A few weeks ago I had the great pleasure to be interviewed by the fine gentlemen at The Dragon Page, and today that interview has been posted. Dragon Page is an awesome SF/F podcast, so check it out.

What’s interesting about this interview (at least for me) is that they dug a little deeper into the two hard questions everybody asks about I Am Not a Serial Killer: instead of just commenting on the similarity to Dexter, for example, we talk about whether I knew about Dexter beforehand (I didn’t), and how that series has affected my sales and career. Then we talk about the supernatural elements, and why I made them a surprise, and how that seems to polarize the audience (some people love it, others hate it).

It was a fun interview to do, and we ended up with a lot of good, meaty stuff. Go have a listen.

Here’s the problem: Mary Robinette Kowal is too good. Not only is she famous, and gorgeous, and brilliant, she’s also a really good writer. This cannot be allowed. I tolerated it before, when it was just award-winning short stories, but her new book Shades of Milk and Honey is too much: clever and simple at the same time, with an unerring sense of historical yes-that’s-exactly-right-ness, and a mastery of craft and form belying the fact that she, like her characters, pretty much created the form out of nothing. To write a book I enjoyed this much, in a manner so talented I could never hope to recreate it, can only be considered a personal insult. Next time I see you, Mary, you’re dead.

Shades of Milk and Honey is a Regency fantasy—a sort of subgenre mash-up of Austen and Tolkien, positing a world where affluent young ladies go to balls and takes walks in the country and try to get handsome, wealthy bachelors to woo them, while simultaneously weaving complex magic spells. Where most Regency fantasies fall down is in introducing a story too filled with swashbuckling adventure, which works great in most fantasy but clashes brassily with the subdued social conflicts of the Regency style. Kowal’s story works—and this is going to sound backward—by making the arcane mundane. Her magic system, an intriguing power of illusion, is used in precisely the way a group of Austenites would use it: as an art form for accomplished young ladies (and the occasional traveling artist) to practice on long summer days, beautifying their homes and amusing wealthy patrons. The conflicts in the story are similarly authentic to the Regency style: magic or no magic, these girls want to get married, and that’s going to require a lot of dinner parties, social balls, and witty dialogue.

The simple story is straight out of Jane Austen, by which I mean that it feels like it could have been written by her despite being primarily new and original. Two sisters, one young and gorgeous, one well into her 20s (very Old Maid-ish by Regency standards) spend a summer chastely fantasizing about the various men in the neighborhood, including both standard Austen tropes (a wealthy landowner and a handsome captain) and original ones, such as a gruff artist specializing in “glamour,” Kowal’s intriguing system of illusory magic. One of the great pleasures of the book is how she weaves the magic into everyday life, keeping a consistent Regency vibe; one of the neighbor girls, for example, uses glamour to improve her beauty artificially, resulting in inordinate fatigue and the occasional fainting spell which, naturally, attracts even more male attention. Glamour is used on the fly, both to enhance music and to create mini portrait-plays called tableau vivants, and it can also be made permanent, adding wind or light or other special effects to the ubiquitous paintings and murals. Our heroine and narrator is, of course, an expert with glamour, and uses it to impress the men, comfort the women, and discover the truth behind the inevitable bounder who tries to take advantage of her naïve younger sister. By the end of the book love has been won and lost, ties have been made and broken, and questions have been resolved in a way both true to Austen yet surprisingly Kowal-specific.

What few faults the book has are minor. In capturing the feel of Austen she has hewn too closely, in parts, to the specific conflicts of Pride and Prejudice; if you’re familiar with that work you will recognize the core premise immediately, and when the villain arrives you will know it several hundred pages before any of the characters. I was also far more curious about the cultural impacts of the magic system than the book allowed for (for example, since glamour can alter temperature, how has society changed by the addition of cheap, convenient refrigeration long before its advent in the real world?), but I recognize that these kind of questions are well beyond the scope of a book about subtle summer romance. The good news is, you know everything about the magic that you need to know, and the story, while beginning initially similar to Pride and Prejudice, diverges hugely by chapter three or four, and becomes a thing wholly its own.

What I liked best of all about the novel, in the end, was it’s incredible artistic accuracy—the story, the characters, and especially the language are exactly, perfectly Regency. In many ways the book works as a historical thought experiment: it’s more than just “a fantasy book in a Jane Austen style,” it’s “the book Jane Austen would have written if she’d written a fantasy.” Word choice, diction, even the cadences of the sentences are dead-on for the period. It’s really kind of amazing, and adds immensely to the Regency feel Kowal creates.

Good fantasy is hard. Good historical fiction (my favorite genre) is hard. Good period fantasy, combining the best of both styles, is a holy grail very rarely achieved. With Shades of Milk and Honey, Mary Robinette Kowal has found that holy grail and made it shine.

And for this insult, she will pay.

I’m just finishing my book about mental illness (schizophrenia specifically), and we’ve been dealing with some hardcore issues of mental illness in my family the last few months (clinical depression), and all I can say is wow. Just…wow. I don’t understand how anyone can crawl out of that dark, depressive hole, and yet many people do, and the people I know who deal with depression and overcome it are some of my new heroes. The people who don’t, or can’t, are some of the most tragic figures I know.

Depression is one of the most insidious things I’ve ever encountered–your brain decides that its going to start interpreting good things as bad things, or to brush good things aside with the certainty that they don’t matter because life is all bad anyway. Depression is a disease that specifically combats its own treatment, because one of its core symptoms is the belief that nothing you do will matter, so why bother getting treated or taking medication? It’s like if cancer had the side effect of making you never want to get better. That’s not something most of us can even understand–a disease that changes not your body, but the way you see the world. It’s like catching a cold that makes you speak another language; it doesn’t make any sense at all. And yet it’s frighteningly common, and every single person reading this post probably has a friend or family member (or yourself) who struggles with it every day.

We see those commercials for depression medication all the time on TV, especially late at night (when, I suppose, depressed people are still watching TV), but how many times do we actually listen to them? One of the symptoms they list is “thoughts of suicide,” and that’s just about the most frightening thing I’ve ever heard–a disease that can make you want to kill yourself. How do you get out of that? How do you take that first step and say “even though I’m completely convinced that life is horrible and nothing I do will ever matter, I’m going to do something anyway”? Seriously–that’s one of the most heroic acts of will I can even imagine. It’s like climbing Mount Everest just to get out of bed in the morning. The people who fight back against depression and overcome it are absolutely amazing.

The family member who sparked this post has not made that decision. He has retreated from the world so thoroughly that sometimes I think he can’t possibly go any further, and then he does, and it’s just heartbreaking. He’s so cut off from life that he barely even eats anymore, and the doctor who most recently examined him said “when it gets this bad we can still treat him, but only if he wants to be treated, and the mortality rate is about 35%. He’d have a better chance of surviving Leukemia.” And as terrible as that sounds, that’s just par for the course in his inner landscape–every news he hears is that bad, because his brain convinces him that it is. When we brought him home from the hospital he walked away without a word, actively running away from every attempt to help him. I just don’t understand it.

I think it’s about the most horrifying thing in the world.

I spoke at a Teen Writer’s Conference in Ogden on Saturday, and it was awesome; it was the standard Story Structure presentation I’ve been doing everywhere this year, and once gain it served me well. I think I should just put together one really good presentation per year, and then reuse it at all the various cons I go to. Anyway, it’s a pretty funny presentation (if I do say so myself), and the kids loved it, and I think they learned a lot. And then I opened it up for questions at the end, and one of the very first was: “Are you just naturally this funny, or do you have to try really hard?”

Kudos for the most intriguing question that presentation has ever produced.

The best answer, of course, is: “Nothing I’ve said has been intentionally funny, and it hurts my feelings when you laugh at me.” What I actually said was “Being funny is really hard,” which is not a very fun prospect, but it’s arguably the truest thing I told them all day. I consider myself a pretty funny guy on the fly, able to make silly comments that make people laugh, but books and tweets and blog posts and powerpoint presentations are a lot harder. I don’t consider myself a very funny tweeter, for example, though I try. Conveying humor through writing is easier in some ways because you can control your own set-up, but it’s a lot harder in other ways because a controlled set-up can easily feel false, and (an even bigger issue) writing does not easily replicate the tone of voice and posture and all of the other things that make live humor so effective.

Obviously voice and posture aren’t an issue for a powerpoint presentation, because it’s the combination of writing and stand-up; you get the best of both worlds, essentially, plus you get to throw in images as well for a nice visual aid. At one point in my presentation, talking about Try/Fail cycles, I show a picture of the kidnappers from The Princess Bride–Vizzini, Inigo, and Fezzik, all in a row–and that picture gets more laughs all by itself than anything I do or say anywhere else in the presentation.

But the point I’m very poorly making here is that being funny takes a lot of work. If you’ve seen my presentation more than once (poor soul) you know that not only do I make the same jokes every time, I make them in the same way every time–that’s not because I’m unimaginative, it’s because I spent hours preparing that thing and practicing it and getting the words and the timing just right for maximum effect. My books are the same way: they’re not pure humor, by any means, but they have a lot of humor in them, and I spend more time honing the funny stuff than I do the scary stuff.

Jokes and scares are actually kind of similar in some ways: you have to create a certain tone and atmosphere to get the audience ready; you have to create a “standard,” so to speak, to establish a baseline of normality, and then you have to break that standard in a way that produces a specific reaction: a laugh or a fright. And to make it effective, you have to do it in a way where the audience can’t see what you’re doing, and it all flows naturally, and they’re not sure if you’re just naturally funny or you have to try really hard.

Back in the early days of March I started a blog series about the process of writing my first sequel, Mr. Monster, which had just debuted in England and which US audiences will get in October. I had just enough time to write the first two posts in that series before my computer broke on an international flight, and I missed a full month of blogging, and then blah blah blah I never finished the series.

Isn’t it about time I got back to it?

I began the series by talking about the three main problems of sequelhood: 1) you need to be the same, but different, 2) you need to correctly identify what the audience liked about the first work, and 3) your protagonist needs a new character arc as good or better than the first one. Today I want to talk about that third piece, because it was one of my main focuses when I down to write Mr. Monster.

Let’s consider, for a moment, Spider-man. In the first movie, Peter Parker is a young kid, still in high school, struggling with a lot of really big problems: he’s in love with a girl who doesn’t care about him, everyone at school hates him, and his primary father figure is murdered–and that’s not even counting the crazy new superpowers he doesn’t understand, or the insane flying supervillain trying to murder everyone in New York. That’s a lot for any kid to deal with, and it sets up a lot of really interesting character arcs for a very multi-dimensional character. By the end of the movie Peter has grown up, gotten a job, overcome his feelings of inadequacy, won the girl (sort of), and learned some difficult lessons about responsibility. It’s a classic coming-of-age story, but done well and made to feel very fresh. And then it made a jillion dollars, and the studio wanted a sequel, and…crap, now what?

Peter Parker ended the first movie with more or less everything he needed; he had resolved his major issues and learned his major lessons, so where else was there to go? His arc in the first movie was powerful, but they couldn’t just re-use it, and whatever they found to replace it had to be just as good or better. I can’t stress the better part enough, because that’s what an audience wants–what an audience needs–if they’re going to love your second work and not feel let down. So the writers for Spider-man 2 had their work cut out for them, and they had to sit down long and hard and figure out what they could do with Peter on a second outing: what obstacles could he overcome, and what lessons could he learn? It’s not enough to just toss out another villain and let the hero beat him up–you need a strong emotional arc, and solid character growth, or the audience just won’t care.

The Spider-man 2 writers started by looking at the end of the first movie to see exactly where we’d left our hero. He had power, responsibility, and a strong sense of selflessness, but he didn’t have the girl–he’d given her up, on purpose, to protect her. So there’s one arc: we can finally get him together with Mary Jane, which will require him to make some very difficult choices about priorities. That’s new and interesting. What else…at the end of the first movie Spider-man is hailed as a hero, so let’s take all of that away from him. The newspaper hates him, and of course his best friend blames him for his father’s death, so let’s play that up and really vilify Spider-man, to the point that even Aunt May thinks he’s horrible. Last of all, let’s shatter the sense of control that Peter seemed to have at the end of the last movie–his problems aren’t solved, they’re just getting started. Being Spider-man keeps him so busy that he can’t stay on top of any of his other responsibilities, causing him to get fired from his job, lose his tenuous friendship with Mary Jane, and get horrible grades in school. His life is literally falling apart at the seams.

Giving Peter this new set of challenges forces him to make painful, personal decisions, and setting up Mary Jane as an ultimate goal gives those decisions a sense of direction and purpose. We’ve essentially created a movie that hearkens straight back to the questions of the first–choosing between a real life and a superhero life–but it feels new because the obstacles are different, the goals are different, and ultimately Peter’s decision will be different. We’re not repeating the first movie, we’re re-examining it, forcing the character and the audience to consider the issues in light of newer, deadlier, more emotional realities. Spider-man 2 is practically a master’s class in how a sequel can fulfill the promise of a first work while still exploring new territory and finding new insights.

Which leads us (in a very roundabout way) to Mr. Monster. The first book was about–spoiler warning!–John Cleaver’s decision to break his rules and let his inner monster loose. He is faced with the agonizing decision to either let a killer go free or become a killer himself, and decides in the end that it’s better to kill one man than to allow, through inaction, that one man to kill dozens. He lets his dark side loose, feeds his most dangerous tendencies, and sacrifices his own innocence to save his town. A friend of mine, reading the manuscript, remarked that “it shouldn’t be easy to put the monster away again; if it is, then it’s not a monster.” I took this brilliant insight and essentially built the entire second book around it: we begin book 2 with all of John’s rules already broken, and all of his self-control in shattered ruins at his feet. In book 1 he lets his monster out, and in book 2 he realizes just how hard it is to lock it back up.

But no matter how much I liked that direction, I knew it was obvious and I wanted to complicate it. Locking up the monster is a new conflict, but it’s still the same basic theme John has already dealt with: a tough moral decision between good and evil. I needed to skew it off in a new direction, and give John not only new obstacles but a new flavor of obstacles. So, what has John not dealt with yet? We’ve seen him face dangerous situations, combative situations, and stalking situations; we’ve seen him spend a lot of time alone, hiding from villains and his family and the world. What we’ve never seen him face is a social situation. We’ve seen him hide from people, but we haven’t really seen him try to fit in–to navigate the social and emotional minefield of personal interaction, which his sociopathy would make almost impossible. I thought this sounded like fun, so I tossed in a new character and magnified an old one who would both force John far outside his comfort zone into situations where his deadly inner monster will be more of a hindrance than a help.

Last of all, I mixed these two ideas–the growing dominance of his urges to kill, and an enforced proximity to people he doesn’t know how to deal with–with a sense of mounting pressure from his Mom, who’s taking an active hand in his psychology, and the FBI, who have not only stepped up their search for the Clayton Killer but begun to focus more and more on John himself. This creates a painful buildup of tension, which casts John’s ongoing dilemma (“Am I a good guy or a bad guy?”) in a new and more dangerous light.

That powderkeg of emotions explodes, I should mention, about halfway through. Why wait? In book 1 I revealed the killer halfway through, and then had even more fun dealing with the aftermath; I wanted to do the same in book 2, and besides: an exploding powderkeg is a really fun aftermath to try to deal with.

…but Glee just hooked me.

I’m a big fan of musicals, but I’ve never really gotten into Glee: the stories are too melodramatic, and the singing is too fake. Then I watched last week’s episode, “Theatricality,” and the closing number sold me. It was completely perfect–subtle, emotional, and brilliant. The show may be wildly uneven (the following episode, “Funk,” was awful) but that one number made me a fan. Any show that can produce a moment that powerful deserves a host of second chances.

Let me set the scene for you very briefly: there is a girl (Rachel) whose mother gave her away at birth, but they find each other again 16 years later. The mother (Shelby) is everything Rachel wanted–she’s beautiful, sweet, and shares her passion for music–but she’s still not really ready to be a mom. Shelby tells her that it’s not going to work out, that she can’t be a mom but in a few years maybe they can be friends, and then she says goodbye. Rachel, as a last favor, asks if they can sing a song together, and because it’s a Lady Gaga episode they sing…Pokerface?

I was initially very concerned about this choice, I admit, but the episode was called “Theatricality,” after all, and I figured they wanted to go out with a bang. Instead they created a very soft, very simple duet with the two women and a piano–it was low key and playful, a mother and daughter having fun together with a light, bouncy song. But as they sing their faces show brief flashes of emotion, and you start actually listening to this ridiculous Lady Gaga song and realize that it’s all about hiding your emotions and pretending things are okay even though they’re not, and at the end of each chorus is the repeated line “She’s got to love nobody.” All of a sudden this isn’t just a goofy vocal number, it’s a daughter being abandoned by her mother for the second time in her life, and they both know it, and they both hate it, but it’s still happening and they’re just going to face it and deal with it and move on. It was stunning.

It helps significantly that the mother is played by Idina Menzel, who is a) an incredible singer and b) an uncanny lookalike of the daughter; both qualities help make the daughter, in comparison, seem young and vulnerable and fragile. At the end of a long, over-the-top episode full of KISS and Lady Gaga and savage, emotional rants, here comes this quiet, perfect scene brimming not only with real feeling but with a near-impossible blend of contradictory feelings: they’re happy and they’re sad, they’re brave and they’re frightened, they’re strong and they’re broken, all at the same time.

This is what art is about; this is why I became a storyteller, to tell these kinds of stories and create these kinds of moments. I hope that somewhere, in one of my books, someone can have the kind of experience I had watching that scene. I can’t find a good video to link to–the music is here, but you don’t get the full effect unless you can see their performances, and for that it looks like you’ll have to watch the whole episode on hulu.

A “trunk novel” is, more or less, a novel you wrote before you were published; you were still honing your craft, some of it’s good and some’s bad, and you’ll probably never do anything with it, but you don’t want to throw it away so it’s just sitting there in your trunk. I did an email interview this morning that asked about my trunk novels, and I thought it was an interesting question about a topic I haven’t really discussed in any detail before, so I thought you might be interested. Here’s the question and my answer.

I gather you wrote a number of novels before getting your first published. Can you tell us a bit about them and how you went from those to I Am Not a Serial Killer?

I grew up reading fantasy, and assumed I was going to be a fantasy writer, and all of my early books were fantasy—some of it pure Warhammer fan fiction, though at the time I thought it was stunningly brilliant and original. After finishing two novels that were both set in the same derivative world (one was called Realm and one was called Deeper Into Chaos), I decided to try something completely new and different, and started free-writing; this eventually turned into A Night of Blacker Darkness, a historical horror farce about graverobbers and fraudulent accountants and incredibly stupid vampires. (This book is somewhat infamously referred to as “The vampire bunny book,” though it’s not actually about vampire bunnies.) Of all my old novels this is the one I think is good enough to publish, though I’ve had to rewrite it more times than was probably wise to get it into that condition. Every few years, after finishing two or three more books, I’ll go back to that one and say “I’ve learned so much in the last few years, and I can see now why this doesn’t work—let me just tweak it a little.” I should just give it up and move on, but I think it has a lot of potential. One of these days I’m going to redo it as a stage play, and see how it works in that format.

After that I wrote a book called The Legend of Krag, which was a return to fantasy but with all of my preconceptions broken down—probably too drastically. The world and the story were created out of whole cloth, as a reaction against my derivative earlier books, but I swung the pendulum so far to the other side that “original” became “too wacky to be accessible.” The one thing I really liked about this book, though, was the very dark undercurrent, so when the time came to write another book I focused on that and made a return to historical horror, though after two humor books I decided to write this one completely straight. I don’t even remember what this book was called, because I always just referred to it as Victorian Batgirl. It was SO MUCH FUN to write a straight gothic horror; I’d never even considered it, but I sort of backed into it accidentally and ended up loving it. My world and plotting were much better in this book than in my previous books, but it still had some major problems—most notably, my attempt to write a Victorian girls school was an abysmal failure.

While running that book through my writing group, a friend and I hit on the idea of a young sociopath trying not to become a serial killer, and I decided that since I was loving horror so much I should go ahead and make the sociopath my next project. That, of course, turned into I Am Not a Serial Killer. By now, with five other books under my belt across a wide range of styles and genres, I had a much better grasp of characterization and story arc, and everything just kind of came together. It took me eight years and six books, but I did eventually learn all my lessons and figure out how to write a good book.

I have a laptop. I’m actually writing on it right now, in fact, because it’s more comfortable to sit in my big easy chair than to go in the other room and use my desk. So I use my laptop at home because it’s comfy, and I use it at work because it’s convenient, and on rare occasions I’ll use it at my friend Ben’s house because I don’t want to drive the extra ten minutes to get to my office (I am nothing if not incredibly lazy). And yet, that’s not really the reason I bought a laptop.

I bought a laptop because I wanted to have access to the Internet, and consequently to my email and website and Twitter and Dropbox, everywhere I go. And even though I take it with me everywhere I go, I find that I don’t really have the kind of Internet access I had imagined. I hauled it with me on my trip to Europe because I wanted to update my blog every day, and then of course the screen broke and I couldn’t really do anything, but out of curiosity I asked around at every hotel and convention I went to and, whaddaya know, none of them had wireless Internet. Bah. When I got home and went on my US tour the laptop was still not fully repaired, so I was without it, but the story was the same: there wouldn’t have been any good access points anyway. On my trip to BEA I thought, “at last, I have a functioning computer, I can take it along and post every day and blog all about my trip,” and then with the exception of my friend’s apartment where I stayed the first night, I never had Internet.

The hotel where I stayed in New York was called the Pennsylvania, and let me just warn you away from it right now: it was awful. First, it’s the only hotel I’ve ever been to that had a line to check in. I actually waited a full 20 minutes in that line, and this with only 6 or 7 groups ahead of me, because there were only 2 people at the counter and they were both a) incompetent and b) slow. (I prefer my incompetence to be as fast as possible.) When I finally got my room I tried to connect to the Internet by plugging into the conveniently labeled cord, but I couldn’t get it to work, and finally started rooting around under the desk to discover that the cord was not, in fact, plugged in to anything on the other end–better yet, there wasn’t even a place it COULD have plugged in to, so I’m not exactly sure why it was in the room in the first place. I was able to do some writing that night, so the laptop proved its worth, but there was no chance to blog. Also: from about 10pm to 7am the hotel smelled powerfully of woodsmoke, like someone had built a campfire in the next room. Like I said, this was a drab, nasty blowhole of a hotel.

Everything else about my trip was wonderful, though. Alexis and Patty from Tor publicity were great, and we got a TON of stuff done, and I really enjoyed myself. I also had the chance to spend a lot of time with Moshe, my editor, and Sara, my agent, having fun and eating good food and discussing various current and upcoming projects. Things are moving at a good clip, careerwise, and I’m very excited.

As for BEA itself? The highlight was my signing, which had so many people we actually ran out of books and had to turn people away. I also met a couple of really wonderful booksellers, but I’ll tell you about them tomorrow.