Booklife

Angela Slatter’s stories are lushly written, complexly plotted, and beautifully reminiscent of the weirder fairy tales.  They’ve appeared in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, ONSPEC, and Fantasy Magazine, among other magazines.

Slatter has two collections out this year, Sourdough & Other Stories and The Girl with No Hands & Other Tales, both in fine hardbound editions.  Until her novels hit the shelves, I’ll think of her primarily as a short story writer and of her stories as proof that the short form is thriving.

Below is a brief interview with Slatter.  There is more over at this month’s Clarkesworld Magazine and at her website.

The short story isn’t dead, it’s just _________?

Angela Slatter: Fighting a vigorous rearguard action against big publishers who don’t see any money in selling short story collections unless they’re attached to big name authors. I do think it’s a form that’s on its way back up — I think people are time-poor and a particular section of the book-buying public will be looking for something complex, satisfying and relatively fast.
Has your understanding of the short form changed much since your first efforts?

Angela Slatter: Oh yes! I read over some of my old stuff now and cringe at the repetitions of words and sometimes the word choices. I think that’s just experience and constantly engaging with the craft of writing, and also reading a lot of other people’s work (either to crit or edit, or for leisure reading) because it shows you good techniques and also mistakes other people make and how to avoid them!

What is the value of speculative fiction?  At its best, what role does it play in the world?

Angela Slatter: I’d say its value is that it gives a chance to dream, to think of something other and to maybe imagine something new. At its best it gives people a chance to see something differently and open their minds to new experiences and ideas.

What can a writer who doesn’t usually read speculative fiction learn from reading within the genre?

Angela Slatter: Plotting! And the idea that something happening outside the main character’s head isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Also how to make characters engaging even if they’re not particularly likeable. And that awesome glorious, amazing writing doesn’t just come from literary writers  — Kelly Link can totally kick any so-called big L literary writer’s arse into the middle of next week.

If you could see around corners and into the future, what do you think the literary landscape will look like in ten years?

Angela Slatter: Fewer vampires? More zombies? I think ghost stories are set to make a comeback – not the paranormal romance ones necessarily, but I think we’ll be looking at more ghost stories. I think the whole eBook thingy and new kinds of “containers” for book-ish content will really come into its own and I think spec-fic will be the genre that takes the most advantage of it.

First I hear the opening line, then I see the story.  The sensation resembles being awoken by voices or being carried into a dream by a lullaby.  After that first sound, the audio and visual tracks start to (or at least try to) sync up.

That first line may not be the first line in the final draft but it remains the access point into the world of the story.  It is the wedge, the lever.  It comes first, gets me in the door, but then runs away from me.  And I must chase after it, across the internal landscape.

Real world sounds – voices, traffic, sirens, birds, etc. – can yank me from the secondary world of my writing, can interrupt my pursuit.  Yet music helps me stay with the chase. 

I’m still trying to figure it all out.  How and why music helps with writing offers me no end of fascination so I am still asking around to see what other writers have to say on the subject. 

Below, novelists Jaleigh Johnson, Matt Mayo, Lettie Prell and Jane Yolen talk about silence, photography, and the seduction of music.  

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Jaleigh Johnson is the author of fantasy novels The Howling Delve, Mistshore, and the recently released Unbroken Chain.

Matthew P. Mayo writes fiction and non-fiction, including the Bootleggers, Lobstermen & Lumberjacks: Fifty of the Grittiest Moments in the History of Hardscrabble New England. According to Mayo, he “plays guitar and concertina poorly—but with great gusto!”

Lettie Prell is the author of Dragon Ring.  She served as the editor of Broadsheet, the newsletter of Broad Universe, which “promot[es] science fiction, fantasy, and horror written by women.”

Jane Yolen has written more than 300 books, most of which are for children.  She has been a folksinger and has written lyrics for Boiled in Lead, June Tabor, Cats Laughing, Lui Collins, The Folk Underground and others.

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In what ways do you or have you used music to enhance your writing and creativity?

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Matthew P. Mayo:  At a basic level, music and writing and any other creative act are all the same. It’s the methods of pursuit that differ. I find it interesting that while sometimes I can listen to someone else’s creative efforts while pursuing my own, most of the time I prefer silence when I write.

Total silence is impossible, so I settle for birds, passing cars, my own breathing (difficult to avoid). Even if I’m not listening to music, I’ll still hear music in my head. More often than not, it’s the Indiana Jones theme song. Don’t know why, but it could be worse.

Sometimes I can write while listening to certain types of instrumental music (surf or jazz or slack-key guitar), but don’t do so well with sung songs. This tells me that in order to build something worth inhabiting—in order to write something worth reading—I don’t want to hear anyone else’s voice but my own. Either that or I’m just cranky.

Lettie Prell:  I took up photography as a hobby at about the same time I began writing science fiction in earnest.  I loved photography as a way to go non-verbal.  I absorbed line, color, shape, and created from those elements.  There was not even a stream of self-talk in my head when I looked through a lens.  It was deliciously freeing.  Yet within that stillness, in my head, tone and atonal passages would play – the music of my own emotions.  This inner music was fueled by one of my favorite solitary activities back then.  At night I would put on music and turn out the lights, and do my own, unschooled and spontaneous version of Tai Chi. 

Jane Yolen:  I love music–folk, folk rock, Early Music, the Romantics, lots of jazz, R&B, 60s rock, cabaret, musical theater, some opera, very little pop, and no hip-hop at all. But when I am writing, I need absolute silence. Music is too seductive and suddenly I am writing to its beat instead of my own. And writing lyrics to it in my head as well.

Jaleigh Johnson:  I usually have to have some type of music playing while I write. The only time I ever like it silent is if I’m doing a tricky bit of editing, and the song lyrics are getting stuck in my head. But the right music, whether it’s a blood-pumping rock song or a soft ballad, can really get me in the mood to write an appropriate scene. The mood of whatever piece I’m listening to gets inside me, and those feelings come out on the page. The time when I most need this effect is after a long day, when I’m tired and on deadline and I simply have to finish this scene or panic sets in. That’s when the music takes me away from everything else and shoves me fully into the scene and the setting. It fires the imagination.

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And/or what has music — listening to it, seeing it live, playing it, writing it, whichever — taught you about writing fiction?

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Jaleigh Johnson:  Music taught me–and it reminds me again and again–that art, at its best, can evoke emotions that carry people away from their troubles and the stresses of their daily lives. Good music and good fiction can be a breath of fresh air, pure and vital.  When I write, I strive to give that experience to people.

Matthew P. Mayo:  Music has always been a large and welcome presence in my life, from listening to my mother’s record collection as a tot (Herb Alpert! Bobby Vinton!) to building my own record collection (Kiss! Ramones! ‘Mats! Husker Du!) to being in bands (Toxic Crotch, anyone?) to playing college radio-station DJ to playing acoustic instruments now. It’s always been with me, working to override the tinnitus (also always here), and has probably taught me to be adventurous, take risks, and pick a few wrong notes in order to find one that sounds good.

Lettie Prell:  When my writing achieved novel-length proportions, my photography waned.  The verbal arts won out in the end.  I never play music when I write, and if I did I would probably cease to hear it after a few minutes.  My capacity to focus to the point of being unaware of my surroundings is well-known at work among my colleagues.  Yet when I pause in the writing to dream a scene – not the dialogue because that is listening to my characters talk in my head – when I see the scene, it is as if through my photographer’s eye.  I go non-verbal in those moments, and my torso sways in the chair, because the music of my emotions is playing.

Jane Yolen:  Certainly music has taught me how important (and seductive) rhythm is. It has taught me something about voice: how each character’s tone, timbre, rhythm, speech patterns is a distinguishing characteristic. Someone may be an oboe, a basso, a tenor, or a fife. It has also stretched me. When I was younger, I only liked folk and classic. My husband opened me to opera and jazz. My son Adam made me appreciate folk rock. My friend Babbie showed me cabaret. And while I’d loved the great musicals of my childhood and adolescence and can still sing many of the songs (though only in the shower these days or alone in the car) it took Stephen Sondheim to reacquaint me with the form. And so I have learned over the years to love different styles and kinds of writing–and tried many of them myself.

I think any time one starts to understand structure of any kind, since it plays such an important role in storytelling that it is of great benefit. I don’t think it’s happenstance that I published my first novel not long after I started taking music lessons. I think my writing improved in a way I could not have predicted–or forced.

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Jeremy L. C. Jones is a freelance writer, editor, and part-time professor.  Jones is a frequent contributor to Clarkesworld Magazine.  He teaches at Wofford College and Montessori Academy in Spartanburg, SC.  He is also the director of Shared Worlds, a creative writing and world-building camp for teenagers that he and Jeff VanderMeer designed in 2006.

Before I met Marly Youmans I thought of her as a Southern novelist who also writes poetry.  Last month I heard her read her poems at a public reading at Shared Worlds 2010 and I started thinking of her as a poet who writes novels.  Now, with the essay below, I think of Marly as a writer who tells stories in whatever form they require.

Marly Youmans is the author of Val/Orson (novella) and the forthcoming The Throne of Psyche (poems) and Glimmerglass (novel), among other books.  She wrote the following piece the day after dropping her daughter off at her first day of college.

–JLCJ

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Rebecca

by Marly Youmans

Once upon a time I was a little girl belonging to a family that suffered a great loss.  One consequence of this loss was that I used to say that someday I would have a daughter with beautiful curly blonde hair, and that I would name her Rebecca.

Eventually I grew up and married and became pregnant. I knew in my bones that the child inside me was a boy, and he was. Then I became pregnant again, and I was sure from the start that the child was, this time, my Rebecca.  And so she was.  As a baby, Rebecca was lovely and mostly bald, with a glistening down on her head. Slowly the golden curls came on, and she and her brother with the long blond hair (“I want big hair!”) were show-stoppers in the stroller set. Another brother came along some years later, and so Rebecca was—as she always seemed—right in the middle of things.

Like me, Rebecca liked stories. Aspects of her have appeared in my stories and poems and novels in various guises, and her requests led to two young adult fantasies set in the Southern backcountry, The Curse of the Raven Mocker and Ingledove. The first of these was written in an unusual manner. Since I had no time to write with a toddler in the house, I made a pact with Rebecca.  If she would amuse her busy little brother every afternoon, I would write. The draft of that book went scorchingly fast:  I had it in sixteen days.  An eager audience is the finest sort of inebriant!

When she was little, Rebecca liked to sit on my lap and narrate stories that I typed. In the fall of first grade, she won the Stone Academy “Written in Stone” prize three times. After that, they instituted a “Hall of Fame” and put her in it to keep her from winning any more prizes. As she grew, she tried out other pursuits–dance and theatre, piano and organ and voice, drawing and pastels and painting. She was still best at writing, but drawing followed close behind.

Yesterday we took Rebecca to Bard College, where she plans to fold her many interests into a film major. Letting go of a child who I knew would exist decades before she was born is bittersweet.  Just as I knew she would be, I knew this day would come—that her golden life would stream on, apart from us.  She walked away from the car, alone, toward the peaked white tents where she would meet other freshmen.  The late afternoon sun shot slanting through the trees as she grew smaller with distance.  Light ran through her hair and turned it into a burning halo.

8 August 2010

In April, I asked 15 writers from across the genres to share some of the best and worst writing advice they’d received.  The result was “Turning Loose the Tiger” and a few other posts.  Last month, John DeNardo and the kind folks at SFSignal conducted a Mind Meld in which they asked speculative fiction authors to share the best writing advice they’d received.

Both of these projects were intended to benefit younger writers in general and the students at Shared Worlds 2010 in particular, but each contains material that experienced writers could benefit from, too.

This week, my daughter Molly turned seven.  She is my inspiration and my co-conspirator in many artistic adventures.  Each day, she models the creative life with bouts of extreme pretend, lavishly colored paintings, and character-driven stories so complex that they require a compendium.

Molly also loves to give me advice – lots and lots of advice.  Her advice is often practical, such as “Daddy, stories should be interesting!”  And sometimes her wisdom is downright surreal.  For instance, yesterday I was editing at the kitchen table and Molly said, “You may want to paint that fork.” There were no forks on the table or in the article I was revising. Molly nodded her head sagely.  I’m still trying to figure out what she meant.

So, I’m asking that readers answer the following question:

What writing advice have you received from a child?  And how did you use the advice in your writing?

Use the comment section below.  Answer as briefly or extensively as you like.  Be as serious or as playful as you like.  And be sure to let us know a little something about you and the child giving you the advice, too.

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Jeremy L. C. Jones is a freelance writer, editor, and teacher.  Jones is a frequent contributor to Clarkesworld Magazine.  He teaches at Wofford College and Montessori Academy in Spartanburg, SC.  He is also the director of Shared Worlds, a creative writing and world-building camp for teenagers that he and Jeff VanderMeer designed in 2006.

I don’t just listen to music.  I see it, too.

Though I filter the world (and my emotional response to it) through my eyes, I can’t seem to go very long without listening to music, without using my ears.  Sight is my primary sense, but music is my constant companion.  If music isn’t playing outside, then I am imagining it inside my head, hearing it from within.

Music is a nearly synesthesic experience for me – streams of color and geometric patterns, whirling, twisting, illuminating my mind’s eye.  I watch songs unfold, see them spark and flash.  Instantly, even instrumental songs take on a narrative line and paint images in the space between my ears. 

Sounds occupy space in my brain, large swathes of (endless) geography mapped out by the notes and colorful lines of light.  As the songs move through time, I move through the internal landscape, adventuring, discovering, stumbling around.
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Each year at Shared Worlds there is a zombie outbreak and each year I do my best to try to understand what zombies mean.  Here is the third post about zombies, then I’ll take a little break from them for a while.

Public readings at Shared Worlds are unique.  The audience is stocked with dozens of insatiable readers and fanatical writers.  These are young people who sign up to spend two weeks of their summer world-building, reading, and writing.  They swarm a bookstore like, as the manager of the Hub City Bookshop described them, “piranhas in a feeding frenzy” and it is awe-inspiring to behold.

During the second week of Shared Worlds 2010, we had a double bill of Holly Black, the creator of the Spiderwick Chronicles and Carrie Ryan, the author of The Forest of Hands & Teeth and the forthcoming The Dark and Hollow Places.  By 6 PM, Black and Ryan had been around the camp most of the day, teaching and leading discussions.  For hours, the students had barraged Black with questions about magic systems, plot, and writing in general.  Black’s classes are very lively, and Ryan had helped her tame the gloriously wild beast of teenage enthusiasm.

Somehow, though, Ryan had managed to keep a very important secret from the students.  I don’t know if she did so intentionally or not, but the word finally go out that Carrie Ryan writes zombie novels.  Yes, zombie novels.  YA zombie novels.

I wasn’t prepared for how exciting this bit of information was going to be for the fifty or so people in attendance. 

After Black read from her recent novel White Cat and Ryan read from The Dead-Tossed Waves, we opened the floor to questions.  Dozens of hands shot up.  Most of the questions had to do with that subject so dear to Carrie Ryan and, apparently, to the majority of the people in the audience – zombies.

I was amazed at how excited everyone got.  I like zombie novels, but this was out of control.  The questions just kept coming.  It was as though someone had announced Now is the time to discuss the undead and the students did.  There was something about the public forum that seemed to encourage them to ask more and more questions about zombies. 

I wondered why.  Why is zombie talk so lively?  And so I did what I always do when I have a burning question, I asked the nearest game designer to explain the situation.

I found Will Hindmarch hanging back toward the display of new releases.  Will, who is the creative coordinator at Shared Worlds, spent a big chunk of years thinking, talking, and writing about that other popular monster, vampires, as part of his work on White Wolf’s Vampire: The Requiem role-playing game. 

Below, Will and I have recreated the conversation we had while Black and Ryan signed books after the Q & A.

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It’s amazing how excited they get about zombie.  I wonder why?

Will Hindmarch:  The thing about zombies is that they’re incredibly easy to talk about. They are great touchstones for discussing new worlds and new stories. On the one hand we all know some of the core traits of zombies—e.g., they’re undead, they want us bad—yet on the other hand, so many of the identifying features of zombies are up for grabs. Maybe they’re slow and shambling, maybe they’re wicked fast. Maybe they’re supernaturally given some semblance of life, maybe they’re ruined by science. Maybe they want our brains, maybe they want to make more zombies.

But if there are so many different kinds…

Will Hindmarch:  When we talk about zombies, we’re comparing imaginations and creative theories. We’re able to hold a wide variety of zombies in our head at once, all coexisting under that one title: Zombies. We’re able to accept and tolerate a lot of riffs on this one grim idea of the walking dead. The zombie canon has porous borders. New kinds of zombies get let in—to our stories, to our nightmares—all the time, even while the classic ghouls keep coming back.

Zombies have important defining features (the head is usually key to taking one out) but even those features can be imagined in new ways, erased or replaced, without necessarily removing the monster’s innate zombie-ness.

When they heard a vampire story read by Nathan Ballingrud a few nights ago, they didn’t ask so many questions about vampires.  I mean, they liked the story and asked Nathan plenty of questions about the story, but they didn’t ask all these questions about vampires.  I guess hard-core zombie fans are just…  different.

Will Hindmarch:  Audiences seem willing, or more than willing, to accept new takes on the classic monster, accepting variations bent to the purpose of a particular story or imaginary world. But even with all the variations allowed by the zombie fan, the audience hardly seems to segment or fracture. Zombie fans debate the merits, ferocity, and fearsomeness of their favorite kinds of zombies, but they continue to tolerate and count new models of zombies into the expanding identity of the monster.

The result is a truly public monster, a creature with no single master, ready to be adopted by any author with a good story to tell about the waking dead. It’s modern folklore, not owned by anyone, ready to be adapted again and again, and tough enough to withstand a few missteps and stay scary even after they’ve been made funny.

But still, once the zombie talk starts it doesn’t seem to end…

Will Hindmarch:  They’re easy and fun to talk about because they’ve broken the bounds of archetype and entered remix territory. Your zombies might not be the same as my zombies, but the appreciation of new terrifying remixes is part of the appeal.

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Jeremy L. C. Jones is a freelance writer, editor, and part-time professor.  Jones is a frequent contributor to Clarkesworld Magazine.  He is also the director of Shared Worlds, a creative writing and world-building camp for teenagers that he and Jeff VanderMeer designed in 2006.

Jim C. Hines wrote his first story fifteen years ago.  (Over at his website, he’s written an interesting reflection on the changes in publishing since the mid-1990s.)  After three years of trading submissions for rejection letters, Hines broke through the brick wall with a story called “Blade of the Bunny” that appeared in Writers of the Future XV.  Since then his humorous fantasy fiction has appeared regularly in places like Realms of Fantasy and Clarkesworld Magazine, as well as in many anthologies.

In 2006, eleven years after starting out, Hines began publishing novels with DAW.  First came the Goblin series and then the Princess series.  In his six novels (and, I assume, the seventh which is on the way), Hines takes tried-and-true fantasy tropes and turns them upside down and inside out.  He does so with a combination of affection and biting wit.  He doesn’t mock the genre, no, he just doesn’t let it takes itself too seriously.

Hines and I spoke last summer for an interview in Clarkesworld Magazine called “Doing Crappy Things to Good Characters,” the title of which should tell you an awful lot about Hines and his writing. 
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Christopher L. Dinkins & Jeremy L. C. Jones

The living dead.  The restless dead.  The walking dead.  No matter what you call them, zombies make for great stories.  With that in mind, we asked 11 of the contributors to James Lowder’s anthology, The Best of All Flesh, to share their thoughts on the joys of writing zombie fiction.

This and our earlier post on zombies were inspired by Christopher Davis, a student at Shared Worlds 2010, and his love of zombies. 

“Zombies are so versatile for a writer,” Davis said.  “They can be fast, slow, any number of things.  You just have to have multiple zombies.  And then things get really interesting.”

Lowder selected the stories from his previous collections, The Book of All Flesh, The Book of More Flesh, and The Book of Final Flesh, with an eye toward variety and toward showcasing stories that hadn’t been re-printed elsewhere.

Overall, the stories in The Best of All Flesh emphasize, as Michael Jasper said, “the impact [zombies] have on the people in the story.”
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By Christopher L. Dinkins & Jeremy L. C. Jones

Zombie Boy is a student at the Shared Worlds 2010 creative writing camp.  His parents know him as Christopher Davis.  But his love of all things zombie earned him the moniker, Zombie Boy, at Shared Worlds 2009.  The name has stuck and he is proud of it. 

Zombie Boy hails from coastal California.  He is an avid gamer who likes to kick back and shoot zombies in his spare time.  We asked him, “Why are zombies scary?”

“Because they never stop coming for you,” he said.  “And your life just gets harder and harder…”

In honor of Chris’ fondness for the undead, we contacted 11 of the contributors to James Lowder’s anthology, The Best of All Flesh, which gathers stories from Lowder’s out of print classics of zombie literature, The Book of All Flesh, The Book of More Flesh, and The Book of Final Flesh.

Below, in the first of multiple posts, the contributors talk about fear, humor, loss of control, and the break-down of civilization.  In other words, they talk about why they like to read zombie stories.
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“I’m lucky in that I just love what I’m doing,” said novelist James Reasoner.  “Writing has always been fun for me.  It keeps me entertained.  On a practical level, I know that there will be times when it’s not as easy, and I’ve learned not to obsess about them.  I just keep working and do what I can, because I know it’ll get better.” 

Reasoner has published more than 200 novels.  He writes under his own name and nearly three dozen pen and house names, such as Dana Fuller Ross, Brett Halliday, Tabor Evans, Jon Sharpe, Jake Logan, and Gabriel Hunt.  He’s been writing stories since the late 70s and novels since 1980.  Over the years, he’s written Westerns, detective stories, action-adventure, military, fantasy and just about any other type of novel and story.

“The author of the cult classic P.I. novel Texas Wind under his own name, James Reasoner has nevertheless made his living writing books he received no credit for,” said Robert J. Randisi author of The Ham Reporter and, as J. R. Roberts, the Gunsmith series. “But I give him credit. The best thing I can say about him is this:  he’s a helluva Professional.”

Reasoner moves among the genres seemingly with great ease.  Though I suspect a lot of hard work goes into making it look so easy.  From book to book, series to series, Reasoner’s stories seem to follow one pattern – good character, good story, and good fun. 

Below, Reasoner and I talk about entertaining himself first and writing the West. 

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What do you enjoy about writing the West?

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James Reasoner:  Traditionally, Westerns have both strong characters and strong plots, and I enjoy combining those two elements.  Plus, I grew up reading Western novels and watching Western TV series during the Fifties and Sixties, and it’s just great fun being able to follow in the footsteps of creators whose work gave me so much pleasure and entertainment over the years.

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And what is the biggest challenge in writing the West?
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James Reasoner:  Getting all the historical details correct.  Readers will let you know if you get something wrong.  I try to be as accurate as I can in my writing, but mistakes still slip through from time to time. 
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What sort of Westerns do you write, and what are they key elements?
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James Reasoner:  I write traditional Westerns that are not that much different than the ones published in decades past, although I think the characterization in today’s Westerns (not just mine) is usually deeper and better developed than it was during the pulp era.  Of course, there are exceptions to that, since some of the pulp writers were very good at characterization.  I’ve also written quite a few books for several of the so-called Adult Western series, as well as big historical sagas that are more concerned with actual events and characters in Western history. 
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How have your novels and/or your approach to writing them changed over the years?
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James Reasoner:  My style has evolved over the thirty-plus years I’ve been writing, but it’s been a gradual process that’s still going on.  I’m constantly learning new things about how to make my writing more effective.  My approach is still the same, though:  I try to do the best I can on each project and write books that would entertain me as a reader.  If I’m not having fun, the readers won’t, either. 
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You write both under your own name and under pseudonyms and house names.  Do you approach writing “as someone else” differently?  What does it allow you to do that writing “as yourself” doesn’t?
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James Reasoner:  I touched on that in the previous answer.  If I’m writing for a particular series, I’ll definitely try to make my book fit in with the others in that series.  Each series has its own way of doing things.  But as far as my general approach to the work goes, there’s really no difference.  When I sit down in front of the computer to produce my day’s pages, that my book I’m working on.  I have to like it and enjoy it.  When it’s turned in, of course, I’m professional enough to accept that sometimes it’s not mine anymore.  But in my heart, it still kind of is.  That’s why I can look at a book in the store that doesn’t have my name anywhere on it, but if I wrote it, I’m still proud of it.
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You wrote the first novel in the Gabriel Hunt series.  How much freedom did you have in shaping the character and the direction of the series?
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James Reasoner:  Charles Ardai, the creator and editor of the series, wrote a fantastic bible for it, one of the best series bibles I’ve ever seen.  So he had developed the character of Gabriel Hunt pretty extensively before I wrote my book.  However, I was able to add some touches of my own that Charles adopted for the rest of the series.  Writing that book was a very enjoyable experience.
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What are you working on now, and what’s next?

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James Reasoner:  I’m writing a traditional Western novel that will be out under my name next year, plus developing an outline for a house-name book also scheduled for next year.  The next manuscript in the schedule after the current one will be a house-name Western.  I have quite a bit of work lined up, and that’s the way I like it.

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What can a writer who doesn’t usually read Westerns learn from reading within the genre? 

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 James Reasoner:  How to balance plotting and characterization, and how to get the details right.  Plus a lot of Western authors are just really good storytellers and know how to pace a book so that the reader wants to keep turning the pages. 
 

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Jeremy L. C. Jones is a freelance writer, editor, and part-time professor.  Jones is a frequent contributor to Clarkesworld Magazine.  He is also the director of Shared Worlds, a creative writing and world-building camp for teenagers that he and Jeff VanderMeer designed in 2006.