondary process. It’s something of a fluke if any lump of art ever manages to be entirely composed out of the materials of one genre.

And of course there are genres at different levels of granularity: so “prose” is a genre, but so is “the novel”, and so is “the science fiction novel” and so is “the picaresque post-apocalyptic/nanotech skatepunk utopian science fiction novel”. (Or if it’s not yet a genre, it should be.)

So — the two main genre traditions I’m in are:

1) SF — that is, intellectually alive science fiction and fantasy and weird fiction from, I don’t know, Stanley G. Weinbaum and H. P. Lovecraft up through Sturgeon and Bester, thence Delany and Le Guin and Moorcock, and up to the cyberpunks, the singularitans, and the slipstream style monkeys; and

2) irrealist literary fiction, from Kafka and Ionesco through Calvino, Borges, Barthelme, Abe, Pirandello, and up to Aimee Bender, George Saunders, and so on.

These two traditions are in some sense twins separated at birth — they run from the same roots in the 19th century, and were sundered in the 1920s by cultural forces that split fiction into “high” and “pulp” literatures — a boundary I think is now loosening again.

Do I prefer one over the other?

As spaces to work in, no, I don’t. I like them each, and I like where they collide. Depends on my mood, and what the story’s for.

As a reader, I think the answer is pretty much the same, with mysteries and Anne Tyler and nineteenth century realists and nonfiction and mythic texts thrown into the mix; I’m an eclectic gourmand as a reader. The genre space I read in is a lot broader than the genre space I find I can effectively write in.

SO: Have you found that any of your non-genre readers have made the attempt to cross over and read some of your genre work?

BR: I don’t know if you can sort readers that way either. But I’ve definitely gotten letters from people who read “The Orange” in Harper’s and went and read all my other stuff on the net.

If I was writing novels, and having to deal with readers through the clunky marketing abstractions of the publishing industry, it might be harder. Short stories are ephemera — they get reprinted across genre lines, and once they’re Googleable (because I want my stories to end up in HTML sooner or later where everyone can see them) they’re pretty accessible to all readers, regardless of tribal affiliations.

SO: You’re someone who has engaged in meta-fiction on several occaisions. Do you think that meta-fiction makes it easier for you to converse with the reader?

BR: Sure.

…I guess you probably want more than that.

I guess I feel like metafiction is one of those expensive, shiny tools that you keep in the bottom fold-out drawer of your Black&Decker tool caddy and look at admiringly and mournfully now and then, until *just the right* problem comes along, and then you’re soooo happy that you can finally pull that overpriced, glorious sucker out and use it for the job it was intended for.

It can be brittle; it can be precious; and when disconnected from the meat of the story, it can be dead boring. Even the slightest sly-nod-to-the-reader has a tendency to deflate, distance, and defuse, so you save it for those moments when the story’s motor is otherwise likely to overheat.

So there’s something very exciting about finding a story in which a direct dialogue with the reader, or an extended reflection about story-in-story, or any of those extravagances of literature commenting on itself, actually makes sense, matters, and can bear any emotional weight.

SO: What are the five blogs everyone should be reading (besides your own)?

BR: Well, in the first place, they shouldn’t be reading mine unless they’re very patient, since I am a poor blogger, frequency-wise.

And in the second place, I don’t think I even *read* five blogs regularly, and those I read irregularly are probably a pretty idiosyncratic set.

Like everyone, I am somewhat addicted to http://www.boingboing.net. All the good fights and roll-up-your-sleeves, let’s hash-this out dialogues in my corner of speculative fiction tend to happen at Dave Moles’ http://www.chrononaut.org/log/ . Chris Barzak’s blog http://zakbar.blospot.com has been fascinating since he’s been teaching in Japan and relating the many layers of his culture shock. I intermittently find http://www.corante.com/many/ — a blog on social software — intriguing, though I mostly prefer the longer essays of one of its contributors, Clay Shirky ( http://www.shirky.com).

I honestly don’t think I can pick a fifth. Jed Hartman’s sober assessments of and thoughtful inquiries into issues moral, political, scientifictional, cultural, and orthographic? Gwenda Bond’s electic, sparkling, elan-filled, witty, sly reportage on books, politics, books, alcohol, books, bicycling, and books? Nick Mamatas’s caustic can’t-look-away cocktail of political radicalism, vitriol, Lovecraftiana, and pro wrestling? Hal Duncan’s glorious swathes of word-drunk, swaggering, intellectually toothsome rant-as-artform? Susan Groppi’s late lamented blog, with its clarity of voice and its passionate engagment tempered with irony?

I dunno.

(Actually, the web quasi-literary form I’m really addicted to is not the blog, nor the webzine, nor even the faux-news-site (long live the Onion!) but webcomix — they seem, and I know it’s sort of sacrilege for me to say this, to make best use of the medium. Currently addicted to http://www.megatokyo.com and http://www.sinfest.net, and in recovery from http://www.somethingpositive.net …)

You can find Ben’s blog over here.

Tobias S. Buckell is a Caribbean born writer and a 2002 John W. Campbell Award Nominee. He was also a 1999 Writers of the Future 1st prize winner and a graduate of Clarion ’99. His first novel, Crystal Rain comes out in February from Tor Books, and he’s working on a second.

He’s been blogging about his path to becoming a writer from various locations since 1998, and blogging from his own URL of TobiasBuckell.com since 2002.

Simon Owens: A few months ago, you posted a widely read survey about novel advances for genre writers. Do you find the results to be disappointing?

Tobias Buckell: The genre advance survey found that median advance for a first novel was $5,000. Just over 100 writers gave me info to come up with that result, as well as the graphs I posted. The median book advance for a writer after several books and a few years in the industry was $12,500.

Are they disappointing? I don’t know. They are what they are. If you write a book that publishers think will sell well they’ll give you more money. If your book sells well you’ll make more than the advance with royalties. If you do well they might pay you more for the next book. A significant cluster of writers in this survey saw $10,000 and $25,000 advances for a first novel.

What this survey does not do is track what these writers made in foreign sales very well, or any other subsidiary rights. Many writers double their US advance with foreign rights sales. Many writers get speakers fees. Teaching fees. The genre advance survey was a very limited snapshot into how working writers work, but it will tell you what you could expect to get as an advance for your first novel. And the survey only touched on whether these writers’ books earned out and how much more they made off royalties.

Almost half the writers who answered had a significant portion of their yearly income come from writing and/or a combination of the other income streams I mentioned above. The other half still stayed with their dayjobs.

SO: As someone who has had success in both short fiction and novels, which do you prefer? Do you find yourself wishing you could spend more time on short fiction?

TB: I really love novels. As a reader they were great, because when I got a novel I liked I could lose myself in for the better part of a day or two (I’m a quick reader), and I became so much more immersed in that world than I was when I read a short story. I do love short stories, don’t get me wrong, but novels have a special sort of magic for me.

To answer your second question, as a writer, I love the short form because it gives me a quicker sense of accomplishment. In a week or two I can create a whole finished product and be done with it. I can experiment with a style, character, or setting, then be done. Over the last year and a half I’ve only written a handful of short stories, whereas in the five years previous to that I wrote some 100 short stories, so I do miss them. A lot.

But working on novels primarily right now letting me create the form I feel most comfortable with, and enjoy as a reader the most. In an ideal world I’d have time to work on both novels and short stories, right?

SO: How have you used your blog to promote your work, and how much do you think internet promotion has on book sales?

TB: I didn’t set out using the blog to promote my work. It was more of an attempt to keep myself working hard by having some eyes on me, but as time went by I just kept adding links and commentary about stuff that interested me that wasn’t necessarily about writing. The main thing I do to promote my work is just post about anything I’d like people in general to know about. If I sell something I blog a post about it, then get back to blogging about other things. If a story of mine is out in an anthology, or got a good review, or got a bad review, I post to the blog.

I think the value of the blog isn’t so much the hard sell where I have those posts letting people know where my stuff is. I think the value is in keeping readers who find me after reading something by me that they liked and who hunt down my name via google or who read my bio and a note about my website. If the blog is interesting to them and they keep reading, then they tend to know where my next piece of fiction is coming out. I imagine this ‘stickiness’ will be useful as I get into writing novels, as there is a year between each novel at least, and so I’m giving readers another way to access me between the novels.

Does internet promotion help sell books? Promotion is always this frustrating thing where we know only 20% of it helps, but we don’t know which 20%. My gut sense is that blogging helps, as every time I go to a convention and give a reading there are people there who found out about me through my blog. Wherever I go there are always people that seem to already have made this friendship with me that I’m only meeting for the first time. It’s really cool, and I can’t imagine it hurts. But you have to be willing to be authentic and engaged on the blog, not just using it as a way to hard sell people who are looking for something interesting to read while plonking away online.

SO: What are the five blogs everyone should be reading (besides your own)?

TB: Only five? I have 300 in my RSS feedreader. But okay, here some favorites are:

boingboing which is run by Cory Doctorow and others

www.scalzi.com/whatever which is John Scalzi’s ‘The Whatever,’

electrolite which contains Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s blogs

futurismic is another blog I blog occasionaly at about space news, but it features items about technology and the future, and also posts science fiction short stories.

‘The Mumpsimus,’ a blog by Matt Cheney that I also keep a close eye on and enjoy.

Simon Owens: Has moving to Japan had any lasting effect on your writing?

Christopher Barzak: Moving to Japan has certainly changed my writing. I imagine it will continue to do so even after I’m no longer here too. Living in Japan has been one of the most life changing experiences I’ve had so far, in a really wonderful way, so I hope I never lose the things I’ve learned here. In my writing, I see it mostly in the prose and the narrative structure. Less really is more here, in most cases, and I find myself spending time on finding the right detail that can evoke many things, leaving space in the story for these images and details to reverberate. And structurally my stories and the novel I’m writing here are mostly concerned with coincidence and how we know things. I’ve always been interested in the process of knowing (versus being, which I’m comfortable with, whereas knowing I think gets in the way of being sometimes) and while I’ve been here I’ve been learning Japanese and it’s a language where things that are left out are sometimes the loudest things said. This has manifested in my writing mainly as an elliptical style of storytelling in some cases, that cut around a story, rather than going through it. Right now I’m working on a novel told in stories (similar to David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas or Ghost Written structures) where all of the narrators and characters are connected to one another in some way, but most of them don’t realize it, even though they’re affecting each other’s lives. It’s working title is The Love We Share Without Knowing, though that may change, most likely will change, by the end. I’m having fun watching the layers of the novel accrete through the individual stories. Will any of this have a lasting affect on my writing? I’m sure it will. I think writing is a process of growth and learning, the same as living, the same as most things are. And like those rings you find in trees, we carry the mark of what we’ve learned with us, if we’ve really learned it.

SO: Do you find yourself submitting more to magazines that take email submissions now that postage is more of a hassle?

CB: This hasn’t changed much for me actually. I’m lucky enough that many editors who don’t normally take email submissions have told me it is okay if I email submissions to them while I’m in Japan. And for those markets where I have to still mail through regular channels, I’m lucky enough to have a friend back home who prints out my stories and cover letters and sends them off for me. But I do wish more markets were email submission friendly, because these days it’s more efficient if you have the correct system set up, and it could save vast amounts of paper.

SO: Your writing is very literary. Do you ever consider (or try) crossing over to non-genre fiction markets that are more open to cross-genre material?

CB: Well I’ve published some stories in what you could call literary markets already. Nerve, Descant, The Vestal Review, Pindeldyboz. So I definitely consider non-genre markets. When I am trying to decide where to send a story, I don’t only look within the genre. I also send stories to literary places. Lately I’ve been getting very kind and encouraging passes after tension-filled consideration periods from places like Conjunctions, Hobart, One Story, and McSweeneys. So I hope one day more of my stories can appear in more literary publications as well as genre publications. I think that many of the stories I write could go either way. Sometimes that’s a problem within the genre, where an editor thinks the story is more of a literary thing, and sometimes it’s a problem within the literary world too, where the editors think it’s more of a genre thing. There are very few markets, besides zines, for stories that are neither fish nor fowl. Apparently the world is still in love with categorization. And knowing…as mentioned above. People like to know what something is, to be able to name it, before they can accept it. So often many of the stories I publish are not ones that are even my favorites. Though some have been ones I really like. You can’t control these things too much, though. So I just send them out and wait until the right editor comes across it, and am grateful that I’m able to write and have the stories I write published at all.

SO: What are the five blogs everyone should be reading (besides your own)?

CB: Alan Deniro’s Goblin Mercantile Exchange. Alan is a really intense thinker and I resonate with many of the ideas he explores, even if we use a different sort of language to talk about these ideas. And he’s really really funny.

Tokyo Times. An intensely funny blog whose creator links to many outrageous occurences and fads within Japan. It makes me laugh at least once a week. It also makes me wish I knew where to find similar blogs set in every country, to compare notes on how silly human beings can sometimes be.

The Adventures of a Not So Blonde Blonde. My friend Jody, who teaches English here in Japan too, only she’s stuck out in the middle of nowhere. When she moved to Yachio, the little town where she lives and works, the foreign population doubled. Literally. The other guy was a Mormon who has been here for ten years and married a Japanese woman and has kids and so really, I don’t even count him as a foreigner anymore. Jody originally was going to call her blog Drunk Jody.com, and was going to post various pictures from her wild drinking nights. Recently I asked her, “Whatever happened to Drunk Jody.com?” and she said, “Well my blog isn’t called that, but don’t you think that’s really the essence of it anyway?”

Liquid Logic. I don’t know Lauren, but this woman is smart as a whip, and funny. I like reading what she has to say.

West of the Moon. An anonymously narrated blog. But it’s got a nice, sincere voice, and a thoughtful banter. I know who the writer of it is, actually, but can’t tell you. It’s a secret. And not because the blog is gossipy or says horrible things or anything like that. Just a blogger who wants to remain nameless.

You can find Christopher’s blog over here

Heather Shaw spent her childhood on the south side of Indianapolis, taking dance lessons, entering 4-H fairs and performing in high school plays. After she received her B.A. in English from Franklin College of Indiana in 1996 she promptly flew out to Berkeley, CA where she failed to fit into a commune and got her first office job. She met Tim Pratt at a Strange Horizons brunch in 2001, and married him in October of this year. She has performed poetry on the Lollapalooza poetry stage, back when they had such a thing, but these days concentrates on fiction. Her stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, Polyphony 3 & 5, Fortean Bureau and other nice places. She is currently working on revising her first novel. She lives in Oakland with Tim and two cats.

Simon Owens: I’ve noticed that you’re not a very prolific writer. Do you tend to revise and spend a lot more time on your fiction than the average writer? Has this ever frustrated you?

Heather Shaw: You’re right, I’m not. I’m not sure how much revising an “average writer” does, but I do recognize that I don’t churn out the volume of stories that other writers, such as Jay Lake (or, yes, Tim Pratt) do. And, living with Tim, I can tell you that yes, generally speaking my stories go through more revisions than his do. This probably has to do, at least partially, with the fact that Tim has written hundreds more stories than I have, and can simply write a cleaner first draft. But then again, I’m just not the type to write that many in the first place.

First I’ll get an idea, an image, a line, a character in my head. It’ll bounce around in there for awhile, having imaginary conversations, trying different plot lines, singing in different voices. After a bit, I’ll try to jot it down in idea form — a raw skeleton of a story idea so I don’t forget about it. Then I forget about it for awhile.

If it’s any good at all, it’ll nag me. I’ll come looking for it, dig up the scrawled line or two where I tried to convey the essence of the thing. At this point, I try to write it. Sometimes this is awful, embarrassing writing that will never see the light of day. If so, I set it aside and just spend some time — days, weeks, months — thinking about the idea and where it went wrong, what could make it better. Occasionally it’s a fairly clean draft. After this cleanish draft, I sit on it awhile longer, try to forget about it for at least a month so I can come back to it and revise it later with fresh eyes.

At this point, how soon I deem it “finished” depends on if I have a deadline and how anxious I am to get it out in the world.

Yes, it frustrates the hell out of me sometimes. But I’m also willing to let things “simmer” rather than produce stuff I’m not happy with. I try to pretend I’m happy this way — that I’m an artist, and this is the way I roll — but sure, I’d love to whip out a brilliant story every other week or so. Wouldn’t we all?

SO: How has being in a relationship with a very talented writer like Tim Pratt affected your writing? Do you two provide a lot of feedback on each other’s fiction?

HS: I write more because of Tim. Or I should say I try to write more, as my ideas and process allow. But, since he’s always there, working on stuff, talking about writing with me, bouncing ideas off of me, it’s pretty safe to say it helps to bring writing to the forefront of my mind.

It also pushes me to work harder on stories, to make each one better. We write different kinds of stories, so that helps, but there is always that feeling that I want to be recognized for my own work, not because I’m married to Tim Pratt. I’m very proud of him, and all that he’s accomplished, but I do want to carve out my own niche in fiction.

We often tell each other our story ideas. Occasionally we’ll take walks and work out a plotline, or a character, or a theme, during the course of the stroll. At the idea stage, I think we provide a lot of really useful feedback for one another, helping shape the story into something potentially really good.

However, once a story is drafted, our role is one of cheerleader, not critic. Writers are insecure creatures, and once we’ve written something, we try to support one another, convince the other that whatever has been written has merit. Harsh, realistic critiques don’t go over well in our home.

We can, however, provide realistic crits in a writing group. Something about having other people around makes it too embarrassing to just cheer the story without further comment, and we can take constructive criticism from one another better in that venue.

SO: Do you feel that editing Flytrap has been a rewarding experience? Have you and Tim ever expressed any regrets over editing the magazine?

HS: It has been a *very* rewarding experience. I’m very proud of our little zine with teeth, and I enjoy working on it. We’ve had the honor to publish some awesome stuff, and I love the look and feel of it in my hands. It’s a different kind of pride than success in my own fiction or even Tim’s; there’s a great joy in printing a fabulously tricksy story you found in the slush by an author you’ve never heard of, or a gem from a dear writer friend.

I’m sure I’ve expressed regret when I’m wading through the slush. I’m a slow slush reader, while Tim is a speedy one, and I have great guilt over this. Tim and I take turns with the zine: I’ll edit fiction and he’ll edit poetry for one issue, then we’ll swap for the next one. So, when it’s my turn, people who are used to Tim’s response times will occasionally worry when it takes too long, and I hate that I cause them to worry. I tend to linger over stories I like, and inevitably we have more than I can take, and those last few stories take me a long time to decide over.

But, ultimately, it’s a great project, and I’m very proud to be a part of it.

SO: What are the five blogs everyone should be reading (besides your own)?

HS: Nick Mamatas

Hanne Blank

Jonathan Strahn

Art Lad

Chris Barzak

You can find Heather’s blog over here