Ficlets

1. Quick! Tell us a little about yourself and about Command Decision.

I’m a sweet, harmless, gentle soul who writes adventure stories only because she never had any. Seriously. Do not look at the sword. It’s a sweet, harmless, gentle sword…. OK, OK. Married, one grown son, two horses, a cat, and about 80 acres. Interested in most things. Loves classical music, homemade bread, dark chocolate, Kalamata olives, clear-running streams, horses…

Command Decision, the new book, is the fourth volume of Vatta’s War…a science fiction series about…well…a lot of things. A great trading family nearly destroyed by enemies they didn’t know they had and now fighting to survive and recover their economic base. Ky Vatta, the “different” one, who flunked out of her home world’s military academy and had to work in the family business (she was sure it would be boring) but after the attack that killed her parents is trying to find and destroy the enemy. Ky’s cousin Stella Vatta (the family beauty), who is taking over the business end of things and discovering that she is more capable than she knew. The man they both know, Rafe…son of the CEO of a vast interstellar communications monopoly, once a despised remittance man believed to be too corrupt to live on the same planet as his family, but now also his family’s savior.

2. At a recent science fiction convention, I heard you speak about how writing for a small local newspaper eventually led to your current career as an award-winning author. Could you recount that path now? I think it would be very useful for folks to see how a writing career is not always a straight line but can contain any number of surprising twists and turns.

While sending out stories and article proposals to places that didn’t want them (sigh!) I noticed that the woman who had been writing the local chatty news column for our town in the county weekly had retired.With prodding from my husband, I applied…and for the next something-many years wrote a weekly column. Initially I was told not to cover hard news (school board, city council) but to cover “community” news – any local happenings people would be glad to see in the paper. They imposed a word limit – 600-800 words – and there was that weekly deadline (always absolute in the case of newspapers.)

Meeting that deadline week after week, and learning how much news could be crammed into 800 words (or, how much readable and interesting padding could be stretched to that length in weeks when real news was limited to rumor unfit to print!) taught me a lot. First, it taught me that someone would pay for my writing…no one ever had, so finding out that they would was a boost. And the payment, though not much, provided typing paper and ribbons (and later, computer paper and printer ribbons) for my fiction writing.

Second, a lot of fiction skills can be exercised in nonfiction, especially in journalism. People enjoy reading about themselves, but they enjoy it even more if you learn to capture their character, not just their name. A local news column might cover four to six topics…stringing them together into an interesting read means learning to write tight, but easy-to-read, transitions. Even the smallest news story has a plot of sorts, and rewards storytelling skills.

A local news writer has a different relationship with readers than a book writer; the locals were always happy to tell me what they thought, what they found interesting, what I should’ve written about instead. Knowing what catches readers’ interest (other than broad general topics like “horses” or “sea battles” or “romance”) is pure gold to any writer who wants to stay in this game.

So writing for the paper supported my other writing financially (not me, of course, but the paper/ink/ribbons/etc.) and gave me weekly feedback on how ordinary people reacted to my writing…what they understood, what they didn’t, which columns they liked best and told me they’d clipped out and pinned up. I was able to practice specific writing skills in small, convenient chunks that didn’t take time from the other things I was doing. I learned about the “business” end of writing to some extent, as well: the need to make those deadlines, to stick to those word limits, see things from the editor’s or publisher’s side of the fence, not just the writer of perfect diamond-studded golden paragraphs.

3. With your Vatta’s War series of books, you’ve achieved one of the goals for many writers: A successful franchise with characters readers really like and want to know more about. Are there downsides to this sort of series, too? And four books in, what do you do to keep both the events and the characters fresh?

A possible downside is that publisher and readers both may want more of the same, when you’re getting tired of it. So far, I’ve been able to jump from one thing to another before I hit a personal wall.

As for keeping things fresh…for me, that depends on allowing the main characters to be very complex from the beginning – which means that their actions, reactions, and interactions are not entirely predictable…they have enough depth to throw the writer, as well as the reader, surprises. For instance, Ky and Stella Vatta are cousins, each with the kind of family identity that families impose (the smart one, the pretty one, the strong one, the clown, etc.) Yet – as is true in real families – the family “story” about them isn’t the whole truth. Neither is “just” the family definition. Each has seen the other through that filter, but now they’re finding out new things about each other as events demand talents that weren’t in the family-centered identity. And each must face some revelation about self that undermines her self-image at a very basic level and then redefine herself. Add in a chaotic time in their culture, and you have the possibility of many different kinds of interactions.

It helps to see the universe not in black and white or shades of gray, but in full living color. Gray bumping into gray can only produce another shade of gray, but once you put vividly multicolored characters into conflict, you can end up with an episode of green striped with red, or blue with yellow and purple spots, or some other odd (or even familiar) combination. On the world-building end, either a formal background or some serious reading in both history and cultural anthropology help a writer create believable societies. Our single planet has many different cultures, each with its own traditions—its own clothes, foods, songs, dances, ways of defining gender and family relationships and insider/outsider mythology. Our single planet provides opportunities ranging from those of a rich kid from a developed nation to an orphaned infant with AIDS in a hut in Africa. A complex, richly imagined story universe needs to have some hint of similar complexity, even if the characters are not dealing with all of it (any more than you or I deal with all the complexity of the world we live in.)

4. Share a piece of writing advice you’ve been given.

In a workshop given by Austin Writers’ League (now Writers’ League of Texas), Howard Waldrop gave us several pieces of advice. The first was, “Don’t write a fantasy trilogy.” I had already blown that one, since the completed Deed of Paksenarrion was in my closet at that moment. But the advice that made my first fiction sale was “Send your work to an editor whose choices you already like.” Like many other novices, I’d been sending my work to editors whose choices I didn’t much like, on the grounds that they needed my contribution. I was wrong; Howard was right. My next submissions sold.

5. Your Nebula-Award winning novel The Speed of Dark is inspired to some extent on aspects of your real life. Talk a little bit about that and what it meant to have such a personal book come away with a major award.

The Speed of Dark has an autistic protagonist…and our son is autistic. The character is not, except in being autistic, much like our son (Lou, in the book, is a less exuberant personality), but I could not have written the book without the daily, hourly, minute-by-minute experience of working with our son. Parents of autists have at least twice as much experience, per year of a child’s life, as professionals…because we’re with the child 24/7, 365 days a year. I home-schooled him for years, because our small-town school system did not have what he needed—or the money to provide it. In addition, having an autistic child resulted in my meeting other autists, and families of autists.

I still can’t really describe how wonderful it was to have this book, of all my books, achieve award status…and, on top of that, to be chosen as the community-reads book in several cities and universities. The book is – naturally – very close to my heart. Having readers who get it, all of it, the deep levels as well as the surface story, gives me chills.

6. In your life you’ve been a journalist, a marine, a paramedic among other things. You have a degree in biology, you’ve homeschooled your child, and you have numerous hobbies and enthusiasm. The obvious question here would be “when did you ever find time to write,” but the non-obvious question is what impact would it have had on your writing if you did not do – or had not done – all of these things in your life?

First, let’s make it clear that I didn’t do all those things (or various other things) at once! And as for “finding time to write”—you know the answer to that one: you don’t find time to write, you make time to write. For years, I did not write seriously…I didn’t make the time. Now I do.

But more seriously: everything any writer does influences the writing. Sometimes it’s obvious: no autistic son, no novel about an autistic protagonist. No military background, no military-based stories. Sometimes what experience does is keep you from making stupid mistakes…my time as an EMS volunteer is what keeps me from making stupid mistakes about injuries. The history degree has kept me from making stupid mistakes about history; the biology degree, from making stupid mistakes about all sorts of living things.

If you want to write about someone riding a horse across country, it helps to have ridden a horse across country; if your character bakes bread, it helps if you’ve baked bread. Journalists sometimes do things (learn to fly an airplane, climb a mountain, work a certain occupation) just to be able to write about it from a fresh perspective, but fiction writers can flavor their work with whatever experience they’ve had.

So if I hadn’t been in the Marines, if I hadn’t ever done CPR, if I hadn’t ever ridden a horse, or made bread or slogged through mud, or camped out in the snow…I’d have had to depend on others’ descriptions of those things. I’d have had to work harder to make it read “real”. Conversely, if I’d had any of thousands of experiences I haven’t had, then I would have had even more experiences of my own to play with. Everything a writer does – every experience – can inform and enrich the writing.

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Read an excerpt of Moon’s latest novel, Command Decision.