Ficlets

1. Quick! Tell us about yourself and Keeping it Real.

I’m one of those lifetime scribblers who started out filling legal pads with Star Wars fiction and stories about ponies and ended up writing for a living. That was my plan since I was at school in about 1983 and I stuck with it. Now I’m a lot older and I’m still sticking with it. I live in English suburbia, with two children and my partner. That wasn’t in my plans when I was younger. I always thought I’d go off to California and be wildly unconventional. Maybe later. I still haven’t quite given up all my other dreams either, which included being some kind of scientist, astronaut, mystical sage, femme fatale, kung fu master or doctor but I don’t see how I’ll fit all that in.

Keeping It Real is the first of a series of books which I wrote just for fun and my own entertainment. I’d gotten used to writing serious SF, and I love doing that, but at the time I started this I’d mined out that seam in my soul and was getting very tired of the sheer weight of the ideas I was working with. There’s only so much meditation on human nature and its improvability or lack thereof that I can take at a time. I was also sick of feeling like I had to flog myself to uphold my own very high expectations about how serious I was/ought to be, as if I was some kind of philosophical crusader…so I started this project for a couple of reasons. One, I wanted to reclaim my soul from its burdens and two, I wanted to kick off what I felt was a genre straitjacket in my mind between fantasy and SF. I’d recently been a Clarke [Prize, for British SF] judge and reviewed others’ books in the national press and found myself alarmed at my own snobbery on the issue of what genre was and wasn’t, should and shouldn’t be, so I decided to take the mickey out of myself. However, once I’d started writing them I forgot all about that because I was having too much fun. As it turns out I didn’t escape the crusader instinct but it looks a lot different in these stories.

It follows an ordinary young woman through shocking adventures in fabulous times as she becomes a cyborg, falls in love with an elf, fights an epic battle with a sorceress and tries to stay human all at the same time. It’s funny, in a black way. The title is heavily ironic. At the same time I am deadly serious about the subject. If I were in a literary interview I guess I might say it was a kind of anatomy of the present moment – how people see themselves and the world, the conflicts between science and other kinds of knowledge, the foolishness of our present day fractured state of mind. That’d make it sound boring though. But when you just summarise the plot, as it was summarised on the UK’s most serious book programme as ‘a girl who has been turned into a machine finds herself with the disembodied spirit of an elf necromancer living in her chest and falls in love with a rock star…’ why, now you make it seem a bit ridiculous…

2. One of the things that is delightful about Keeping it Real is how fast and loose it plays with genre boundaries. It’s fantasy and science fiction, and within each of those categories, you’ve taken what appears to be a positive delight in taking established tropes (ie., cliches) and standing then on their head. Did you intend this book to be a general genre smackdown? Or was it simply a matter of not caring about any of it and just getting on with your story?

It was supposed to stand things on their heads but I didn’t want to smack anyone, well, only myself. The titles are meant to signal that I realise I am messing with what to some people are both the sacred tropes and horrible cliches of genre and that I don’t care if they don’t like it. I don’t have much time for sacred tropes. They kill creativity. Cliches are already dead, so that’s not cruelty. So I gave them a kick up the ass, with love of course. And doing that was a return to what I’d used to do before I knew you couldn’t and shouldn’t – I’d write anything for the sake of a story.

3. Your heroine, Lila Black, is a bit of a mess—bionic, a bit glitchy, not necessarily happy about her role in the novel. As a writer, what do you do to get in the head of a character like that, and what do you need to do to keep her sympathetic and someone readers care about? In my experience it’s easy to make someone who is a complicated character, but rather harder to him or her someone you want to spend time with.

Since I’m the same as she is it’s not hard to write her. All my characters, and I think all writers’ characters, are facets of themselves so if you can bring yourself to be honest you can write them very well. Not every part of you is sympathetic but even with really difficult parts if you can examine them with a caring eye you can get readers to find it in their hearts to care too. Convincing writing is all about forging emotional links that way. Then if readers don’t like it at all – and many won’t – you know it’s not you, they’re just not able to see things your way at the time when they read it.

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

I’ll share one I learned by myself, though it’s out there in other advice places: the only person stopping you from doing whatever you want to do, is you.

5. The No-Shows, the band in Keeping it Real, have a web site and a single. That’s a pretty impressive trick for a fictional elf band. Talk about how that came about – and why (or whether) unconventional promotion like this is worth the effort.

After I wrote the first book I wanted to find a sound for the band: I think my US editor, Lou Anders, had been talking about how great it would be if we could set up a little website with a picture and a single for people to hit just to add to the fun factor. We had no money at all but I started surfing MySpace and listening to lots of tracks. I came across Cynic Guru just on a random mouseclick – but it was a mouseclick guided by the faeries (winks). As soon as I heard it I thought “that’s it, that’s the sound!” and before I could lose my nerve I wrote them a note asking them if they might be able to come up with a short tune for the project. I had no idea who any of them were and wasn’t even confident of getting a reply.

Then an email arrived from Roland telling me all about the band and who he was and I started laughing because if I’d realised how ‘famous’ he was in the first place I probably wouldn’t have had the nerve to ask anything. (They are two Americans who play in the Iceland Symphony Orchestra and two rock vets from Icelandic bands). I told him this and he said the same thing about me. They were kind enough to offer the track “Doom”, which wildly exceeded all my hopes, and Roland even remastered the whole thing, recorded a new drum line, and rerecorded some of the vocals to make them more ‘elfin’. I can’t say how grateful I am to them and their record company for helping out with such enthusiasm. I hope that a lot of people hit the site, enjoy the track and want to find out more about them.

6. Many of your books have been published first in the UK, where you live, before they were published in the US. Does having that gap of time between publications cause any sort of mental dissonance for you? As in you were already done thinking about that particular novel, and then suddenly it’s “new” again? Have you had cause to reevaluate a book at its second debut?

The gap between the UK/US doesn’t bother me any more than the actual gap between writing and publication. Once I’ve handed the final draft in to the publisher I almost instantly forget the project; my interest is in writing it and after that’s done I want to be doing the next thing. So when it’s time to do publicity or talk about the books I have to think quite hard first and reassess what the book was about and why I did it. Every time that happens I reevaluate the book and find myself having new insights about it so I usually say different things on a second debut than I said at the first. The more distance between production and comment the better for taking a clear perspective on it. I just garble if I have to talk about something I’m working on – even if I try to be straightforward about it I never manage it because the process doesn’t lend itself to being analysed until it’s over. For me at least.

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Read more from Justina Robson at her LiveJournal.