|
|
|
|
SEPTEMBER 2007
Dear Readers,
 Every month I agonize over what to write in this intro. I wring my hands wondering what might be relevant or funny or interesting enough to warrant a few paragraphs. Topics have been disparate, irrelevant, esoteric, and sometimes funny (I hope). This month is going to fall squarely into the irrelevant category, so prepare yourselves (this means you, Kate Cunningham
of Wellington, NZ, assuming you're still out there).
I recently shaved a mustache that I had for exactly one year, one of the most ridiculous years of my life. I'm not sure of the exact name of this mustache. Some said it was a handlebar, but I'm sure that's incorrect. Rollie Fingers had an exemplary handlebar, and mine was not like that. It could have been a Pancho Villa, it could have been a trucker, but my friends called it Johnny Cakes. If you get the reference, you'll know the implication immediately. I've checked various websites searching for a definitive name, but I've been unsuccessful. How would I best describe it?
If I had entered a competition, I think it would have been in the freestyle category. If I walked into a bar, or somebody's place of work, they wouldn't think I was a cop. They'd think I was there to check the ventilation system, and I would, too, except that I don't have that particular skill set. The point is, my mustache said I might.
If my mustache were to have been called a "nose neighbor," it would have been a very raucous neighbor, indeed. It would be a neighbor with a V-8 Vega up on blocks in the front yard. It would be a mustache with grease-stained coveralls, yet a mustache that cleaned up nicely. It would be opposed to hunting and fishing regulations. It was an outlaw mustache, although it might have been pro-capital punishment. We never really talked politics. It was a hard mustache to categorize. It preferred adventure to convention.
What is weirdest, though, what is perhaps the strangest thing of all, is that we have a book this month which is every bit as hard to categorize as my erstwhile mustache. It's a book that eschews convention. The Best of Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, edited by Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant, is a rare bird indeed. Please do look more closely. Our sidebar this month features the preface and gives the reader an idea of its raison d'être.
Of course we've also got Terry Brooks' latest novel, The Elves of Cintra, which continues its story of the Genesis of Shannara. It's a good month, readers.
Best wishes,
Fleetwood
frobbins@randomhouse.com
|
|
|
|
|
|
DEL REY NEWS AND ANNOUNCEMENTS
AWARDS AND ACCOLADES
Naomi Novik won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer at the World Science Fiction Convention in Yokohama, Japan. The Campbell Award is given annually to a fantasy or science fiction writer whose work has debuted within the previous two years. Ms. Novik won for her Temeraire series, which begins with His Majesty's Dragon. She's seen here with her husband, Hard Case Crime publisher Charles Ardai.
Flight 3, edited by Kazu Kibuishi, won the 2007 Harvey Award for Best Anthology. The Harvey, one of the comic industry's most respected awards, was named for Harvey Kurtzman, founder of MAD.
The Robert A. Heinlein Award—given for outstanding published work in hard science fiction or technical writing inspiring the human exploration of space—has been awarded to Del Rey authors Anne McCaffrey and Elizabeth Moon.
Mary Jo Putney's A Distant Magic has been named one of Booklist's top ten romances of the year. Excellent work!
CONVENTION NEWS
Harry Turtledove will be GoH at RAD CON 5, February 15-17, 2008, in lovely Pasco, Washington.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
with Terry Brooks
|
|
|
|
|
 Interview with Terry Brooks author of The Elves of Cintra
Question: Publication of this novel, the second in the Genesis of Shannara trilogy, marks the 30th year of your writing career. Congratulations!
Terry Brooks: Many thanks. It’s hard for me to believe that anyone still reads me after this much time. I always said that what I wanted most out of a writing career was longevity.
Q: You still seem to stretch, to challenge yourself as a writer, with each new novel. A lot of writers in your situation would be content to coast along. How do you keep your passion for writing alive?
TB: It’s tempting to coast now and then. Easier to just cut a few corners. But the problem is that it’s nowhere as interesting as trying new things. I think I am lucky enough to be able to work in the worlds I’ve already created. No one is telling me not to go back for another visit. But writing requires passion, and passion requires involvement. So I look for stories about which I feel strongly enough that I am not going to lose interest three quarters of the way through. Readers have a right to expect your best each time out, and I’m not going to disappoint them.
Q: In the acknowledgments to The Elves of Cintra, you write about your friends and family giving you “the space and time to be as strange and disconnected from reality as I needed to be.” I was struck by that phrase . . . Why is it important to you as a fantasy writer to have this freedom, and what does it mean exactly to be “strange and disconnected from reality”?
TB: That’s a little misleading, I suppose. It makes me sound mental. But what I meant was that in order to write in the realm of the fantastic, you have to be able to let go of the real world. Not entirely, of course, but enough so that you can imagine things that transcend what we know. You have to get into the imaginary and then explore what having the imaginary become real means. For example, if the world really were ending, as it is in Armageddon’s Children and Elves of Cintra, how would that happen? How would it affect the population? What if demons were real and driving this cataclysm? You get the point. Readers of fantasy expect you to take them to new places. In order to do that, you have to go there first.
Read more. . .
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
This (Parenthetical) Preface appears in The Best of Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, edited by Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant. It constitutes the raison d'être of the zine, what its current manifestation as a "best of" anthology.
Somewhere in 1996, during in the long, hazy hours of Gavin's temp job, and encouraged by the literary atmosphere of Boston bookstore Avenue Victor Hugo, where Kelly was then working, we decided to start a zine. Why not? We had access to a photocopier, and we knew some writers. Gavin walked by a travel agency advertising a $300 tropical vacation and decided that for that kind of money he'd have more fun making a zine. (With hindsight, $300 is also a lot of books and beer.) Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet was inspired as much by pop culture (Ben is Dead, Don't Shoot It's Only Comics) and personal zines (Doris, Leeking Inc) as by the suspicion that the kind of hybrid genre/literary fiction that we liked best was underrepresented in the magazines that we read.
We ran twenty-six copies of the first issue of LCRW off on someone's photocopier. (We numbered it Vol. 1, No. 1.) It wasn't pretty, but it sold through. When we started to put together our second issue, we upped the print run and found a size and design we liked (it was stapled then, it's still stapled now). We began to solicit fiction from newer writers, including Nalo Hopkinson and Dora Knez. Our goals since then haven't changed much. We want to publish a mix of new and established writers. We want to publish work that surprises us. We want to have fun and break even.
Read more
|
|
|
|
