Countdown to readers’ favs of 2019, day 3

Two posts about the final appearance of beloved Dallas-Fort Worth science fiction/fantasy convention ConDFW were neck and neck as reader favorites. Let’s hear it for this one, first published February 18:

ConDFW rides into the sunset – but what a ride it was!

How could I not have realized that this year’s ConDFW, that grand North Texas science fiction/fantasy convention would be the last of its 18-year run? But if all good things must come to an end, ConDFW went out with a booster rocket of a blast, including discussions by literary guests of honor Charlaine Harris and Yoon Ha Lee. 

Harris hardly needs an introduction. Disdaining the epithet of “prolific” – ‘I’m not prolific, I’m just old,’ she assured her audience. “When you’ve been writing for 40 years, you write a lot of books.” Add, when you fearlessly tackle multiple genres – and combinations of genres – you don’t easily run out of ideas.

Perhaps best known for the Southern Vampire series that mixed mystery and paranormal genres with a touch of romance, and inspired TV’s  “True Blood,” Harris described her latest work, An Easy Death, to moderator Melania Fletcher as “an alternate-history Western thriller with magic,” noting, “I like to write about women who kill a lot of people, which had to be set in an alternate-history universe.” 

Charlaine Harris

“Will there be sequels?” Fletcher asked. 

“My publisher surely hopes so!” Harris replied. 

She’s also written multiple mystery series, urban fantasy, graphic novels (with collaborator Chris Golden), romances, and short stories. Pressed once as to how many short stories she’s written, Harris said she had to search her records to realize she’d written at least 40. “Short stories are so hard. Every word counts and there’s no leeway with character or description.”

Somehow along the way however, she also managed to co-edit seven volumes of short stories, which “really improved my own writing.”

“What do you do when you’re not writing?” Fletcher asked. “I understand you have a houseful of rescue dogs.”

“I’m down to two now,” Harris said. “And I’m really involved with my family and – don’t look surprised – I’m very active in my church. I’m very religious.”

“Have you gotten any criticism from your church?” Fletcher asked. 

“Not from my church – I’m Episcopalian, and they’re often quite liberal,” Harris said, then deadpanned, “but when we sold our house in Arkansas to a woman with a different religious background, she was advised to have it exorcised.”

Aside from the possibility of receiving divine aid, doesn’t a woman who writes so prolifically have to be extremely well-organized, Fletcher mused, wondering if Harris prefers plotting or winging things as she types.

“I blue-sky it,” Harris replied. “People ask me what I wear when I write, and I . . . never understand why that would cross anybody’s mind. It would never cross my mind to ask Lee Child what he wears when he writes.”

(For the record, her writing uniform usually consists of jeans and T-shirts. For whoever that may inspire.)

***

And one more for ConDFW, this post published February 20:

A last look at ConDFW – Conversation with Yoon Ha Lee

Yoon Ha Lee

Earlier this week, I promised to give readers a peek at the writing guests of honor from last weekend’s final edition of science fiction/fantasy convention, ConDFW. First up was the prolific, genre bending Charlaine Harris. Now comes another multi-published writer whose cross-genre talents might tax even Harris’s imagination. Enter Yoon Ha Lee, the Locus Award-winning author of Ninefox Gambit and its sequels, as well as middle-grade space opera Dragon Pearl, published last month, and multiple short stories.

“I’m queer, I’m transgender, I’m bisexual,” Lee said, explaining why they foreswore a teenage allegiance to Ender’s Game after discovering the political opinions of its author, Orson Scott Card.

(For the record, Lee is a native of Houston, Texas, of Korean ancestry. Also a former mathematics teacher, bipolar, married to a quantum astrophysicist and parent to a 15-year-old daughter. Oh, and has a very spoiled cat.)

“I spent half my childhood in Houston and half in South Korea,” Lee told moderator (and planetologist and fellow cat lover) John DeLaughter. “We came home (to South Korea) a lot for reasons my parents never explained, because they didn’t explain stuff to kids.”

Lee originally started writing science fiction with “all white characters and Western settings” because these were the models they had grown up with. But after hearing about the phenomenon of cultural appropriation Lee realized, “Yes, I’m Korean. I can write Korean characters.”

They also, however, love ancient Greek myths. After learning that Rick Riordan, author of the Lightning Thief series based on classical mythology, was interested in writers immersed in other mythic cultures, Lee decided to give it a try.

“I bet no one else is going to pitch Korean mythology space opera,” Lee said. “And I was right!”

Still, Lee confesses a yearning to write an Iliad as space opera. “But without Achilles, because he annoyed me, particularly because he got Patroclus killed. When I was eight, I thought Achilles and Patroclus were just friends. Then I read the adult version and realized – oh, they didn’t tell me that when I was eight in Houston.”

“They still don’t tell you that at age eight in Houston,” DeLaughter said.

Other themes of Lee work include non-Homo sapiens intelligences (ascribed to the influence of Austrian ethologist Konrad Lorenz and the Chinese cultural hierarchies influenced by the Confucian culture experienced during childhood years in Korea. 

“We stole Confucianism from the Chinese and then became more Confucian than Confucius.”

“Is that something you would like to see go away in Korea?” DeLaughter asked.

“It’s not all evil,” Lee said. “Teachers are very respected in Korea, so they are able to manage their classrooms better than in America, but there are a lot of things that are problematic.”

And then there are the names, which often are based on jokes and numbers. “I know a lot of people say numbers are dehumanizing, but as a person who majored in math, I find numbers fascinating.”

Admittedly, what everyone in the ConDFW audience wanted to know was the prolific Lee’s advice on how to write.

“Finish your things,” Lee said. “It doesn’t matter how awful a manuscript is, it can always be fixed in revision.”

And given Lee’s mastery of short stories, did writing them gain credibility for the novels, an audience member asked.

“I did the old-fashioned thing of writing short stories, which I did for 17 years, before writing a novel. Which is not time efficient. Having that credibility from short stories helps, but if you want to write novels, you must write that novel!”

***

Tomorrow: Numbers 4 & 3 on readers’ list of 2019 favorite posts.

Wordcraft -- Charlaine Harris tells all -- almost -- to MWA

Bestselling author Charlaine Harris was happy to talk about everything to do with writing at last Saturday’s meeting of the Dallas Mystery Writers of America. Everything except one, that is.

“I can’t tell you how to write a query letter, because I’ve been published so long they don’t expect them from me.” Her first mystery was published in 1981, although she’s been most famous since 2008 for her Sookie Stackhouse urban fantasies, basis for HBO’s True Blood TV series.

“I got published over the transom, when there were transoms,” she said. “And there were more publishers. Now you almost have to have an agent, or at least a connection. My agent called and asked if he could represent me. I’ve had one agent for my entire career--I’ve had him longer than I’ve had my daughter.”

That magical call didn’t actually occur out of thin air. She had already written two well-reviewed mysteries that earned her the respect of another writer who recommended her to the agent, Harris said. “It was not natural for me to self-promote. A famous writer once walked up to me and said, I’ve published 25 million books. And I thought, I don’t recall asking. I don’t want to be like that but. . .”

But aren’t agents superfluous in this day of Internet publishing, an audience member asked.

“Poppycock,” Harris replied. “If you want to be published conventionally, you need an agent. Even if you (self) publish by e-book, what about foreign rights, movie rights, TV rights?”

She gave an enthusiastic “yes!” to a question about whether conferences (such as next month’s DFW Writer’s Conference) are good places to make necessary contacts. She also recommended contests--provided you win, of course--as ways to make worthwhile connections with agents and editors.

So how does a woman with as many writing credits as Harris, and TV spin-off, and movie options, start a writing project? “With a character or a place,” she said. The setting for her newest book, Midnight Crossroad, out next month, is a crossroad, “which is very significant in the magical world. And then I have a key scene I want to write. Hopefully, it’s in the middle of the book.” Having in mind a significant scene set mid-book helps avoid the problem of sagging midsections, although, “when my books get slow,” Harris said, her trademark solution is to “kill somebody, and the messier, the better.”

Her usual writing goal is eight new pages a day, which she edits as she goes along. In addition to self-editing, “I have a couple of friends that read my books before I send them to my editor. You’ve got to have somebody you trust, somebody you consider your peer, to point out the black holes in your writing, the things that are invisible to you. Other than that, you’ve got to write the best book you can.”

For more about Harris, books she’s written and books she loves, see her site, http://charlaineharris.com/, and at this site, “Harris gets deadly serious about character,” December 16, 2013.

For more about the Dallas chapter of the Mystery Writers of America and their programs, see http://dallasmysterwriters.com/.

(Next Monday, local writers the Dallas Library’s April 12 Book Fair.)

Wordcraft -- Harris gets deadly serious about characters

The list of teachers and topics for Saturday’s writing workshop from Mystery Writers of America was impressive: college instructors, writers with strings of awards, an investigative journalist. And then there was Charlaine Harris, whose Southern vampire mysteries have all made the New York Times best seller list, and I knew I had no choice but to open this discussion with a few perceptively wacky words from the creator of telepathic, vampire dating, mystery solving barmaid Sookie Stackhouse.

“Here’s the first rule for the characters who populate your book,” Harris told the her sold-out audience, “everybody’s got a job.”

And that’s “job” as in something they get paid for as well as serving multiple functions in the book itself. Harris learned this the hard way when her Sookie Stackhouse series took off, finally developing a character list in the hundreds (most of whom she lists in After Dead, her absolutely last word on the world of all things Sookie).

And with so many characters, “they must be so distinctive that the readers won’t have to keep flipping back the books” to identify them, a distinction aids by careful choice of names. “Do not use names within the same book that start with the same initial,” she said, adding a tongue in cheek admission of her own weakness, “I’m very fond of the letter J.” (Not that you’d guess it from her character list.)

So how does she recommend finding these distinctive names? In obituaries. Or better yet, delinquent tax notices, frequently published in small town newspapers. Although she warned, “Don’t ever use the complete real name from those.”

And remember the common characteristics everyone possesses, including some I‘ll admit never hearing in any other writing class, such as moral code (“even if it’s do unto others before they do it to you”) and sexual orientation (“it informs everything they do”).

Having said all that, and more, Harris admitted to being “a pantser of the worst sort”--an author who writes by the seat of her pants. The one character she said she had “built as a conscious thought” was Sookie Stackhouse herself. “In order to shake up my career, I thought I would make her do something completely different--a woman dating a vampire” because of her strange disability, the ability to read the minds of her fellow human beings.

“Telepathy would be a terrible thing,” Harris said, “Because I believe in the polite lie, because I was brought up Southern.”

Fortunately for the sake of her romantic involvements, Sookie discovered she couldn’t read the minds of dead people, such as vampires, leaving her blissfully unaware of the true answer when she asks a vamp important questions she’d rather not know the answers to.

(Harris cheerfully admitted that though she remained faithful to most traditions of vampire lore, she wasn’t above making things up, like vamps’ lack of brainwaves, when it suited her.)

So what’s she planning to do now that the Sookie series has ended this year? She’s got a new mystery series set in the small town of Midnight, Texas, with the first volume, Midnight Crossing, due out in May. For more about Harris and her writing, I’ll leave you to check out this mistress of mystery,
http://charlaineharris.com/.

And for more about the Mystery Writers of America, contact its Dallas chapter at
http://dallasmysterywriters.com/.

#

One of the instructors at Saturday’s session, Hallie Ephron, will return to Dallas January 25 for a day-long workshop on romantic suspense, courtesy of the Dallas Area Romance Authors. For information and to register, see
www.rwa.org/p/cm/ld/fid=1155/.