Ficlets

1. Quick! Tell us a little about yourself and Ragamuffin!

I was born in the Caribbean. I grew up on the island of Grenada until I was 9, and then moved to the British and then US Virgin Islands with my mother and sister. I came to Ohio my senior year of high school because my family lived on yachts, and the hurricane season of ‘95 was brutal and destroyed the yacht we were currently living aboard. My stepdad was from Akron, so he moved us to Ohio, of all places, to be with his family. Somehow I never figured out how to get back out of Ohio once I got here. Funny how that works.

My first novel, Crystal Rain, was what I call a Caribbean steampunk novel, set on a world that had lost its connection to Earth via a series of wormholes. They’d lost advanced technology due to destroying the wormhole, so it’s filled with airships and steam engines and brass dials. People really dug it, and many hoped I would do a direct sequel set again on that world, but I really wanted to stretch myself and shake things up a bit instead of doing the same old same old. So Ragamuffin, while ostensibly a sequel, is my Caribbean Space Opera.

Space Opera is the genre of big gosh wow adventure that I just loved reading. Space merchants trading between planets, crazy aliens, and really, really big set pieces that evoked a sense of wonder that larger than life characters run through. Star Wars is well known for being the most iconic piece of Space Opera that everyone is familiar with, and I wanted to access those same underlying and quite satisfying basic tools of the genre.

Ragamuffin is the tale of band of Caribbean space merchants, branded as pirates by a very colonial minded group of aliens who have humans in an iron fist. They meet up with our main character, Nashara, a woman more machine than human, who holds within her the secret to breaking free of the domination humans are under. It’s my attempt to throw back the curtains and show the worlds that exist outside of the single world that I wrote about in the first book.

It’s a tale about colonialism, imperialism, subjugation, freedom fighters, with a heck of a lot of fireworks. And for the geek in me, I actually have a rational, scientific reason for a hero to need a massive mini-gun in a fire fight.

2. You were born and raised in the Caribbean before moving to the United States in your teens. Leaving aside (for the moment) how your Caribbean background manifests itself in your writing, what impact did going from living in one very distinct culture to living in another very distinct culture have on your writing, both as you were developing as a writer, and now as you work in the field professionally?

Well, I am a science fiction writer, and I feel that that fundamental experience I had in coming from one culture to another allows me to think outside the box a little bit more easily than others might. Coming to the US for the first time was like coming to a futuristic alien city. The massive freeways and bridges, towering buildings (I’d never had a reason to be in an elevator until I was in high school visiting the US) and vast landscape that just didn’t stop going on was wildly different.

I notice the many of my favorite SF/F writers seem to have had some seminal experience in another culture, and that their work seems to have more staying power for me as a result. Arthur C. Clarke’s fascination with Sri Lanka, India, and the South Pacific and other parts of the world infuses some of my favorite novels of his. I’m still a huge fan of Corwainer Smith due to his Chinese influences, his stories still read really fresh to this day even though written 60+ years ago, it seems that writers who are aware of different perspectives are able to really re-imagine worlds and peoples.

Some might say that science fiction is often a fiction about change. Often technological, often social. I think I’m able to embrace change rather quickly while still holding to my core individuality as a result of the various life changes. I lived in post-US invasion culture, a tourist island, on boats, and then finally in the corn growing heartland. I have an appreciation and familiarity with change. It just seems natural.

3. You’ve written before and at length about your passion and love for Caribbean culture and how it infuses into your fiction. Talk about it a little more—and talk about what you do as a writer to balance your desire for setting the scene in a certain milieu and simply getting on with the story. How much scene setting is ultimately required?

I love the islands. Part of it is due to the fact that you really don’t know how much you love your home until you leave it. And then you realize what a wonderful place it was. The Caribbean is my heart. Half my family is rooted there, my biological father is Grenadian, it’s in my blood. I grew up hearing dialects, eating the food, hearing the stories of Anancy and other folk tales. I listened to Calypso and Reggae growing up, watched carnival, and most of the people around me were Caribbean or various travelers passing through. A mobile international community.

But whenever I read fiction set in the islands, it was often a tourist’s look at them. Think of James Bond in the Caribbean, it’s this sort of thing where the western hero visits the islands and looks around at them, visits a beach, gets some nice drinks, admires the beach babes, and has an adventure. I always thought it would be cooler if I could write about a dreadlocked local James Bond who outsmarts the mysterious villain hiding out on the island. I’d seen the islands used in fiction a few times, but when I read Bruce Sterling’s Islands in The Net, it was the first book I read where Caribbean islanders had a big part to play in the narrative and were on the stage in their own right. I was so inspired by that book I decided right then and there I would fix a grievous mistake of Bruce’s: only keeping the novel focused on the Caribbean for a third of the book.

There is an interesting balance for setting scenes. Obviously the books are adventures, and there are spaceships and aliens and plots, so the trick is not overloading the reader. I try to slip things in there like food, and so on, but mainly the things that come across are the people. My main characters are often Caribbean in background. They often speak Caribbean dialect and share some of the same culture (for example Pepper is a popular recurring character, a dreadlocked mercenary with cyborg parts and a propensity for shaking up people’s lives).

The dialect has been the most interesting part of my faithfulness to my background. I do not render words phonetically, like Mark Twain or James Herriot. But like Twain, when challenged on his use of dialect, I do believe in trying to replicate the language and voices of the people I heard around me growing up as best I could. As a result I use some Caribbean words, and phrases, and the unique grammar structure that comes from it being a creole born out of the linguistics conflicts of former slaves coming into learning English hundreds of years ago. It’s watered down a great deal, but for many this is the most strikingly Caribbean aspect of the novel.

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

Polite, professional persistence will take you far. Persistence to keep submitting, persistence to keep writing, persistence to keep trying to improve your writing. I’ve kept my head down and been working really hard for a long time due to that advice. Sadly, some of the people who gave me that advice are not writing anymore, they gave up. Ray Bradbury is one of my heroes because it took him 500 rejections to get his first story into print, and look where he ended up! When I started out I got hundreds of rejections on my short fiction before I broke in. I think to date I have almost 600, although over the last few years I haven’t gotten too many.

Every once in a while I hear editors talk to each other about a writer who had been submitting stories and then stopped, and that the editors felt that writer was getting so close to perfecting their craft enough to break in soon. What an unknown tragedy.

5. You recently made the jump from a part-time writer with a non-writing related job to being a full-time writer. Talk a little about that transition. What advice would you give writers thinking about making that same jump?

I spent five years working as an instructional technology manager at the small university I graduated from. It started out as a night shift thing, which meant as long as I got what they asked me to do done, my time was my own. A few years after starting I ended up having responsibility for running the whole place. It got draining, and even though I wasn’t paid much, there’s always that pressure about doing the responsible thing, keeping the stable job, keeping benefits. In early ‘06 they crunched the budget and thought it would be nifty to end my contract and combine my job with someone else who had two or three combined jobs already, and I suddenly had six months left. I decided I wasn’t going to let one person ever have that much control over my future again!

That persistence and hard work thing was a really important key to that jump. For two months I read every online bulletin board, ad, job posting, and lead I could find and applied to everything. I basically made the leap of faith that by summer, I was going to be my own boss, one way or another, even if it meant living off a line of credit I’d set up. I was just that determined. I was even in the middle of setting up hiretobiasbuckell.com which was a website resume, a video interview with me, and a promise of a $4,000 finders fee to the person who set me up with the most interesting job based on my qualifications. Luckily I didn’t even have time to set up the site, things started happening and I was able to leave my job four months early. I still have the domain though, you know, in case…

The best and worst thing is that you are your own boss. You don’t have anyone setting your task list and when things are due, but that means you have to stay on top of all that, even if you’re not motivated. Finding ways to boss yourself around are important, or you’ll suddenly find yourself behind deadline and scrambling to keep up. The lack of accountability and strict schedule can cause confusion and stress around you, but I tend to do better on my own terms. I keep late hours and nap at odd intervals, and it de-stresses my life to know that if I’m overwhelmed by everything, I can just go take a nap in the room across from my office (better known as my bedroom) without anyone questioning my work ethic.

If anything, I’ve come to realize I’m a latent workoholic, and learning to slow down and stop and hang out at home has been a bit of an adjustment. There are always more projects that could be started, emails to be replied to, and so on.

6. You’re a writer with more than just active Web presence: you’ve spearheaded initiatives to help other writers get active online, like SFNovelists.com and taking an active role in the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America’s “skunk works” initiative. Why be so engaged with the Web – and engaged in helping other writers? Aren’t they your competition, after all?

I owe a lot to my own web presence. At TobiasBuckell.com I get a thousand people a day passing through listen to me babbling on about my life as a writer and pointing out whatever I find interesting. My readers there have been responsible for helping get the word out about my books and me, and a lot of good things have come from my blogging. So I do sort of talk to other writers about the benefits of these tools.

SFNovelists.com is something I’m quite proud of. Internally, we’re a group of 60 or so novelists who chat via list serv about the business and keep anything of note written down on a password locked internal wiki. It’s been incredible learning from other writers in the field. The public side of the group is for our readers. SFNovelists.com has a main site that grew out of some things I felt a writer’s organization should do with its main site for its authors, which is to promote its authors and their books. The main site has original daily posts by a different author each day, as well as a sidebar showing the latest blogposts the authors have made on their own personal sites. On another sidebar are the latest books the members have published, and that can be ‘flipped’ over to reveal a list of random links to free samples of books, whole short stories, and even whole books for readers to get into. To the bottom, a random featured author bio and picture, and then links to video and audio done by the members. And the reason I set this all up is I believe that people can, in a positive manner, work together.

I don’t think publishing is a zero sum game. We’re all creating something out of nothing, and I always think many hands make light work. Creating places for readers to find new authors is a great thing. Via SFNovelists.com, we’re hoping to lure people there with the promise of original posts by some very cool authors, as well as a centralized place to find cool novelists and their work, samples, and books. I think ‘paying it forward’ is always a good thing. Other writers aren’t my competition, they’re fellow travelers and good friends whose companionship I need.

After all, I work in an office in my house alone all day. I need the interaction!

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Read Tobias Buckell’s blog here. Also, check out the first third of Ragamuffin online.