This is your Origin Story: Giveaway and Interview

Today is the The Nature of a Pirate book birthday and you get the presents! Here’s a giveaway of all three Hidden Sea Tales books, along with an interview containing a proposition I’ve been wanting to share:

There’s a story we tell here in the west. We tell it over and over. In it, you are sleeping in your pit in the castle kitchen, your only reward a crust of bread and the faint hope that Chef won’t cuff you hard enough to concuss you again. Then some grizzled old dude turns up with a sword, and says you have to go fight a dragon. If you don’t he’ll eat all your villager friends, starting with the brown ones and the queers.

Book birthdays bring many things, and contests, blog posts and interviews are just a few of them. Not-at-all veiled political rants, on the other hand… well. I wrote this essay a couple weeks ago, when I was sick as hell and, along with many of you, was reeling at current events. It’s cousin to the letter I wrote to Canada’s Prime Minister, and like that letter, I hope it’ll speak to some of you.

I am very grateful to the (perhaps aptly named!) Book Wars blog for giving me the space to talk about fantasy worlds and real ones, about good and evil, about fighting and winning. You all have a week to enter that contest!

Where I’m going, where I’m at, where I’ve been

As I write these word I am sitting on a VIA train bound from Toronto to Ottawa; Kelly and I are going just for the night, to hang out with friends and bask in the wonders of an emerging arty phenomenon known as The Timberhouse. I had a terrific time in Ottawa when I went to CanCon in August, and am looking forward to getting to know the city better. Our nation’s capital moved up the bucket list as soon as Kelly and I arrived in Ontario, but it took us until this year to get there. I am predisposed to fall head over heels.

The train runs along the shore of Lake Ontario for a good portion of the route; it’s more of the same track I take to Scarborough when I am teaching there. The simple act of riding east fills me with happiness. I thrive on having a once-a-week gig at UTSC, commute and all. I undertand it would be a tiring slog if I was headed out there Monday to Friday, term in and term out. But so much of my incredible 2016 is caught up in memories of taking the Go Train out to campus, of starting and ending my teaching day with solitude, scenic beauty and comfort.

Like many people I had a difficult November: like many people, the heart of it was the turn in U.S. politics, but there were other things, too, like an old friend announcing bad diagnosis on Facebook, like a particularly feisty round of flu germs taking out me and Kelly simultaneously, like the unfortunate chance of my having forgotten that I always struggle with fiction writing in this eleventh month specifically. Usually when I see November coming, I try to plan around that drop in productivity, but this year I was wrapped up in other things, like you, and I only figured out the seasonal angle on about the 28th, when someone else spoke up.

Now it’s December, and my new book will be out on Tuesday, and meanwhile my agent and I have agreed on a schedule for finishing the next novel. I’m trusting that my natural creative rhythms will assert themselves. I want to draft about 1500 words a day between now and mid-February, starting Monday. That means I have this last weekend to fritter: Kelly and I went to see one of our favorite bands, The Weepies, last night at the Drake Hotel. It was a singularly delightful experience: we were eight feet from the stage, in a pack of people who just wanted to hear, and enjoy, and sing along.

Naturally, I’m excited too about seeing how this boho weekend at Timberhouse will unfold.

There have been good things, these last two weeks. Every moment of calm, every joy-inducing sight, every breath of warmth and comfort, every well-written sentence (whether inhaled as a reader or exhaled into my own manuscripts) has had a certain intensity, the fine-cut edges of a rare, faceted opal, flashing ethereal fire against the darkness, spark by spark. I am talking to strangers more, now that I can draw breath without coughing, reaching out. I see that desire to talk, connect, to just be damnwell be nice, mirrored in their reactions. The energy I have at hand for being kind and prosocial seems more abundant. And every moment with my family and friends seems a gentle sort of victory.

Science fiction writers are very good at worst case scenarios, and the part of me that has extrapolated our current circumstances to an exceedingly miserable and bitter end has, at least temporarily, overriden the part assigned to petty worries about the future. Different parts of the brain are chewing different stressors, I know, and while I’m not appreciating the things generated by the newly active neurons, the absence of certain habitual gnawing mind-loops has been a source of both relief and navel-gazy intellectual interest.

I have been dreaming more, and most of the dreams have been unexpectedly good.

I have also experimented with posting the occasional political thing on my social media. I try to be choosy, and in particular to talk about Canadian racism, Canadian responses to oppression. I’m not sure yet what I think of the response. There’s usually a sea of likes and good comments–naturally, I like those–along with one or two wanky pushbacks. These seem to be angry dudes with thin arguments–and I haven’t quite sorted out how much of that I want in my Facebook feed, particularly. I need to get the hang of ignoring them, probably. I don’t need to give everyone who posts a snarky comment a breakdown on why the CBC article didn’t actually say some thing being ascribed to me. The problem is a nagging sense that I owe them an argument, somehow, and that if I’m not willing to have it I should shut up.

What else? I read a book about DDOS actions and activism by Molly Sauter, THE COMING SWARM which talks (among many other things) a present-day tendency to measure all civil rights and other protest movements against a rose-colored-glasses view of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement. It talks about how we are tempted to devalue civil resistance when it doesn’t look like Johnson-era marches led by Martin Luther King. This interests me, a lot, and I’m thinking about what I see as effective protest. (I think the book’s interesting and useful, and I hope to get some other recs from her soon.)

In the book I’m writing now (whose working title is WIN CONDITIONS) I’ve imagined a near future society where humanity has a light but geniune grip on a host of climate change problems, where people are laboring mightily to terraform the Earth to make it fit for long-term human habitation. I started this book early in the year, and it ties into some things I said in my SpecFic Colloquium talk: that we cannot simply offer visions of apocalypse, that SF writers have to imagine workable optimistic futures, scenarios where we get out of the political and ecological jams we’ve created.

People can more easily believe in a happy ending if we create it. They can grab onto possible solutions to our current cluster of crises if we imagine the solves, show them in place, and inpire our audiences to tweak and implement them here in the real.

By the time WIN CONDITIONS takes place, the Millenials have long since endured a period called the Setback. Their children barely survived the Clawback. Now there’s a cohort of grandkids who refer to themselves as the Bounceback generation. Bouncers believe humankind will save the earth, one ton of carbon and one reclaimed suburb at a time.

In one of the early chapters I make a passing comment about the first Setback presidency. I was envisioning our present situation, while hoping it wouldn’t come to pass quite so soon.

Still, I choose to believe the Setback will end, and not through some passive stroke of luck. Activism, courage, creativity and compassion will end it. People will end it. It’s easy to say, and much much harder to do, and I know that very well. Do keep me posted on how I can help.

Sneak Peek at The Nature of a Pirate (ICYMI)

Tor Books has posted the first chapter of my upcoming novel, The Nature of a Pirate, at its blog. Some of you may have heard me read this chapter… but for those who haven’t, or anyone who wants a refresher, here’s the opening. A taste of a taste, call it.

Kitesharp was bleeding.

The wounded ship was fifty feet long, with a crew of fourteen sailor-mechanics, and when dawn rose over the Fleet of Nations, her blood trail was just a thin line of crimson threaded into her wake. It twisted against the blue of the sea, a hint of pinkish foam that might have gone unnoticed for hours if it hadn’t begun attracting seabirds and sharks.

The whole Fleet watched as the birds shrieked and Kitesharp’s captain raised a warning cone up her mainmast. Soon—presumably after her bosun had been below for a look—a sphere was raised, too. From a distance, both cone and sphere would appear as flat shapes, seeming to onlookers to be a triangle and circle. It meant Ship in distress. Help required.

This particular distress call had gone out twice before.

The entire book will be available in less than a month, on December 6th.

Nature of a Pirate giveaway on Goodreads ends tomorrow!

Child of a Hidden Sea

Child of a Hidden Sea

The Nature of a Pirate will be out on December 6th, just over a month from now, and Goodreads is running a giveaway for all of October. This means you have one more spooktacular day to sign up and potentially win one of the five advance copies on offer.

But wait–there’s more! What if you haven’t read the first two books in this series? I’m pleased to say Goodreads is also running a giveaway for ten copies of book #1, Child of a Hidden Sea. You’ve got a little longer to get in on that offer–it runs to November 9th.

To recap and make it easy.

 

These two books are the first and last in the Hidden Sea Tales trilogy. The middle book, A Daughter of No Nation, won the Prix Aurora for best novel this past year.  They feature, collectively and in no particular order, a scuba-diving biologist from San Francisco, tall ships, a magical world that might be a future earth devastated by climate change, handsome sea captains, pirates, spies, murderers, diplomats, swordfights, mermaids in the navy, forensic science,  and an international incident caused by a fight over turtle migration.

The books are the story of Sophie Hansa, who went looking for her birth family and found them on the world of Stormwrack, and who finds in Stormwrack her professional calling: a world that offers endless mysteries to tempt her boundless curiosity, and whose profligate use of magic is a challenge to her rigorous training as a scientist. They are books where a woman who believes that scientific puzzles are there for the solving delves into the question of magic, and how it can exist at all, on a world whose people mistrust the curious, seeing them as defective at best, spies and troublemakers at worst.

To make matters even more complicated, Stormwrack has a perfectly good supply of real spies and troublemakers, people who would like to get Sophie and all of her questions out of the way, so they can get back to the business of trying to rekindle a massive international war.

All the things, including some new interviews!

Can haz interview?

Can haz interview?

As we all wind our way into what I hope is an utterly glorious autumn, I am embarking on a little fall cleaning of this site, updating this and that, and getting back into the habit of posting interviews with other authors. I will have S.B. Divya here on Wednesday, answering the Heroine Question. There will be other interview series sharing space with Heroine in the Wednesday slot as we get going, so keep your eyes peeled.

With the launch of The Nature of a Pirate starting to near, I expect to be blog touring myself. I have already written one essay, on the peculiar nature of piracy on Stormwrack, for Tor’s newsletter. I will no doubt be faced with at least a few assignments that boil down to “Write anything you think is interesting about your upcoming novel.”

And that’s where you can help! (Please please help!) I am infinitely less great at write whatever you feel like assignments than I am at hey, answer this specific question ones. And this’ll be the third Stormwrack blog tour. I’ve been talking about these books in public spaces for a long time, and I’ve mined my grey matter for most of the obvious-to-me thoughts. So if you have a question, or an angle you’d like to see explored, post a comment and let me know. I will shower you with gratitude, and also answers. And then more gratitude.