Year: 2018 (page 22 of 32)

In 2011, Post-Katrina New Orleans is a place haunted by its history and by the hurricane’s destruction, a place that is hoping to survive the rebuilding of its present long enough to ensure that it has a future. Street magician Jude Dubuisson is likewise burdened by his past and by the consequences of the storm, because he has a secret: the magical ability to find lost things, a gift passed down to him by the father he has never known—a father who just happens to be a god. When the debt Jude owes to a fortune deity gets called in, he finds himself sitting in on a poker game with the gods of New Orleans, who are playing for the heart and soul of the city itself.

You Never Sell the First Book, Even When You Do:

THE CITY OF LOST FORTUNES is my debut novel, a murder mystery about a demigod with the supernatural ability to find lost things who gets caught up in a magical poker game. The first book I ever wrote to completion was also about a demigod who found lost things involved in a poker game, but they are not, in fact, the same book. I finished the first draft of this other, not-my-debut-novel book (which had a very different protagonist, title, and theme) at some point in 2006. I didn’t sell THE CITY OF LOST FORTUNES until late 2016. Over the course of that decade, I wrote a whole new draft as my thesis for my MFA, another draft after I graduated from Clarion West, and ANOTHER draft as a “revise and resubmit” for my now-agent Seth Fishman.

Throughout this whole process I kept seeing writers saying that before they sold their first novel, they wrote two, three, even five novels and stuck ‘em in a drawer. So every once in a while I’d do a little math. “So, B,” I’d say to myself. “You’ve been writing this book for five years now. If you trunk it now, write and trunk another one, you might sell that third book. In like, a decade.”

Aaaaaand then I was Artax, and the Swamp of Sadness had me.

What I didn’t realize at the time, though, was that I had novels in the trunk already. They just happened to be clones of the book I was writing. Sad, broken clones who would never survive outside the lab. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that they were Pokemon who hadn’t hit their final evolution yet. Little lizards with smoldering tails instead of the giant fuck-off dragon of wrath and terror I wanted to create.

The point is, nobody knocks it out of the park on their first at-bat, even if that’s sometimes the narrative marketing wants to sell you. Everyone has to fail at writing a book before they can succeed at it. Whether that means a bunch of different books or one book over and over again is really up to you.

Your First Draft is (Probably) Not As Good As You Think:

For every writer I’ve ever spoken to on the subject, there are times (usually for me towards the middle and end of a first draft) where you are writing with white-hot, incandescent brilliance. You’re still you, but you’re the Avatar-state you, eyes all glow-y and the four elements leaping to your whim. The words aren’t just flowing, they’re goddamn pyroclastic. You’re Odin on Hlidskjalf, the high seat, where you and your twin ravens “Hell Yeah” and “Fuck Yes” can see the entire world laid out before you. Everything fits together like you’re playing Tetris with a cheat code. Whole chapters, which seemed intimidating before, fall before the might of your genius in one fell swoop.

You laugh in the face of the publishing industry.

And then the high passes, hopefully after you’ve gotten to the end of the thing you’re writing, and you re-read this deathless prose of yours which you just know is going to change the world and it’s . . . fine. Some of it’s probably pretty good, and some of it needs some work. But you can’t really distinguish an “I am a Golden God” day from any average day of word-smithing. “But I was in god-mode,” you whine. (Maybe you don’t whine. I do.) “Where did all those amazing words go?” The fact of the matter is that they weren’t all that amazing to begin with. They just felt amazing, because you felt amazing, because you were actually doing the thing. You were riding a joy-wave of progress, not brilliance.

I think this is why some writers say they hate revision. Nobody truly hates making their story better. What they truly hate is returning to the words that felt brilliant when they wrote them and realizing that they’re just as first-draft-y as the rest of it.

What I learned in writing draft after draft of CITY is that this surge is normal, universal, and damn near predictable. Knowing that this surge of good vibes comes from effort and progress and not some ethereal muse means you can try to work towards it instead of worrying that you’ve lost the magic forever, and the knowledge that a writer in the unrelenting grip of the work is an unreliable judge of the quality of that work means . . .

Your First Draft is (Definitely) Not As Bad As You Think:

For every day that you are a literary Titan striding across the land with a fistful of linguistic thunderbolts in one hand and a Leviathan-sized cup of coffee in the other, there are about a dozen at least a few days where you are laying down the fiction at a blistering speed of a word every other minute and then deleting the sentence as soon as it’s finished. It feels like you’re attempting to build one of those mortar-less walls where every stone has to align perfectly, but instead of trying to fit different sizes and shapes of rock together without seams, you’re working with a wide variety of excrement. “Gee,” you wonder, “does this dog turd go better with this pile of wet cat crap, or should I pair it with that mound of elephant feces over yonder?” Word after word, sentence after sentence, and all it feels like you’re doing is mashing together two fistfuls of shit. And what’s worse, you’re not even doing it correctly.

The thing I learned, the unfair, maddening secret that I’ve stumbled across in writing and rewriting and rewriting this book is this: when you’ve finished your 70 or 80 or 100 thousand words of this thing . . . you’ll find it difficult to know which of those handfuls of words came on a brilliant day or a crap one. The words are just the words, by and large. The struggle is in your brain.

And speaking of brains, let’s talk about revision!

Fear is the Mindkiller:

When I first sent the full manuscript of the novel-just-before-my-debut-novel (which was still pretty different from THE CITY OF LOST FORTUNES) he kicked it back to me with some notes. The beginning and the early part of the middle moved a little too slowly. The main character’s motivation needed clearing up. It took too long to get to the crux of the conflict. He used the word “muddled.” (That’s always the description you want your agent to use.) “Take another crack at it,” he said, “give’r a whirl ‘round the ol’ revision wheel and see how she spins out.” (Seth doesn’t actually sound anything like this, but in my head, all literary agents are barkers in an old-timey travelling carnival. Don’t ask.)

So I re-read my book, and I made a list of all the things Seth suggested I should change . . . and I froze. Like an antelope in headlights. You see, I was this close. Big time agent! Revision instead of rejection! We talked on the phone! I could see it all so clearly: I would sign with Seth, who would sell my novel for an embarrassing amount of money, and I could quit and work full time as a writer and I’d look good in photographs I didn’t even know people were taking and then Gaiman and Valente would show up to invite me to the secret cool writer club and . . . all I had to do to get everything I’d ever wanted was to not fuck up these revisions. Let’s skim right over the part where “everything I’d ever wanted” didn’t actually hinge on this one moment, and go right to the part where I approached these revisions from a place of fear. A place of “there was this one little spark of magic in the book, and if I change too much, I’ll ruin it.” So I changed as little as possible. I sweated and panicked and fretted and doubted everything I did. Three months of working with a constant refrain of “please don’t fuck up, please don’t fuck up” running through my head, and then, bitter and defeated, I sent it back to Seth.

Spoiler: I fucked up.

His reaction was, essentially, that it looked like I’d changed as little as possible. That my problems were bigger than a couple of shifts and adjustments. He told me, a little less gently than he did the first time, that I needed to rewrite the book instead of tinkering with it.

That kind of failure was strangely freeing. The thing I feared most, taking my one shot and missing, had happened. So I could do whatever the hell I wanted. Turned out, what I wanted most was to write the book I should have written all along. And so I came back to the book without fear, took it apart, and rewrote it. I took a reveal which It took me a year. I won’t tell you how much of that year was spent getting over my abject failure and how much of it was spent actually writing, but when that year was over, I had the final draft of the book, signed with Seth, and sold it.

Well, almost.

If You’re Gonna Stay, You’re Gonna Work:

After a year of writing the final-ish version of this book, I’m not sure what reaction I expected from Seth. If I had made a list of potential responses, though, suggesting that the novel was pretty solid except that I should maybe delete a character who was in the entire goddamn book probably wouldn’t have made the list. But that’s what he said. After a few minutes of full on shock, I considered the idea. It took pretty much everything I’d learned in the previous decade or so to be able to do what I did next. Knowing that I’d already written multiple versions of a novel told me that I had the faith in the book to suffer through a major revision. Knowing that my fond memories of how brilliantly I’d written the character were unreliable made me comfortable with cutting the character out entirely. Knowing that fear only leads to failure but determined gets shit done helped me crack my knuckles and wade on in.

So I looked at this character who had been in every previous version of the book. Who was one of the suspects in a murder mystery. Who showed up both the first chapter and the last, and more than a couple in between. And over the course of three days, I snipped that character out entirely.

Because Seth was right, the character didn’t do much. I narrowed it down to a single scene where, if they weren’t there, the book didn’t work. Was there another character who could fill that role? Turned out there was. Which leads me to the last thing I learned writing this book, which is that every part of the book has to carry its load. Character and tone and setting and sentence structure and on and on. It doesn’t just have to fit, it has to work. And if it doesn’t, it’s gotta go.

All in all, it took me ten years to write my debut novel. It took me about ten months to write my second one. I learned a lot writing that one, too. But that, as they say, is another story.

* * *

Bryan Camp is a graduate of the Clarion West Writer’s Workshop and the University of New Orleans’ Low-Residency MFA program. He started his first novel, The City of Lost Fortunes, in the backseat of his parents’ car as they evacuated for Hurricane Katrina. He has been, at various points in his life: a security guard at a stockcar race track, a printer in a flag factory, an office worker in an oil refinery, and a high school English teacher.  He lives in New Orleans with his wife and their three cats, one of whom is named after a superhero.

Bryan Camp: Website

The City of Lost Fortunes: Indiebound | Amazon | B&N | Google | Kobo | Audio

And here is writer Michael Moreci to talk about his newest comic, Wasted Space — out today from Vault Comics. Go grab from your LCS.

As a writer, when you’re on the book promotion road, you find yourself repeating things you’ve already said a lot. I mean, there’s only so many questions interviewers can ask, and there’s only so many ways you can answer them. It’s just the way it goes. And one of the questions writers most commonly gets asked is “Where did this story come from?” For Wasted Space, the story is actually kind of a funny one, and though I’ve told it a few times, I’m going to tell it again. Because I like to, but also because there’s more I want to say about this origin story that I haven’t said before. So, here goes:

Wasted Space—my new sci-fi comic that’s a pinch of Preacher, a dash of Star Wars, and a smidge of Philip K. Dick—was born on Christmas day, 2016. I’ll never forget this day, because it’s hard to shove out of your mind being so unbelievably miserable. I was sick. Sick as a dog. Sick as a dog who’d eaten something out of a dumpster that he knew he shouldn’t have eaten but, being a dog, he couldn’t help himself and now he’s so sick and all he has to show for it is being part of a dumb human’s simile.

Anyway. I was really sick.

It sucked, because it was Christmas day, and I’m a dad of two, which means Christmas is a pretty special time around the Moreci household. Any parent knows that we don’t get sick days. There’s no PTO plans. We wake up already on stage, mic in hand, and the crowd is just waiting. And your only choice is to put on your best Liza Minnelli face because, sick or not, this show is going on. Especially on Christmas, which is, like, the Liza Minnelli Broadway spectacular blowout. It’s a day you not only have to be on, but you especially want to be on. But I couldn’t get there—I was that sick.

I did manage to pull myself together enough to see my kids open my gifts. Then I crawled to Walgreens, bought enough cold medicine to tranquilize a horse, loaded up, and slept until it was time to visit my in-laws.

None of that helped.

So there I was, driving out to the in-laws, hopped up on cold medicine, and generally miserable about the state of the world. This was December 2016, and I hardly need to remind you what happened just a month beforehand. Things took a turn for the catastrophic, and I was still angry/befuddled/outraged/despondent over the lunatic who was about to become the leader of the free world in just a few weeks.

And that’s when Wasted Space was born. In the car, sick as hell, my head swimming in cold meds, still reeling from our national tragedy. The entire story came to me in like forty minutes.

But Wasted Space is more than that. Yes, it is very much meant to be a book for our unbelievably chaotic and troubling times. I don’t talk politics much online, for my own reasons, but I sure as hell wear them on my sleeve in this story. I wanted to make something that grabbed people by the lapels and gave them a good shake, like Preacher, like American Flagg, like Transmetropolitan, like so many other comics that I adore, and I hope I hit the mark. But buried beneath that story is something more personal, and certainly more intimate, that’s a little difficult for me to talk about.

Let’s rewind to a few years before Wasted Space, back to another sci-fi comic I wrote — Roche Limit, which came out in 2015 from Image Comics. I guess you can say it’s my breakout book; it was awarded numerous ‘best of’ lists, it was a commercial success, and it’s currently being made into a pilot for SyFy.

And I hardly remember writing a word of it.

Maybe that’s an exaggeration, I don’t know. But I was drinking a lot during that time, alone, mainly while writing. It was a tradition for me to drink—bourbon being my drink of choice—while I wrote, and I wrote nearly every night. It’s weird, because there’s no episode of drunkenness that stands out in my mind, where I did something outrageous that showed I needed some help. It was just this steady stream of drinking—too much, too frequently—and an overall sense of unhappiness.

I won’t dive into personal details, but suffice to say, eventually, I found my way out; I left my day job and went full-time freelance, I’ve spent more time with my kids than ever, and I hardly drink at all anymore. And though I feel better and happier, I do look back on that time of my life with a lot of regret. I know I wasn’t present in my world, not totally. I wasn’t my best, not anywhere close to it, and I mourn that. I mean, this was a time when I was writing a book that was finally breaking me out as a writer, and I hardly remember its creation. It’s just a haze in my mind, as much of that time is.

That’s where Wasted Space’s main character, Billy Bane, comes from. He’s a man rotting away, drowning in booze and drugs, who is forced to ask himself the question I had to ask of myself—“Am I better than this? Can I be better?” Granted, Billy’s story is a lot more dramatic than my own—a lot. But the kernel is the same, this struggle of being awakened from your own crappy misery and forced to make a choice—to do better, to be better, or to just aimlessly wallow.

Of course, I took that kernel and surrounded it with a blue, beefcake Fuq bot (it’s pronounced exactly as you think!), the apocalypse, and giant red entity known as Legion who likes to smash people’s faces. So, there’s that stuff as well.

Like my recent novel Black Star Renegades (also Star Wars inspired, though to the extreeeeme in this case), Wasted Space is a crazy, fun romp. These two books taught me how to enjoy what I love, how to be joyful in my writing, and I’ve never been more happy with the products of my work. My hope is that everyone who reads these books sees the fun in there as well—because as much as we need the outrage over every second of every day, we can use some good times as well.

Michael Moreci: Website | Twitter

Wasted Space: Vault Comics

Last month, I went to Austin to give a workshop to the local RWA, and while there, I had the chance to pop into a brand spankin’ new Amazon Bookstore.

Now, stepping foot into a physical Amazon bookstore is immediately surreal, in part because Amazon has for so long been a purely digital entity — so, when you enter this space, you become momentarily concerned that you have just shoved your Meatspace Body into a Cyberspace Realm, like you’ve broken some critical rule of reality. “WAIT IS THIS THE MATRIX. IS THIS THE OASIS. IS THIS REAL. ARE MY FINGER-TOUCHES ANALOGOUS TO MOUSE-CLICKS. IF I TOUCH A BOOK DO I BUY IT. AM I JUST TALKING IN BINARY CODE NOW.” (“Sir, you’re being weird,” one of the booksellers helpfully whispers into my ear.)

The other aspect of surreality comes from the fact that all the books are face out.

This is amazing.

This is terrifying.

This is weird.

Bookshelves as a rule are a great way to store books, but not a great way to display books to make them enticing. Authors and publishers gnash their teeth over book cover design, and all for books that are then turned sideways and slotted intimately next to other books, rendering the attractiveness of their covers utterly moot. A shelf is a great way to demonstrate books-as-information-clumps and a poor way to put them forward as tantalizing culture products.

Amazon has solved this by making every book a superstar.

Face. Out.

Glamour Shot.

RAZZLE FUCKING DAZZLE.

Again, this is:

Amazing, because it gives the book covers their due, and makes the books seem as much like art and culture product as they are wads of content.

Terrifying, because I’m pretty sure it feels like all the books are watching you.

Weird, because this is… not how we use bookshelves, generally. It’s so out-of-sync with how we experience bookshelves and bookstores, you get the feeling that the person who set them up doesn’t know what bookshelves do. It’s like seeing someone wear a boot on their hand or use food as a hat — it looks interesting, but it also looks like something a moon alien would do when trying to masquerade as a human meatbag. So, it’s jarring enough to feel like you’re in a bookstore that doesn’t know it’s a bookstore, even though it’s ostensibly a much sassier, sexier way of displaying the books for sale.

“Look at me,” the bookstore says, “I’m a real bookstore.”

“But this isn’t how real bookstores look,” you say.

And then the bookstore morphs into a fist that punches you and a mouth that eats you as you realize far too late that it’s actually just a Mimic from the old-school D&D Monster Manual.  [Edit: or home to the Lurker or Trapper from the same book!]

The other side effect of this display is, of course, that the bookstore features… well, very few books. It’s like an art gallery — you can only hang so many paintings on the wall. A single shelf on a bookshelf with the books spine-out can fit, let’s say, 20-30 books. But you can only display one face-out book per, I dunno, five or six spine-out books, so you’ve seriously limited how many books can be on display.

And what I found there was a mix of three kinds of books:

New, popular books — bestsellers or bestseller-adjacent.

Classic books, like, in SFF, analogous to Dune or ASOIAF or Wrinkle in Time.

Buzzy books, books you have heard about — at least, books you would’ve heard about if you pay attention to books and book-related things.

Folded into those three categories are a reasonable mix of Amazon-specific books, meaning, books published by the various wiggly arms of Amazon Publishing. (I’ll quietly make a sad face here and note that none of my A-Pub books were in the store, but that’s just me being mopey. Still: mope, mope, mope, you can’t stop me from moping, just you try.) My thing when I go into any bookstore now is to go to the SFF shelves and, honestly, look for the work of my friends — like, lately, B&N has been falling down on that front, especially when it comes to new releases. The Amazon store had a mix of SFF cohorts (Myke Cole, Delilah Dawson, Erin Morgenstern, NK Jemisin, and A-Pub author Marko Kloos), but the overall representation was fairly slim. But a great deal of SFF isn’t represented there at all. Again, in part because (I assume) you just don’t have much room on shelves.

(The perhaps ironic component of this is that the online Amazon store is theoretically limitless, while the physical location is eerily finite.)

I can contrast this with two other bookstore experiences —

First, that same day, I visited BookPeople in Austin (and signed some stock there), and that is a well-managed, beautiful store — a lot of stock, huge SFF and horror section with a deep bench for readers and authors. And then their whole children’s section was — *whistles* — imaginative and alive. I wanted to stay, play, frolic amongst the book garden.

Second, with B&N, which I just visited yesterday — our local B&N is starting to worry me. There were a few end-caps and central display shelves that had no books on them at all, giving them a ghost-town feel (and this was on a weekend, when foot traffic was high). And the SFF shelves had very few new releases by authors — no Cat Valente’s Space Opera, nor Fire Dance by Ilana Myer. (Their website says the former is in stock, but the person there didn’t know where, which tells me maybe it was in a box in the back.) This hurts first-week sales and so when B&N does their metric on subsequent books by those authors they’ll cite those first week sales as a reason to not carry the books, which of course wasn’t the author’s fault and — well, you see how it goes.

(Also, B&N feels less and less like a bookstore. My son breaks my heart whenever we go there because he always acts like he forgets they sell books. Which isn’t surprising, given how books are pushed to the margins while the ‘stuff’ like toys and such are brought into the center of the store. I can’t blame him for failing to realize B&N is a bookstore. He has no such confusion at our local indie, Let’s Play Books. Or same with Doylestown Bookshop.)

The Amazon Bookstore is a curious interstitial, then — it’s somewhat sterile, having none of that warm, lived-in reading-nook feel you get from a lot of indie stores. But it’s also surprisingly book-facing. Yes, there’s your standard part of the store dedicated to selling you the Kindle, but the rest is pretty much all books. Very few toys or other dongle-widgets to compete with the books. And this is Amazon we’re talking about. They could use those stores to sell books plus leaf-blowers plus pet food plus stuffed animals plus literally anything else Amazon sells. So, it’s nice to see… a bookstore that displays and sells primarily books in an attractive, book-forward way. But then they kinda fuck that up by putting front-and-center reader reviews and star ratings, which introduces something… off-kilter to the whole proceedings. When I’m in a bookstore I care very much about what the booksellers are reading, not what Guy In Aisle Five likes. And knowing how easily the ratings at Amazon can be manipulated… and having heard that the stores don’t tend to carry books with ratings below four….

…nnnyeah that’s a bit anxiety-inducing as an author.

And all told, there’s something icy and inert about the store. It didn’t really make me want to buy any books? It had that Silicon Valley vibe to it, a too-clean, tech-industry standoffishness. The staff stayed off in corners, talking to one another. The selection was sadly slim and if they had a big space (similar to the old Atlantic Book Warehouses) it might feel like more of a fun shopping experience instead of a sterile book boutique. I didn’t hate it, but didn’t love it. It felt more like an augmented reality experience of a bookstore than an actual bookstore. I don’t mind if more show up elsewhere, but also hope like hell they don’t replace any actual bookstores, because… well, it just isn’t a 1:1 replacement. It can’t be, the way it’s designed. There’s simply more pleasure walking around and exploring a nice indie store or a B&N (especially a well-curated B&N, like the Rittenhouse Square store in Philly) than this place.

(Here is where I make my plaintive cry to support indie bookstores whenever possible. And here you may say, ah, but I have no such store in my area, to which I give the retort: ahhh, oh-ho-ho my good book-buying friend, many such bookstores now ship to you wherever you are. You can find some such bookstores via Indiebound. And if you want signed books by me, you can buy them direct from Let’s Play Books in Emmaus, PA — I’ll sign, they’ll ship. And note if you can’t do a bookstore, always check out the library. You can even ask your local library to order books by your favorite authorpeople.)

That is a suitably dreary photo to accurately represent how suitably dreary it is outside right now. It’s gray and rainy and unnnggghh *banshee moan* this weekend was warm and lush and spring was in the air and now it’s cold and wet and fuck it.

And no that’s not a macro photo, but we’re all just going to have to deal. It’s a macro photo if you’re a giant. How about that? There you go. If you’re a giant, particularly a Space Giant out there in Giant Space, it’s a macro photo. Boom, you just got lawyered.

So, this week — well, the end of this week — I turn a big ol’ whopping 42 years old, which given HHGTTG, leads me to believe this will be some kind of very special year for me, cosmically speaking? I mean, probably not, but let a fella have his literarily numerological leanings, yeah? Yeah. But anyway, to celebrate, I figure I’d put my MEGA ULTRA SUPER DUPER POOPER UBER BOOK BUNDLE on sale — 50% off, so $20 becomes $10, which means you get ten books (eight writing books, two novels) for a buck a pop all in one go. You can check it out here, and you get the sale price with the coupon BOOKBIRTHDAY.

I’ve also noodled on doing a Patreon or Drip to support this site — but I’m also not sure about it. I don’t want to silo content unnecessarily, and I don’t want to split the readership here, nor punish those who aren’t subscribers. More thought will be required.

Ooh, also, ATLANTA BURNS and its sequel, THE HUNT, are still on sale for $0.99 a pop. For how long? I’ve no idea. Maybe ten minutes. Maybe ten years. Again, please note: these books are trigger-warning-flavored for all manner of things, so please be aware of that going into the deal. Good news on this front: a friend of mine wrote a pilot script based on the first AB book, and it was fucking cracking — I’ve read a lot of pilot scripts and this one, boy howdy, it’s one of the best scripts I’ve read. It captures the book while still being its own thing? It’s great. I don’t know that anything will happen with it, but Good Lord Willing and the Creek Don’t Rise, fortune will smile on this weird little project.

ANYWAY.

Reminder of where I’ll be upcoming —

This weekend: Ravencon in Virginia!

Then, May 5th, I’ll be at the Quakertown branch of the BCFL library for their comic-con day. I’ll be signing books and Let’s Play Books will have books for sale, so come by, say hi. Details here.

I’m at Phoenix ComicFest May 24 – 27, and will have a schedule for you soon.

Then I think I’m popping up to BEA to sign Damn Fine Story? More on that as I know!

Then I’m doing Writer’s Digest in NYC in August.

And that’s it!

I’M OUT.

*runs naked and cackling into the woods*

It is Friday the 13th.

Easily a day we ascribe to “horror,” but here, I’d like to take a different tack with it — I’d like you to write a short story about LUCK. Good, bad, indifferent, whatever. But luck. Doesn’t have to be horror at all, though it certainly can be.

Length: ~1000 words

Due by: Friday, April 20th, noon EST

Write at your online space.

Give us a link below.

Luck it up, motherluckers.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy meets the joy and glamour of Eurovision in bestselling author Catherynne M. Valente’s science fiction spectacle, where sentient races compete for glory in a galactic musical contest… and the stakes are as high as the fate of planet Earth.

A century ago, the Sentience Wars tore the galaxy apart and nearly ended the entire concept of intelligent space-faring life. In the aftermath, a curious tradition was invented—something to cheer up everyone who was left and bring the shattered worlds together in the spirit of peace, unity, and understanding.

Once every cycle, the great galactic civilizations gather for the Metagalactic Grand Prix—part gladiatorial contest, part beauty pageant, part concert extravaganza, and part continuation of the wars of the past. Species far and wide compete in feats of song, dance and/or whatever facsimile of these can be performed by various creatures who may or may not possess, in the traditional sense, feet, mouths, larynxes, or faces. And if a new species should wish to be counted among the high and the mighty, if a new planet has produced some savage group of animals, machines, or algae that claim to be, against all odds, sentient? Well, then they will have to compete. And if they fail? Sudden extermination for their entire species.

This year, though, humankind has discovered the enormous universe. And while they expected to discover a grand drama of diplomacy, gunships, wormholes, and stoic councils of aliens, they have instead found glitter, lipstick, and electric guitars. Mankind will not get to fight for its destiny—they must sing.

Decibel Jones and the Absolute Zeroes have been chosen to represent their planet on the greatest stage in the galaxy. And the fate of Earth lies in their ability to rock.

Writing comedy is hard.

I’ve written a lot of books that have comedic scenes in them—I think perhaps all of my books do that. A little comic relief in a dramatic story is one thing. But I’ve never done a book that is intended to fall within the comedy genre. And at the same time, the “Eurovision in space” concept is hardly one you can play straight. It’s a heightened and ridiculous reality that requires a certain tone.

This turned out to be astonishingly challenging for me. I’m a very fast writer. I allotted time to write Space Opera based on my usual wordcount-per-day rates. And suddenly I found myself working 12 hours a day to produce 1000 words. Because suddenly I didn’t only have to worry about the right word or sentence, the prettiest way to say something or the most dramatic way to say something or the most interesting way to say it, but it had to be the funniest word as well. Which leads to long conversations about what the funniest animal or fruit or man’s name is, or whether (actual discussion) the euphemism “wang” is funnier or less funny than “willy.” It’s a brand new dimension of decision making, and while I found it terribly fun, it just took so much longer than anything I’d written before. I couldn’t just come up with a cool take on spaceships I hadn’t seen done before, it had to be an at least somewhat amusing take on spaceships as well. And then, of course, in the long waiting period between finishing a book and it coming out, you have to worry about something new. I used to just worry about whether people like the ending or identify with the characters or find the structure too difficult. Now I have to worry about whether or not I’m funny, too. IT’S A WHOLE NEW WORLD OF FEAR AND INSECURITY HURRAH. In a normal SF book, if you get a laugh or two out of a reader, you’re hilarious. But in a science fiction comedy, you have to deliver all the way through, and not fall down on any of the rest of it, either. It’s freaking tough.

How to make friends with the space-elephant in the room

Of course, when you make any attempt to write science fiction comedy, the ghost of Douglas Adams is always in the room. He did it best, and you can’t do better. The sooner you accept that, the sooner you can actually get to work. It was even worse for me, since I knew I couldn’t have my protagonists be American (it’s not called Americavision) and the only participating country I’ve lived in, and thus, felt comfortable enough to write about, is the United Kingdom. I knew there would be comparisons, and it’s a bit terrifying, because, as I said, you can’t come close to Hitchhiker’s, it’s a mathematical law, like Xeno’s Paradox.

Ultimately, I had to give myself permission to sound a little bit Adams-y from time to time, that it couldn’t be helped, and know that in the end we are very different writers, with very different concerns, and a perhaps bit of arch deadpan humor on a spaceship could be forgiven in service of rocking out as hard as possible. One of my favorite things to do is dwell in the comedy until the reader feels comfortable, and then go straight for the feelings. It’s that oh-so-American hard turn into gut-rending emotion that I feel I can bring to the genre. And you know, it’s fairly freeing to know that you just can’t reach the same heights as the master—you’re bound to mess it up in comparison, but if I can pull a bronze in the event, that’s enough for me.

More than I ever wanted to know about Eurovision.

If you’ve heard anything about Space Opera, you’ve probably heard it described as “Eurovision in space” which is about the long and short of it. The book came about because I was live-tweeting Eurovision two years ago, because I love Eurovision more than most things, and someone on Twitter joked that I should write a science fiction version. It was sold just on that sentence and little, if anything more. Now, as I said, I love Eurovision, with all the passion of a filthy American convert. (If you don’t know what it is, basically, every country in Europe, and a few not in Europe, send a pop band or singer to compete against all the others in a glittery, ridiculous, wonderful song contest with a global audience bigger than the Super Bowl, despite most Americans never having heard of it at all. It’s sort of a combination of The Voice, Miss Universe, and WWI, as people vote from home, but you cannot vote for your own country, so the current political situation is usually very well illuminated by the Eurovision voting.) But there’s love and then there’s the level of knowledge it takes to turn Eurovision into a complete galactic extravaganza with as many species as nations on the continent.

I now, officially, know way too much about Eurovision.

Each chapter title is the title of a song that has been performed at a real Eurovision Song Contest in the 62 years of its existence. Yes, even Vampires Are Alive and Boom Bang-a-Bang. Each species name and indeed non-human character name is taken from the languages of the participating Eurovision countries. There are jokes about that time Ireland threw it because they were winning too much and couldn’t afford, as a nation, to keep hosting it. If you are a Eurovision fan, there are more Easter eggs in Space Opera than you can shake a rabbit at. If you’re not, then it’s all just wild fun, I hope.

Oh, and also, pro tip, if you live with an Australian, do not try to tell them any Eurovision facts. They already know. Australia was allowed to enter Eurovision despite being emphatically not in Europe sheerly because they love it so much.

Writing strong male protagonists is hard

That probably sounds like a joke, and it sort of is, but it mostly isn’t. I usually write either female protagonists or multiple protagonists with some of them being female. And I absolutely intended to do so in Space Opera. But the character of Decibel Jones, in retrospect, quite predictably, grew and grew until my washed-up former glam rock star undeniably owned the stage. Now, Dess is somewhat loose in his gender presentation (he refers to himself as “gendersplat”) but the secondary protagonist, a member of that once-chart-topping band Decibel Jones and the Absolute Zeroes, is definitely male. And because I am a woman and the male perspective doesn’t come naturally to me, I found myself asking all the same questions of these characters that I have had to address about female protagonists on a parade of endless panels. Are they vulnerable enough? Are they authentic? Is this something a guy would actually think, or am I just creating girls with butch haircuts? Humans aren’t so terribly different, whatever gender they are, but human culture certainly tries to enforce a difference, and I wanted my men to feel as real as my women. More to the point, I suppose, this is just incredibly important to me. For me, writing diverse characters sometimes means adding more men, and certainly more POC men (as both Decibel Jones and his man-of-all-music Oort St. Ultraviolet are), because I write about women all day and into the night. There are plenty of other female characters in Space Opera, major and minor, but I was nervous about my portrayal of these characters that I came to love so awfully much. I wanted to get male protagonists right—and it isn’t necessarily easy when you don’t come at it from the perspective that male points of view are the default.

Finno-Ugric languages are the actual living best

When I got the idea to use the Eurovision countries’ languages to name all the aliens, I started making word lists, and what I discovered was this: if I weren’t committed to honoring every participating nation (and there are a lot) with a linguistic homage, I could have named the whole galaxy using only Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian, and you all would have been like “Cat, how did you come up with such amazing names?” and I would have demurred bashfully, but really, it would have just been those three language dictionaries on my desk because they are the greatest. I suggest everyone study them because that language group really is fascinating in terms of structure, vocabulary, and versatility. I admit I’m a language nerd, but hot damn, they are just something else. First prize.

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Catherynne M. Valente is the acclaimed author of The Glass Town Game, and a New York Times bestselling author of fantasy and science fiction novels, short stories, and poetry. She has been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy awards, and has won the Locus and Andre Norton award. She lives on a small island off the coast of Maine with her partner, two dogs, one enormous cat, a less enormous cat, six chickens, a red accordion, an uncompleted master’s degree, a roomful of yarn, a spinning wheel with ulterior motives, a cupboard of jam and pickles, a bookshelf full of folktales, an industrial torch, and an Oxford English Dictionary.

Catherynne Valente: Website | Twitter

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