Like a Virgin: A Conversation with Jayme Lynn Blaschke | ||||||||||
An interview with Rick Klaw | ||||||||||
February 2006 | ||||||||||
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No one was seeing it, so I started
looking for stateside markets that would be interested in this. I had something published in the Science
Fiction Chronicle, Black Gate ran my Gene Wolfe interview, which to this day it is the
only interview that has ever appeared in Black Gate. Basically, Interzone had a Q & A
format, and that is really a pure, straightforward unadulterated form, and as far as conveying the message and the
facts of the subject, it's really good. Other magazines had adopted kind of a more feature style, where "The author
comes and I was sitting down here and the author sat down looking fabulous. He was wearing... drinking a mint julep
and he sat back and had a Cuban cigar. The smoke wafted towards the ceiling and the fan spun and the breeze came
in through the window and I was suddenly taken back to my childhood in Omaha..." That kind of thing and that's not
me. I can't write that way...
The one email interview
I did that was fantastic, it wasn't easy on me, but Samuel Delaney, Chip Delaney, he does not feel comfortable
speaking. He has a stutter, a stammer, and he also doesn't feel like he can quickly come up with thoughts, that
he expresses all of his thoughts through his writing, and that's the way he feels is the best way for him to
express himself accurately. I'm not going to argue that. He's done far more interviews with him than I will
ever do with him. That's allowable. But after the fact, after he had answered all my question and got 'em
back, he called me on the phone and we spend as much time on the phone over the course of several days going
back and forth and discussing his answers. So it is really an interesting hybrid, where he discusses, "Well,
how does this sound?" The man is incredibly precise. Not one word goes down that he did not want. He's very,
very, focused on the meaning and the precision of his words and his answers, and that's reflected. It was an
interesting experience, and I really enjoyed it.
A tangent to that: A couple of years ago at Armadillocon...Was it
Armadillocon? Maybe it was ConDFW. Lois McMaster Bujold was the guest. I've been acquainted with Lois for quite a
number of years, because I'm good friends with her best friend, Lillian Stewart Carl. Lillian's a writer from
the Dallas/Fort Worth area who grew up with Lois and they went to high school together. And so I've been
acquainted with Lois, but never really interviewed her, and it just so happened that the opportunity
arose. So we're sitting down, we're fairly comfortable with each other, and just start discussing different
aspects of her books and how certain ways with her Miles Vorkosigan books she has written herself into a
corner because Miles is a character who has always been the underdog, tilting at windmills and challenging
authority and in her latest book, he is the authority. He has more power than anyone else that he's going
to come across, and how does this change the dynamics? We're going back and forth and she acknowledges
that this is a problem as far as plotting goes and character development.
I need to back up a little,
because we couldn't really find anyplace that was quiet to have the interview, so we went up into the Con
Suite. It was pretty empty at the time. We're talking and we start noticing that it's not empty any
more. The Con Suite has filled up and no one was actually looking at us. All of the people were sitting in
their chairs, but their chairs had been scooched back to the couch and were back to back with the couch that
we were sitting on, the sofa, and they were all leeeeeaning back, and you could see their ears stretching
back and everyone was just completely hushed and was kind of like sitting on the floor and sitting behind
the table. We never even noticed that the crowd was gathering, that all these people were gathering and
it became almost like another track of programming, just this quick interview with Lois Bujold. That was a
lot of fun: it was intimate, but also a group participation.
I sent him an email
through his web site saying, "Okay, I see that you're going to be in Austin doing a book signing next week. Can
we get together and have an interview?" He emailed me back within five minutes saying, "No, because they have
me on a flight out right after that. There's no way I'm going to have any time. But I'm sitting in my hotel room
in Milwaukee right now doing nothing until tomorrow. Here's my phone number. Why don't you call me and we'll do
it now?"
So I had an interview within like 30 minutes of the word going out that this guy is the new comics
writer for this title. I was on the phone with him and conducted the interview. That was almost surreal, the
way that one came about. It was like a week later before anyone else contacted him. That was a lot of fun. Of
course, the Harlan Ellison one, because that was my first interview, and I think I acquitted myself well as
could be expected, maybe a little better than most people would have bet on. Looking back now on it I see
things that I could do better, questions I could have asked that I didn't, but I think I did a real good
job with that. I really like the Patricia Anthony interview, because that goes off in a lot of different,
unexpected directions. She talks about her time in Brazil where ball lightning was floating through the
rain forest during a tremendous tropical storm and how the lightning struck this old plantation house they
lived in and polarized all of the electric equipment in the house. It would shock you any time you touched
anything, so they had to wrap copper wiring around everything and ground it outside. How she grew up in San
Antonio and there was a tremendous explosion at one of the air force bases that was basically a nuclear
accident that was somewhat covered up.
Really fascinating things that I had no idea were going to come
up, yet that organic nature of interviewing, as different tangents present themselves, you're able to
follow it, and it was fantastic. Of course and then someone like Jack Williamson, where you get to sit down
with a legend in the field who literally helped to create the genre as to what it is now. I won't ever
forget it. We're talking about his stories, and he's like, "Oh, this one story." "What story?" And he pulls
out this deck of, like, trading cards and starts going through them. "Okay, here it is," and he hands it to
me and it's the cover of a 1932 Weird Tales or something, and it's a deck of trading cards
that had the cover of every magazine he had ever...
I would think Stanislaw Lem would
be very interesting, simply because he isn't accessible... as physically accessible to the west... and he's
got a history. He made some enemies back in the 60s during the height of communism condemning the quality
of science fiction produced in America because we're all bourgeois capitalists. He made a lot of enemies,
and he deserved to make a lot of enemies. I'm curious as to how much of that was the communist party machinery
and how much he really bought into the ideology, or where he stands today. This man is undeniably a major,
major science fiction writer, easily, easily the biggest writer to ever come out of the eastern bloc. But
nowadays you have a new generation, like Zoran Zivkovic...
Maybe more so, it has also shown me how every writer's
different. You always hear that, you always discuss it. Ask a hundred writers how they write and you're
going to get a hundred different answers. There's several different camps that the writers fall into: you have
the ones who religiously outline and are very structured and disciplined when they write, and then you have
the other ones that are more organic and they just kind of let it sprawl out on the page and see where it
goes, and then you have the writers who re-write constantly, you have the writers who write it correctly the
first time so they don't have to re-write it, you have the whole gamut.
As a writer, it shows me the big
picture that I know I'm not doing it wrong. It makes me think sometimes when I come up with a project I want
to challenge myself. What if I try and do something like this person did from behind the scenes this way
when they discuss something? Maybe I can try that technique or trick here. On the macro level it probably
hasn't had much of an effect, but at the micro or nano level, I've tweaked and done stuff that hopefully
affected me more as an editor at Revolution SF. [Editor's note: This interview was conducted before
Jayme left his editorial post at RevolutionSF.]
When I get a submission that's good or not so good, that has
something in it, I think I'm better able to recognize specifically what the flaws are in a piece, if it is
worth addressing, or, specifically, how to address it. Because sometimes a story will come in that's flawed,
but if you necessarily correct the flaws, then that would probably undermine what was appealing about the
story in the first place. It's kind of odd, because I have a little more flexibility with Revolution SF than
I would were I editor of Asimov's or Fantasy & Science Fiction with the types
of stories I can do. I can take a flyer on something that probably wouldn't make it in one of the other
magazines, but then again I turn around and I get something like "Leonardo's Hands" from Steve Gould and Rory
Harper, which is a phenomenal synthesis of horror, fantasy, it's also kind of a caper, there's a little bit
of noirish... noir in there kind of all mixed together and it's a strange story, but it's really cool. It
has some of the most phenomenal imagery I've ever seen in kind of a disturbing horror piece, but it doesn't
really fit anywhere. It might go to Weird Tales or something like that, but it's not really
that suited for a lot of things, but it's a great story and it deserves a home, and it floated around
forever, for a decade, at least, and they'd gotten a lot of responses of, "Well, this is a really neat
story, but, you know, it's not right for this market. It's not right for this market." And I'm so
phenomenally jazzed that I get stories like this.
I was a finalist; I did not win my category... or my
quarter or whatever. I believe it was Scott Nicholson who won my quarter with a story that was very
different than mine, very very much so. He had done a story that was kind of an atmospheric, low-key horror
piece that was about basically a living city: a city had a presence and a spirit and everything, and it was
very much a mood piece that was very well done. Mine was a rural fantasy, as opposed to urban fantasy.
But it affected me as a writer, mainly, and this is most
of the people I spoke to, it's a week long workshop you get to go to. They take everyone in there, put you
up in a hotel conference center and at the time it was Algis Budrys and Dave Wolverton led the workshop
every day and they brought in pretty much a non-stop parade of guest authors to lead in the workshops. I
met Tim Powers and his wife there; that was a lot of fun; very interesting perspectives on writing there,
Kevin Anderson and Rebecca Moesta, they were there. And Jack Williamson came in. They had a big birthday
party for him. I've got a great picture of me and Jack, both in tuxedos, like two swingin' dudes out on
the town having a good time. Just the intense influx of knowledge and experience that comes into that
workshop. It's very different from, say, Clarion or Sycamore Hill, or Turkey City because these are all
established, professional writers and everything and this is a new writers group, even though a lot of
the writers there had published experience, they were still new writers, so the approach was somewhat different.
Interviewing became a siren song to me, to an extent, because I
reached the point where practically any interview I did would sell somewhere for actual cash money, and so, you
know, struggling writer starting out, even though I had a day job, that check coming in the mail is very
attractive. But interviewing is time consuming. It's not particularly difficult from a physical standpoint; it's
just an incredible time sink, if you're going to do it right. I started doing that more and more and more, and
my other writing suffered. I didn't write short stories. I stopped working on my novel entirely. I've got several
novels in various stages of decay, but this one I keep referring to, that one is fairly well-structured and has
a chance of being something other than dreck. When I was 17 years old I wrote my first novel, completed my
first novel, about 90,000 words, and, oh my God, is it awful. I still have a really crummy dot matrix printout
of it buried somewhere in my files. I take it out every so often just to remind myself how bad it could be. That
one can never be published.
[in unison] ...stays in Matamoros!
Perhaps best know for the popular column "Geeks With Books" for SF Site, Rick Klaw's critical essays, reviews, and other observations were collected in Geek Confidential: Echoes From the 21st Century, published by MonkeyBrain, Inc. Previous Klaw interviews have appeared in SF Site, Science Fiction Weekly, RevolutionSF, Conversations With Texas Writers, and Fantastic Metropolis. |
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