The Lowdown (Mrs & Mrs Edition) Part 2: with Kelly Robson

Kelly Robson’s Tor.com novella “Waters of Versailles” won the 2016 Aurora Award, and this year she was a finalist for the Nebula Award, World Fantasy Award, Theodore Sturgeon Award and Sunburst Award. Her Gothic Horror novelette “A Human Stain” is forthcoming at Tor.com in January. Kelly lives in Toronto with her wife, fellow SF writer A.M. Dellamonica.

1. Tell us three things about yourself. 
I grew up in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, just a few kilometers east of Jasper National Park.
When I was a teenager, I competed in rodeos. I was crowed Rodeo Princess when I was just 14 years old, but despite all that teenage outdoorsy-ness, reading has always been my first love.
Alyx Dellamonica and I have been married for nearly 30 years.

2. What was the first thing you had published? 
My first publication was “The Three Resurrections of Jessica Churchill” in the February 2015 Clarkesworld. Neil Clarke accepted it in December, and by that time I’d already sold several stories. None of them had been published yet, but one was coming out in an anthology in March. Editors love to get the first publication scoop for a new writer, so Neil Clarke squeezed me into the February issue.

3. Which piece of writing are you proudest of? 
That’s such a difficult question. It’s like asking a parent to choose a favorite child! All of my stories a really different from each other. I guess I’m most proud of “The Three Resurrections of Jessica Churchill,” which was a finalist for the Theodore Sturgeon Award. The reason why I’m most proud of it is that when I was drafting it, I knew exactly what I wanted to achieve (i.e., make people very upset) -- and I did it.

4. …and which makes you cringe? 
Absolutely nothing. No regrets. Well, that’s not exactly true. Here in Toronto we have a monthly SF reading series, which Alyx and I try to never miss. Last August, instead of a regular reading we did a “Mortified Reading” fundraiser where a bunch of pros read from their childhood or teenage writing. Almost everyone else read horror stories (Gemma Files’ in particular was fantastic) but mine was a horse story I’d written when I was ten years old. I’m not embarrassed of it – managed to read it with hardly any cringing, and it got several good laughs, but I’m afraid it doesn’t reflect admirably on my childhood psychology.

5. What’s a normal writing day like? 
I work from 8:00 to 4:00. We live in downtown Toronto and Alyx works at home so supper is usually over by 5:00. I’m usually writing by 5:30, and go until 7:30 or 8:00. Then we’ll watch and hour of TV, and asleep by 10:00. I’m not a fast writer, so to make decent progress, I have to put in at least two and a half hours five or six days a week (and preferably more, and much more when revising). I don’t write every day because for me, that’s a recipe for burnout. However, if I don’t write more days that not, the word count stagnates.

Cover: Waters of Versalles

 6. Which piece of writing should someone who’s never read you before pick up first? 
My novella “Waters of Versailles” gets a lot of love, and it’s one of my favorite pieces. It’s a glittering historical fantasy set in Louis XV’s Versailles, with a surprise emotional sucker punch.

7. What are you working on now? 
I’m revising a long time travel novella called “The Last Landing of the Lucky Peach.” The story is set several hundred years in the future, and involves mass extinction events, a coming of age story where the person who comes of age is 85 years old, intergenerational conflict, and the question of whether ancient kings really believed they had supernatural powers, which is a really interesting question to me. And because my story, it also has a lot of water in it. Seems like stories are always really wet!

The Lowdown: (Mrs & Mrs Edition) Part 1: Alyx Dellamonica

A.M. DELLAMONICA is the author of Indigo Springs, which won the Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic. Her short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s, Realms of Fantasy, Sci-Fiction and Strange Horizons, and in numerous anthologies; her 2005 alternate-history Joan of Arc story, “A Key to the Illuminated Heretic,” was shortlisted for the Sideways Award and the Nebula Award. Dellamonica lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.


1. Tell us three things about yourself.  
1. I am a Toronto, Ontario writer with four books to my name, a fifth novel coming out this December, and forty short stories in print. My work has been translated into Polish, Hebrew, and (I hope to announce soon) Italian! My first novel, INDIGO SPRINGS, won the Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic and my most recent, A DAUGHTER OF NO NATION, won the 2015 Prix Aurora for best novel, in the same year that my wife, Kelly Robson, won the Aurora for short fiction for her outstanding novella "Waters of Versailles."

2. I have never learned to enjoy the process of shopping for shoes.
3. My biggest problem in life right now is deciding if I can wait on an an amazing local tattoo artist, to work with me on the poppies I want to put on my right shoulder, in celebration of the incredible year I've had. She's booked through to the end of 2016. I’m keen in part because I feel it is always important to notice when things are going so well that your greatest source of angst is over when and how you're going to get your next bit of celebratory body art. If you don't pay attention when things are good, you run the risk of seeing your life as a vale of tears.

2. What was the first thing you had published? 
Excluding student newspaper-type publications and contests wins, my first fantasy story appeared in Crank! Magazine in 1991 and was called "Lucre's Egg."

3. Which piece of writing are you proudest of? 
My Hidden Sea Tales trilogy is wrapping up this December with THE NATURE OF A PIRATE, the follow-up to A DAUGHTER OF NO NATION. It is an ambitious project, set on a world with over 250 island nations, each with their own microclimate and proprietary magic system. The books are funny, romantic, adventurous crime stories. I bit off a lot with them, but I think--perhaps for the first time--it was never quite more than I could chew. I love the world, Stormwrack, that they're set in and I hope to write many more things set in that realm, using those characters and countries.

4. …and which makes you cringe? 
I'm not sure there's anything that makes me cringe, precisely. I'm not sorry that I started publishing stories before the days when everything was electronically archived. I'm so much better now that I'm not entirely unhappy that my freshman efforts, like "Lucre's Egg," are a little more difficult to access. That said, they represented the best writing I could produce at the time, and even if 2016 Alyx looks at them askance, that doesn't mean they're without value. If you aren't a little appalled by your work of two decades ago, it may mean you aren't getting better.

5. What’s a normal writing day like? 
At 6:30 every morning I sit down to do a little teaching and correspondence, to wake up and clear my mind and schedule. By 8:00 a.m., I am in a cafe near my home, drinking coffee and writing fiction. Depending on how that goes, I segue into exercise and errands between 10:00 a.m. and 11:00. My afternoons are more flexible: sometimes I work on revising fiction, sometimes I need to do more teaching, sometimes I have administrative work, non-fiction to work on, or I have appearances to prep for--convention panels I'm moderating, lectures I'm giving, etc. This phase of the day bleeds into dinnertime and, sometimes, afterward into the evening.

6. Which piece of writing should someone who’s never read you before pick up first? 

That really depends on what kind of fiction they're looking for, but it's hard to go wrong with one of my Tor.com stories, which are all free to read at their site and handily gathered here.  If you like urban fantasy, there's my baby werewolf has two mommies story, "The Cage." If you want to sample Stormwrack there are three prequels to the Hidden Sea Tales books: "Among the Silvering Herd," "The Ugly Woman of Castello di Putti," and "The Glass Galago" respectively. If you're curious about my previous series, The Books of Chantment, "Wild Things" is a tie-in to that. Or there's a horror stand-alone, "The Color of Paradox."

7. What are you working on now? 
I am simultaneously working on two related works. One is a novella set forty years from now, in a Toronto weathering the early years of a climate crisis known as the Setback. The other is a novel set a generation later, during a period of (what's hoped to be) ecological recovery. They're near-future greenpunk, with a heavy emphasis on the future of social media, and the latter is also a first contact book. The novella, "Of Things," is very dark, but the novel, GLORY DAYS, is more optimistic.

Things of the Week: 9th September 2016

This week's things?
Stuff is bubbling under. The Proofs of Devil's Highway have arrived from Snowbooks. I've finished the opening chapters of Wolf's Hill. And some good news from my agent. Unfortunately I can't say anything about it yet (contracts have to be signed, etc, which is some way off.) Sorry about that. Nobody loves a vaguebooker. Or vagueblogger, as the case may be.

Anyway, do you fine folks know Mr Tony Schumacher? No? Then you should acquaint yourselves with both the man and his work. If you get a chance to attend one of his readings, you definitely should - he's an extremely nice bloke and a very funny guy.

Oh, and he's also a bloody good writer.

The Darkest Hour, his first novel, is set in 1946, in an alternate-history Nazi-occupied Britain. I admit it - I didn't get round to reading this for some time, as my first reaction was that this had been done before, a lot.

But The Darkest Hour is a different kettle of fish for two reasons. First of all, you can forget the cliches of evil Germans and square-chinned Resistance fighters - the cast of this novel are human beings, flawed and complex. As in other occupied countries, the resistance movements are made up either of Soviet-aligned Communists or right-wing nationalists, half of them as anti-Semitic as the Nazis themselves.

John Rossett, its protagonist, is a war hero, honoured as 'the British Lion' by the German victors he fought at Dunkirk, and now put to work as a police officer loyal to the new regime. Wracked with guilt and self-disgust, he is - like most of Tony's characters - one of the little people, on the sidelines of history, just trying to keep his head down and survive.

The turning point comes when Rossett has to aid in the deportation of Jews from London's East End - only to find the fate of one of them, a small boy, in his hands. It would be the easiest thing in the world just to hand him over to the SS - but he doesn't. Rossett sets out on a path to redemption, but the costs and consequences will be high...

Imaginative, pacey, well-written and with sharp, fresh characterisation that makes this a very different kind of 'what-if?' book, The Darkest Hour is highly recommended. A sequel, The British Lion, is also out, and Rossett's saga will continue in a third novel.

I actually read the book last year, and meant to say something, but forgot. Tony recently did a book video, and gave a couple of novels he'd enjoyed a mention - one of them being Hell's Ditch, which ended up jogging my memory. You can see it here:

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I met Cassandra Khaw at Fantasycon last year; she's an emerging writer of whom good things are already being said (and I hope to host a Lowdown with her soon.) She also wrote this piece on grief and the writing process, which I found thoughful and moving and well worth sharing.

When I was a child, he told me that room service was provided by dinosaurs; they delivered waiters through the windows. He said there were unicorns living in the jungles, magical creatures that could be lured into the open with a single Mars bars. He told me about camping stories, about getting lost in the undergrowth. He told me about fights in school, about racing dolphins in the ocean, about being adrift in sea. 

He made my universe larger.

He was my universe.

I’ve had people ask me why I write, what motivates my desire to craft fiction, what makes me want to tell stories. I never really knew. The answers changed with every conversation, every interview. But I think I know now.  

Because my father was a storyteller and because every time I wrap my audience in a thread of fresh-spun myth, I remember what it is like being a little girl again, curled against his heart, listening as he rumbled through a fresh tale. Because he taught me how to tell stories and because every time I tell a story, I feel his ghost under my words, feel the magic of that moment when the galaxy pivoted on the breath of a syllable.

Because when the words come together, he’s alive again.

(See also this post by Cate along related themes.)

Elsewhere, I encountered On Being A Late Bloomer by Kelly Robson in Clarkesworld, which struck a profound chord. Time and age have been on my mind a lot lately - this year, it'll be twenty years since I graduated from University, nineteen since I started writing seriously. Twelve years since my first book was published. Seven since my first novel. And the realisation dawns: I'm forty-two. I'm not young any more. I'm not a promising new writer or an up-and-comer. I have been in this game for nearly two decades, doing a succession of fairly crappy, low-paid jobs because the task of both climbing a corporate ladder and trying to build a writing career is just something I can't pull off. I am middle-aged, over the hump, looking at the down slope, and there are younger, newer writers coming up behind me who already seem to be making bigger names for themselves and achieving more than I have yet.

It scares me.

There's a scene in From Dusk Til Dawn where Harvey Keitel says:

Every person who... chooses the service of God as his life's work has something in common. I don't care if you're a preacher, a priest, a nun, a rabbi or a Buddhist monk. Many, many times during your life you will look at your reflection in a mirror and ask yourself: am I a fool?

It's just as true if you're a writer, or any kind of artist. That fear that you'll get to the end, be looking at a miserable and impoverished old age, and for what? No-one will know who you are, and you'll look at the stuff you've done and think "Is that it? This is crap. Mediocre. I gave so much up for this?"

But then I remind myself I'm not in competition with those other writers. There's enough room for us
all, and what counts is the work and the hope that it'll outlast you. If you can use it to pay the bills and avoid having a real job while you're at it, so much the better.

I remind myself - for instance - that Mary Wesley published her first adult novel, The Camomile Lawn, when she was 71. She went onto write ten best-sellers, selling three million copies in the last twenty years of her life. She didn't do too badly, in the end.

And I remind myself, and others, to read Kelly's column.

So don’t give up. Don’t quit. It’s never too late—not at any age. Find your own path, wherever it may lead. Being a late bloomer can be an incredible gift. It can lead to successes you never dreamed of.

And I remind myself, most of all, that none of us are done yet, however late or early in the day it might be.

Have a good weekend.