It is 1971. The fictional city of Bellport, Massachusetts, is in decline with an urban redevelopment project on the horizon expected to transform this dying factory town into a thriving economic center. This planned transformation has a profound effect on the residents who live in Bellport as their own personal transformations take place.

Sydney Stallworth steps away from her fellowship and law studies at an elite university to support husband Malachi’s dream of opening a business in the heart of the black community of his hometown, Bellport.

For Omar Bassari, an immigrant from Senegal, Bellport is where he will establish his drumming career and the launching pad from which he will spread African culture across the world, while trying to hold onto his marriage.

Della Tolliver has built a fragile sanctuary in Bellport for herself, boyfriend Kwamé Rodriguez, and daughter Jasmine, a troubled child prone to nightmares and outbursts.

Tensions rise as the demolition date moves closer, plans for gentrification are laid out, and the pace of suspicious fires picks up. The residents find themselves at odds with a political system manipulating their lives and question the future of their relationships.

***

MARRIAGE THERAPY DOESN’T HAVE TO INVOLVE A THERAPIST, JUST THE RIGHT KIND OF DOCTOR

My husband and I were having a tough time. I had been working on my novel for years, grinding out one draft after another, sending out sample pages to literary agents, getting no response, or getting the canned response email rejection or a few nibbles in which an agent asked to see additional pages and then would later tell me that my work wasn’t “the right fit.” I’d burst into tears, punch the sofa cushions and cry on my husband’s shoulder. At the same time, my husband was having a similar response from potential employers. He’d been out of work for more than a year and either got no interviews, interviews that went nowhere, or interviews that seemed to go somewhere…and then silence. In desperation to get my novel to sell, I scanned a list of “book doctors” who charged upwards of $100 per hour. Unwilling to spend that kind of money, I brainstormed until it occurred to me that I could get hubby to be the doctor. After all, he was a newspaper reporter for more than 20 years and did consultation for a fellow journalist whose book ended up on the New York Times bestseller list. My husband took the job, didn’t charge me a dime, and as they say, the rest is history.

THE BEST RESEARCH CAN OCCUR WHILE HOLDING A FORK AND KNIFE

Who says that research can’t be fun? It doesn’t have to involve poring over dusty old back breaking tomes at the public library, spooling rolls of microfilm onto rickety old projectors, or watching documentaries until you’re bleary eyed. Once I decided that one of my main characters was going to be a Senegalese restaurant owner and his nephew was going to be a drummer who’s very good at making Senegalese dishes, I took a trip into town to try the cuisine at the local Senegalese restaurant. The chef prepared the most succulent pork chops I’ve ever had and I still think about the lamb stew. Several trips to the restaurant helped me to realistically portray the meals in the story. I even prepared the lamb stew at home and it was nearly as good as the restaurant version.

BANGING ON A DRUM IS HARDER THAN YOU THINK

In my continuing effort to accurately portray my drummer, I signed up for a drumming circle led by a master drummer from Guinea. Even though I’d already taken an adult education course, I soon realized what a leap it was to take a master class.

Seventy-five-plus students showed up, drums in tow, ready to learn new rhythms from a musician they revered. The student seated next to me kept grumbling, “People who aren’t serious about this should stay home!” I wondered if he’d figured me out, that I was an imposter, not a real drummer. I could feel my shoulders slumping in a ridiculous effort to make myself invisible.

The room went silent as the master drummer played a combination of rhythms. He beckoned us to repeat them. On the beat, he slowly strutted around the large circle, inspecting our hands closely, nodding and smiling slightly when he was pleased, narrowing his eyes when a tone or slap was made without confidence.

As I feared, as he was making his rounds, he paused in front of me, raised a hand to get everyone to stop playing and worked with me one-on-one. After he tried again and again to set me on the right path I finally confessed in a weak voice: “I’m not a real drummer. I’m a writer wanting to learn to play to create a drummer for my novel.” He gave me a smile and continued circling the room. When he came back around to me, he paused again. Was I hitting the drum wrong? Apparently not. He gave me a flirtatious wink and kept going.

TAXIS AND MANUSCRIPTS DON’T MIX

I was on a business trip to a convention in Chicago and brought my laptop with me that had a copy of my manuscript on it. I was feverishly working on the manuscript whenever I had a chance—at the airport gate, the hotel room, on the airport shuttle. One afternoon after leaving the convention center, my boss and I took a taxi back to our hotel. I was so exhausted that it wasn’t until we were out of the taxi and in the lobby of the hotel that I realized that I’d left my computer bag in the trunk of the taxi. I was practically hyperventilating. The only copy I had of the manuscript was on that laptop. I hadn’t backed up the file. Keep in mind I wasn’t concerned about the loss of my work files. Of course, I hadn’t bothered to take note of the driver’s name or the taxi number. I did remember the name of the taxi company, however, but calls there didn’t help. Eventually, it occurred to me that the driver was likely making a continuous loop from the convention center to the hotel. I stood out front and waited. Sure enough, he eventually returned and I got my laptop back. Whew!

I COULD HAVE BEEN A DANCE INSTRUCTOR

Maybe not the kind of instructor who opens up a school, teaches ballet, tap, and jazz, and conducts recitals, but a halfway decent choreographer of fight scenes. In The Talking Drum I have a scene in which my drummer gets into a wrestling match of sorts with his wife. There’s a bowl of lobster stew involved, an herbal aphrodisiac in a jar, a wall-dial-style mounted telephone with an extra lengthy cord, and a pepper grinder. The drummer’s wife discovers that he is trying to insert some of the herbs into her bowl of stew and assumes he’s up to something sinister. They get into a tussle that involves a bear hug, squeezing of wrists, squirming, her using all of her weight to knock him against the refrigerator door with the palms of her hands, the jar of herbs flying out of his hand. I actually spent a good hour in my kitchen choreographing the scene, acting it out to make sure the two characters could actually go through those motions. In another scene, my drummer gets into a bar fight, pounces on the guy seated next to him and is eventually kicked out of the bar by a bouncer in a bum’s rush. That required some choreography on my part as well. I didn’t spend time in a bar going through the paces, but I think it nonetheless came out pretty believable in the published work.

***

Lisa Braxton is the author of The Talking Drum, published in June 2020 by Inanna Publications, and a recipient of a 2020 Outstanding Literary Award from the National Association of Black Journalists. She is a fellow of Kimbilio, a fellowship for fiction writers of the African diaspora, and an Emmy-nominated former television journalist, an essayist, and short story writer. She received Honorable Mention in Writer’s Digest magazine’s 84th and 86th annual writing contests in the inspirational essay category.

Lisa Braxton: Website | Twitter | Instagram

The Talking Drum: Amazon | Inanna Publications

EVERYTHING’S FOR HIRE. EVEN MAGIC.

If you need something done, Cloke’s one of the best; a mercenary with some unusual talents and an attitude to match.But when she’s hired by a virtual construct to destroy the other copies of himself, and the down payment is a new magical skill, she knows this job is going to be a league harder than anything she’s ever done.

***

Min/Maxing & Gaming Forums Work For Magic Too

I’m going to date myself immediately by admitting that the Atari 2600 was my first video game console. Since then, like many people that love video games, I’ve scoured the Internet for tips to get an edge in some of the games I play. This is known as “min/maxing” to some. In role-playing game terms for video games, this refers to the practice minimizing weaknesses while maximizing strengths.

In some cases, this also means finding exploits, glitches, or techniques that the game developers had never originally intended, but work out amazingly well if you’re willing to take the low road. I found I had the most fun with deploying magic into a cyberpunk world by thinking of it in those terms. Magic could have its intended functions, like hurling a fireball at an enemy, but when you’ve got it existing in a world with neural simulation and near-earth orbital space stations, there’s a lot of other stuff you can do with it too.

So I took the gamer approach to some of the magic applications, looking at particular combinations and applications. What happens when technology and magic interact, and now you’ve got new “rulesets” interacting with other rulesets? How can you break this? Is there an exploit you can use where one set of rules normally says something is impossible, but another can make it happen?

In the same way that people used unorthodox means to cheat in games, defeat copy protection on digital media, or just find ways to game the system, I tried putting magic and technology in the same room with some common goals to see how the two would fight or work together to achieve that goal.

I Think I’m A Carbon Fanboy

It’s not unusual for writers to go down the rabbit hole of research when it comes to novels. People writing historical fiction need to get those details right, and unless you’re already a master of quantum physics, engineering, rocketry, cybernetics, or programming, you’re doing to have to dig deep into a lot of areas if for some types of science fiction.

So for me, that ended up being a lot of materials research and getting embarrassingly excited about the future of carbon compounds. All the variants, like graphene, inorganic fullerenes, carbon fiber… it’s just amazing stuff. Who would have thought that the stuff you could theoretically collect from pencil shavings if you were patient enough was a miracle material? I’m still a little stunned that if I wanted some of the best combat armor in the world, all I’d need is a pocket knife, a couple of decades and several metric tons of pencils to get the raw material I’d need to survive a direct shot from gunfire.

Naïve Characters Don’t Have To Be Average

I think I first heard the term “naïve character” while listening to an interview with William Gibson. The naïve character is a very handy device in genre fiction. This is the person that is a stand-in newbie for the reader, and gets to ask all the questions the reader has like “What’s that? Who’s that? That thing the Evil Queen just said that made everyone gasp, what does that mean? How does your tech/magic/psychic eggplant work?”

In some cases, the naïve character is also the protagonist, so there’s a certain amount of “averageness” that’s built in to make sure this person is relatable. Neo in The Matrix is a naïve character who constantly repeats, “I have SO many questions.” Ellen Page, as Ariadne in the movie Inception, is another good example.

For The Chimera Code, I was already tossing readers neck first into an existing cyberpunk future, which would have been disorienting enough on its own. But then magic had been integrated into that world a few generations prior, so they were already getting the hang of this, and it made for some odd intersections of culture and commerce. That’s a lot to take in, and so I knew that functionally, I’d get a lot more room maneuver by having my naïve character to ask Cloke all the questions that needed asking.

But I didn’t want someone average and relatable in a world already as weird as this. Enter Zee, the nonbinary hacker. Zee ended up being so interesting that an automatic promotion to protagonist status became unavoidable. What once was strictly Cloke’s show became the Cloke & Zee act, and the fact that Zee had an agenda, a background, and all kinds of issues to deal with became a major highlight of writing. Zee was no longer just there to say stuff like, “Explain to me how this magic stuff works in today’s global economy,” although that stuff gets asked. Zee had agency, goals, and things that needed doing. So my naïve character ended up being anything but average, and in some cases, totally stole the show.

The Abyss Is Liberating

This novel is my debut, but it’s not my first book. It’s actually my sixth. I’d had the idea for this book forever—or at least since the 1990s—but I kept putting off writing it. At the time, I was really attracted to the idea of writing a cyberpunk book, but William Gibson, the author of Neuromancer and Godfather of the entire cyberpunk genre, was my gold standard. I wasn’t sure I could live up to the bar he’d established.

So over the years, I wrote a lot of other books instead, with fantastical elements in familiar settings. Urban fantasy was my way of getting my feet wet with weird shit, without having to create all of it from the ground up. I still love those books, and my very first novel still holds a special place in my heart, but none of them got published. They all helped me to find my voice, though.

So after many years of unsuccessfully trying to get a book in print, I stared down the barrel of considering that it might be time to kill the dream. I figured if I was going to quit, I might as well make my last book the one I really wanted to write. With that idea of making a kamikaze jump off a cliff, I finally committed The Chimera Code to the page. Believing that it was the last book I was ever going to write made a pretty big difference to how I approached it.

Does this mean I think I hit the bar I set for myself with regards to the brutal, beautiful, dense prose of Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy? I probably didn’t. But now I was willing to at least try for it. I was willing to finally make my own world from the ground up, instead of putting small bits and pieces of it in an established framework. And I was willing to take all the crazy moments I’d seen in comics, games, movies, and even anime, in addition to novels, and just throw them all into this one book. It was going to be my last book. May as well go out in style.

And now, of course, it’s not my last book, at least not for now. So I guess sometimes when you set your sights on ending with a bang, that’s really just the precursor to even louder things.

There Is No Shame In Not Drawing From The Classics

As a Generation X nerd, I did my time as a kid in the library looking at the giants of the SF genre, so I read my Clarke, my Asimov, my Heinlein, and of course, my Herbert. But I was also utterly blown away by things that, at the time, weren’t classics, like the upstart William Gibson, and Neuromancer novel.

More to the point, though, as a Gen X kid, I was also there when the damn broke, and all kinds of other non-SF-book influences came to the fore. Marvel’s Dark Phoenix saga in comics? Blew my mind. Blade Runner, Aliens, and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn? Will be with me forever. The first bootleg, 12^th generation copies of Japanese cartoons that people were calling “anime”? I devoured Akira, Nausicaa and the Valley of the Wind, Bubblegum Crisis and so much more. And video games were like falling through the wardrobe into Narnia. You could do stuff here! You could interact! I got the Babel Fish in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy text adventure! What manner of sorcery was this?!

That’s all my way of saying that when I’m writing something now, I’m just as likely to pull from Haikyuu!!, a volleyball sports anime, as I am from Horizon: Zero Dawn, or Blade Runner 2049. It’s a much bigger world now, and while I still adore the stuff, I find in books today and will happily lose myself in the worlds of Charlie Jane Anders, or N.K. Jemisin, or even go back to Asimov, Clarke, or Gibson, I’m not letting them be the sole influences on what ends up on my page.

***

Over the years, Wayne Santos has written copy for advertising agencies, scripts for television, and articles for magazines. He’s lived in Canada, Thailand and Singapore, traveling to many countries around South East Asia. His first love has always been science fiction and fantasy, and while he regularly engaged with it in novels, comics, anime and video games, it wasn’t until 1996, with his first short story in the Canadian speculative fiction magazine On Spec that he aimed towards becoming a novelist. He now lives in Canada, in Hamilton, ON with his wife. When he’s not writing, he is likely to be found reading, playing video games, watching anime, or trying to calm his cat down.

Wayne Santos: Website

The Chimera Code: eBook

And so we continue with another round of effervescent microblogs, which are too big to be tweets, too small to be blogs, so they’re mostly just here, a meal of content appetizers.

There’s a We Bare Bears movie and you need to watch it. I know, I know. You’re like, “But Chuck, why begin your post with something so controversial, so important?” And yet, you joke, but it kinda is? We Bare Bears has always been a wonderful cartoon, but as I understand it, Daniel Chong intended for the series all along to be a goofy bear-shaped analog to his experience as an Asian-American, touching on (if not explicitly and not exclusively) a non-white and immigrant angle for the bears. Well, the movie definitely puts that into sharp focus — without giving too much away, it (in its adorable way) looks at family separation, border camps, border crossings, bigotry, and the like. And yet, it’s still fun and cute and weird and I’m sad the show is now over. Because it’s really great.

If you also need something that feels both very escapist and very now? Then look no further than Palm Springs, the Andy Samberg / Cristin Milioti time-loop movie. Do not accept any spoilers going in — just turn it on and watch it. It’s like an acid-trip hangover version of Groundhog Day.

The greatest trick as an artist right now is making something I think that is both escapist and topical. That’s a gift if you can pull it off. You certainly aren’t required to — I don’t mean it as a mandate. I only mean, both talking about The Now while also having fiction that feels like The Way Out is a masterful slalom. It’s the narrative epitome of “spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.” I think some of the best fiction, particularly in genre, does exactly this.

No, I haven’t seen The Old Guard yet. But I’m excited to?

Paul Tremblay is still a monster. I did however finish Survivor Song and boy howdy that Paul Tremblay continues to know how to make you breathlessly descend into his monstrous playground where you excitedly run up to him and he stabs you in the heart with a knife made from the bones of one of your pets. He’s a bad person made all the more evil by the fact he’s so damn good at this. One of the best horror writers around. Also, rabies even without super-sizing it, is fucking scary. Imagine what he does with it. You’re not imagining hard enough.

The election is now single-digits away. It’s 98 days, I think. I said this to my wife this morning and her response was, “It’s like when the Super Mario Brothers music gets faster and faster and everything gets more and more dangerous.” Which uhhh. Y’know. Yeah.

It’s hard to know what the fascist federal troops thing is all about. I mean, it’s obviously about a lot of things — bigotry, control, fascism under the guise of patriotism, and most likely, just people getting paid. I just don’t know the endgame of it. I have a hard time believing it’s popular for anyone other than the most reduced turdsauce that is Trump’s Base. Though maybe I underestimate Americans in general? It just seems, during an already-botched coronavirus response, it’s amazing to see someone continue to try to divide the country before a major election. Unless he thinks this is his ticket to not having to have that election. No matter how you shake it, it’s fucked up. But I’d also argue it’s not working. I hope that it’s dinosaurs squawking at a meteor. But it could also be the meteor.

Speaking of that old coronavirus… haha, what a goddamn fuckshow. I mean, it just amazes me at this point that there are people living full, unfrightened lives in this bullshit. It makes me feel like I’m on crazy pills. I mean, we’re still pretty locked down? Loosened up a little bit, where able, but generally we don’t go many places, no restaurants, no gatherings, no vacations. Masked up all the time if we do go out, social distanced, too. But there are people who just gotta do the dumb shit they gotta do. They gotta have XYZ vacation, they gotta go to this restaurant, they gotta put their kids in sports, and it’s all — like, couldja just cool it? A not-unreasomable percentage of new cases in our county (rising once again) are from Pennsylvanians who just had to go to Myrtle Beach, because if they didn’t go there, they’d just die. Meanwhile, we maybe had a shot to control this. We locked down already. And it was all for… nothing, really. Not for shit. Because we’re a nation with oppositional defiant disorder.

Of course, the real breakdown isn’t just in selfish Americans. I mean, it is in the sense that at the individual level, there are people who are like LOL BUT I NEED BASEBALL AND BARBECUES P.S. THE VIRUS IS FAKE, but the real failure is in leadership. We’re all getting salty at governors and school admins for either not opening up enough or offering too limited options, and people are concerned about working from home or not working from home and what their kids will do — but all this is because we have a gormless narcissist fuckwit at the helm, one surrounded by a gaggle of vampiric bleach-white Skeksis happy to urge him to deeper and deeper lows. There’s no safety net to catch anybody, so instead all they do is keep throwing people into the wood chipper. Your kids aren’t going back to school because of education and their need for it, no matter how much they claim it is — they’re going back to school to feed the economy. Of course, throw enough of them in there, and that machine will break down anyway, and the economic damage won’t simply be a slower machine. It’ll just break. And when it breaks, that’s when it crashes.

Think of it like running on a busted leg. You pull a hamstring or something, you just have to take it easy. You can walk, but you can’t run, much as you want to. But if you try to run, you won’t just keep the injury — you’ll aggravate it. Make it worse. Maybe make it permanent.

I’ve said all this before, haven’t I? Person, woman, man, camera, TV. There are four lights.

Summer Camp Island is nice. So is Infinity Train. Cartoons are good. Anybody who tells you they’re not hasn’t watched Avatar: The Last Airbender. Did I mention we got HBO Max?

HBO To The Max, Dude. It’s both a really great service and a shitty one. Can’t get it on Roku, which sucks. It has a variety of shows, but sometimes only a season of that show? Like with so many streaming services, what it offers is often frustratingly incomplete. And it’s not 4k yet, either, I don’t think? Oh! But I’m enjoying Perry Mason, though jesus fuck it’s dark.

Game on. The newest Superhot is pretty bad-ass. The Oculus Quest is fun, and even more immersive now that the hand-and-finger tracking works. (Meaning, no controllers necessary.) What’s a comfort video game for you? One you return to again and again? I’m thinking of jumping back into the Bioshock games. Or maybe Fire Emblem? Mmm. Fire Emblem.

Are you writing? Anything? How’s it going? Sound off. Check in. How goes the wordsmithing, cohort penmonkeys? Harder now? Easier? Getting any words down or is it just a lot of screaming into various jars and yard holes?

Here is a bee. Also a secret caterpillar. And a not so-secret caterpillar. And birds! You can find more pics and nonsense over at Flickr or Instagram.

From Edgar Award finalist Debra Jo Immergut, YOU AGAIN is a taut, twisting work of literary suspense about a woman haunted by her younger self. Booklist calls it “a furious page turner” and Kirkus, in a starred review, says it’s “a profound meditation on love, fate, ambition, and regret.”

I write best when my novel feels like a Rubik’s Cube

You Again began with an unsettling vision. One day in  New York City,  I pushed my son in his stroller past the old tenement building I’d lived years earlier, when I was a 22-year-old party girl with secret, fierce aspirations to be a novelist. I had the strangest sense that, if the old wooden door swung open, my younger self would come striding out. What would she think if she saw me, married woman, pushing this toddler around, and no novel to show for it? Would she be furious with me?

It felt so real. I never forgot that vision. A few years later, I found my way back to writing in a small way, and I decided to explore the idea of a woman meeting her younger self. How would such a thing happen? And why? What would the results be? How would it change her?

These were really thorny questions. I challenged myself to provide some plausible explanations for this twisting of time–while not over-explaining it and draining off all the mystery. I found this challenge completely absorbing. It nearly broke my brain working it all out but I’m really proud of the result, and now, at last, I know how to get my ass in the chair and stay there for hundreds of hours and hundreds of pages. Embed a puzzle deep in it the story’s heart. I’ll be under its thrall until I figure out how to solve it.

My red is not your red

When I was working on the first complete draft of the novel, I was lucky enough to spend a month at an artist’s colony–which was like a luxe sleepaway camp for obsessive creative oddballs. I met an artist there named Franklin Evans (super talented, look him up) and though he was rather retiring and reticent, I wheedled my way into the studio he’d been given, a spooky old stone building in the woods. I told him I was writing a book about a painter and that it would help me at that moment to smell his paints. Poor guy! He agreed. While I was just soaking up the orderly chaos of his workspace–he was piecing together brightly hued works from art tape and bits of small paintings–I asked him about his favorite art-related books. He named two. One was a biography of Matisse. The other was “Interpretation of Color” by Josef Albers. I bought them both. The Matisse was fascinating–but the Albers was like the keys to the kingdom–I instantly knew that my main character, Abigail, would have used this book as her bible.  In the book, Albers methodically demonstrates many surprising and mysterious properties of color, and how it’s all about context. I learned that, because the inner structures  of eyes are as individual as our fingerprints, no two people seem the same hues. Your red is not my red. This became one of the controlling ideas of the novel—how we are ruled by our very personal perceptions of reality.

Some part of me wants to smash things

I lived in Berlin in the 1990s, just after the fall of the Wall. In certain parts of town, I’d see these black-clad wildlings who were always calling for some “aktion” or other, often protesting the eviction of squatters from the ruined buildings that had been left to crumble since the war. Every May Day, the antifa would battle the police in certain parks and streets, and both sides seem to relish this ritual. I found it fascinating, especially since I come from an American generation that didn’t do much street-marching or protesting. I’d rarely seen such things up close. In recent years, visiting Berlin, I actually sought out a few demos, just to observe them. I wondered: could this European strain of antifascism–which began in earnest in 1920s Italy during the rise of Mussolini–ever make inroads into the US? I suspected the answer would be yes–and then Trump’s inauguration happened, when the American Antifa threw its first few really resonant punches. While working on You Again, I decided that Abigail’s 16-year-old son, Pete, might be attracted to this rising movement intent on destroying the status quo, given how unhappy his parents seemed with their status quo. Without endorsing them, I have to admit that, as a writer, I found their passion, their chaos, and their boldness to be powerful narrative fuel, and introducing this element changed the course of the novel.

Secondary characters are the tastiest treats

Do other writers feel this way? Secondary characters bring me such pleasure. While my central characters are busy questing for answers to the great puzzles of their lives, the secondary characters are just busy being their bad selves. They tend to be big personalities. Quirky, angry, goofy, egotistical. They make me laugh. They mouth off in ways that surprise me. In my first novel, The Captives, I adored writing the scenes that centered on my side dishes–a feckless teenage junkie, a Russian gang moll. In You Again, I came to understand that the secondary characters are where I get to indulge in off-kilter dialogue and weird humor.  I really enjoyed inhabiting my ultraglam art-world queen, my shady Brooklyn import-export dealer, and my magenta-haired Antifa girl. I have to restrain myself from overpopulating my books with minor characters, I love them so fiercely.

Truly serious sweat must be broken

This is a lesson I have been learning every day since I made a determined return to fiction writing after being laid-off from a fulltime job five years ago. Yes, inventing imaginary worlds and concocting imaginary humans–especially those tasty secondary characters–is deeply satisfying fun. You can’t force the flow, uou don’t want to inhibit the stream of emotion and imagination. You must allow it to bubble forth with ease and gentleness and some degree of joy.

That’s all true for first draft writing, when you’re just seeking to tap the wellspring, that mysterious deep source of the best raw ideas.

But then, it’s time to bring the hammer down. I took me many years to understand how much harder I would need to work on later drafts. How ruthless I needed to be, as I examined every character, every word, every plot turn, the beginnings and endings. If I didn’t feel painfully stretched to the limits of my abilities, the end result wasn’t even going to be close to good enough. We’re asking so much of our readers–listen to me blather on for page after page after page!–so if I’m not committed to the project with ferocious and unceasing effort, then I don’t deserve to be read. That’s been a tough lesson to learn, and it’s taken many years to really sink in, but I now feel its truth deep in my bones. All too often I fall short, but at least I understand how high I have to reach.

***

Debra Jo Immergut is the author of You Again, forthcoming from Ecco/HarperCollins in July 2020, and The Captives, a 2019 Edgar Award finalist for Best Debut Novel by an American Author, published in the US by Ecco and in over a dozen other countries. She has also published a collection of short fiction, Private Property (Random House). Her essays and stories have appeared in American Short Fiction, Narrative, and The New York Times, among others. A recipient of Michener and MacDowell fellowships, she has an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and lives in western Massachusetts.

Debra Jo Immergut: Website | Instagram | Twitter

You Again: Bookshop.org | Amazon

Buc and Eld are the first private detectives in a world where pirates roam the seas, mages speak to each other across oceans, mechanical devices change the tide of battle, and earthly wealth is concentrated in the hands of a powerful few.

It’s been weeks since ships last returned to the magnificent city of Servenza with bounty from the Shattered Coast. Disaster threatens not just the city’s trading companies but the empire itself. When Buc and Eld are hired to investigate, Buc swiftly discovers that the trade routes have become the domain of a sharp-eyed pirate queen who sinks all who defy her.

Now all Buc and Eld have to do is sink the Widowmaker’s ship….

Unfortunately for Buc, the gods have other plans.

Unfortunately for the gods, so does Buc.

***

Writing a protagonist who is smarter than you isn’t easy (duh)

Sambuciña or ‘Buc’ is the main character of The Sin in the Steel. She’s a Sherlockian teenager raised on the streets who is an autodidact that took to books like a duck to water. She is also well above genius levels and while I’m no slouch, Einstein I am not. Streetwise and booksmart Buc sees every possible angle and because we see the world through her eyes it meant that I NEEDED to see every possible angle too. That proved harder than I anticipated, especially when she’s thinking through the potential ways to resolve a situation and then we see her execute her thoughts (in both brainy and stabby ways). What was fun about having such a brilliant protag though, was figuring out ways she would fail. Buc’s tongue is often as sharp as the half dozen blades she’s got hidden on her person and one thing that became clear is there is a difference between intelligence and wisdom. A reviewer compared her to Alexander Hamilton and in many ways, that’s an apt comparison. Hamilton never knew when to stop in debates and duels, ultimately to his (final) detriment. Even if it was hard, it was always a lot of fun to see her both get herself out of impossible situations and land in something even worse. Hopefully you’ll think so too!

I have a brand

Before you land an agent or get a book deal, you’re primarily writing for yourself. Singular. An audience of one. Even after you get an agent or a book deal, you’ll still be writing for yourself, but what changes is that you will begin to receive input and feedback that informs how you think about who else might be reading your book(s). I’d been writing for six or seven years when I signed with DongWon Song (who was an impressive editor at Orbit before he became an agent) and if you ever get the chance to hear him talk I can almost guarantee he’ll talk about author brand at some point. A brand is something that should develop naturally, but then once you realize what it is, you can really lean into it. It’s how you know you’re reading a Stephen King or Victoria Schwab book after the first few pages. I wrote a million words before DongWon helped me recognize what my brand was: adventure fantasy with heart. Looking back on the trunk novels (7) I’d written before The Sin in the Steel I realized they had some common elements. Namely fast pacing, tight transitions, and loads of fireworks…but despite all those plot-heavy elements I just mentioned, they were driven by the characters. All of my book ideas have come from a character appearing in my mind…often with a word or a sentence or an emotion appearing with them. Realizing that really helped me focus scenes, character arcs, all of it. It’s kind of like wandering the wilderness, lost, and then discovering you had a compass in your pocket the entire time. Brands…who knew?

I am an underwriter

Kill your darlings. It’s one of the first pieces of advice given to new writers. Right after write what you know. Both are great, but both are, to one degree or another, bullshit. The idea behind kill your darlings is that as a writer you put too much fluff in and by making the prose, the plot, and the scenes tighter you’ll polish that diamond in the rough into a display item. It’s great in theory, but like all things writing, it’s something that may or may not work for you and if it doesn’t work, toss it.

I’d listened to a bunch of authors rhapsodize about the need to cut ten percent–or more!–of your novel and so novel after novel, I tried to do just that. And I hated it. Friends, I hated it so badly because it never felt like I was making anything better, instead it felt like I was just ruining the book.

Turns out, it’s because I kinda was? I only realized after Melissa Singer, my Tor Editor kept asking for more in edits. Being an underwriter means I sometimes end up leaving some knowledge or beats or character growth in my head instead of pushing it out through my fingers that are dancing across the keys. That translates into the reader having questions about how or why certain things happened or leaving some threads of gold in the scene so it reads like a seven or eight out of ten instead of an eleven. For example, the draft that got me my agent? That was 99,000 words. The draft we submitted to editors was around 112,000 and the draft you’re reading clocks in at 123,000. Instead of cutting ten percent I ended up adding nearly twenty five percent to the final version! That doesn’t mean I don’t cut lines or scenes, but it does mean for every scene I cut, I need to add more. I just finished the final edits on book two and it was a similar story.

I have to say, this was probably the best thing I learned while writing The Sin in the Steel. Why? Because I love writing and I do it pretty quickly too. I can crank out 10-15,000 words a week and if that’s what killing your darlings means, hand me the axe.

Writing is solitary, but publishing really is a collaboration

I talked a bit before about how lonely writing is. It’s just you and the blank page (often with a maddening cursor blinking at you, questioning why you aren’t making it go away with words). Stephen King famously said writing a novel is like crossing the Atlantic in a bathtub solo. Writing is all of that, but publishing is something else entirely. I thought I’d done my research before I signed with an agent and we got a 3-book deal with Tor but I was mistaken. Sorely so.

Working with an agent and an editor opened up so many new ideas for me, helped me hone my craft, and really polish my work. But that’s still about the writing. What I wasn’t prepared for was discovering the entire iceberg of folks working below the water that make books possible. There were cover designers and artists looking to not only bring the book to life on the dust jacket, but also to make sure the thousand words the picture told would grab would-be readers and make them pick it up off the shelf and crack open that first page. Marketing folks who reached out to bloggers and bookstagrammers and made sure advanced copies found their way to readers who would become champions and build buzz. They crafted campaigns and worked with managers of bookstores, ensuring the sellers would be fired up to recommend the book to their customers. Social Media gurus who get the word out through Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Twitter and more. Publicists who have to deal with nervous first time authors asking a million questions and wanting to do a million things (while having no real idea what exactly is effective). On the practical level there’s folks focused on page lay out and proofs and the physical act of printing the book. Audio teams finding narrators and laying down recordings and giving audible voice to your world.

The list goes on and on, but the best part? Discovering this new found family of book lovers. Look, no one goes into publishing to get rich. If you’re reading this, you’re one of the tribe, but you know how few we are. How many of your co-workers, friends, or family read more than 5 books a year? The margins are thin, my friends. People get into publishing because they are passionate about books. Books entertain, they inform, they can literally save lives. They allow the voices of those dead centuries, millennia even, to speak to us. Books are magic and so are the folks across publishing working to produce them.

It’s the little things

I thought that walking into a bookstore and seeing my book on the shelf would be the moment that would bring me to my knees, but I don’t believe that anymore (Thank God, right? Because I don’t think I’ll be going into a bookstore until 2022 at this rate). Why? Well as trite as it sounds, it turns out…this debut book was really about the journey.

I wrote the first version of what would become The Sin in the Steel in July 2015. In July 2016 my wife and I came home from a night out at the theatre and a drink at a local bar after. I remember it so vividly because it’d been a great night and a stranger at the bar had asked me about the inkwell and quill and quote tattoo I had on my arm. I told them I’d gotten it because I was a writer and while I’d initially intended to wait until I had a deal, I had realized I wasn’t going to stop writing so I went ahead and got it anyway. That was still on my mind when I came home and saw an email from the person who would eventually become my agent asking if I had time to talk on the phone. Dear Reader, I sank to the floor and my wife thought I was having a heart attack. After eight books, I’d begun to lose the faith.

The day my future editor called me is another landmark moment that I’ll never forget. At the start of the conversation I was very much aware that I was trying to sell her on me and the book and somewhere around the middle I realized it had shifted and she was trying to sell herself and Tor Books to me. It wasn’t a tough sell. I remember hanging up and calling DongWon and saying, “I think they’re going to make an offer.” They did. It was July 2018.

Fast forward to July 2020 and incredibly, surprisingly, finally, The Sin in the Steel is out in the wild. I remember seeing the copy edits in the font that would go into the book. The first Advanced Reader Copies. The first blurb, first review. First time I got a payment for meeting a milestone. All of those were powerful moments. I’ve spent years with Buc and Eld and their story and as I’m writing their concluding adventure now, I realize I’ve had my time with them.

So yes, I’m super excited the book is going to hit shelves, but that moment when you walk into a bookstore and a book catches your eye, so you open it up and see, “Before I learned how to read, I thought knowledge was finite, dead and decaying inside old men’s skulls”, that moment, Dear Reader, is for all of you.

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RYAN VAN LOAN served six years in the US Army Infantry, on the front lines of Afghanistan. He now works in healthcare innovation. The Sin in the Steel is his debut novel. Van Loan and his wife live in Pennsylvania.

Ryan Van Loan: Website | Twitter

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