GAME REVIEW: Papers, Please

written by David Steffen

Congratulations. The October labor lottery is complete. Your name was pulled. For immediate placement, report to the The Ministry of Admission at Grestin Border Checkpoint. An apartment will be provided for you and your family in East Grestin. Expect a Class-8 dwelling.

Papers, Please was released by Lucas Pope in August 2013, a first person multiple ending pattern-matching ethical conundrum game. This is just another one of those games about immigration documentation processing. Exciting, right? Actually, hear me out. I was skeptical, too, but the game came highly recommended. The game is billed as a “dystopian document thriller”.

2014-10-03_00002 You work for the government of Aristotska (a country reminiscient of Cold-War era soviet administration), screening people entering the country. Day one is straightforward, because you’ve been told to turn away anyone without an Aristotskan passport. But the government responds to public pressure by starting to allow others through. People start slipping through who don’t belong and the government responds by adding new kinds of documents that you have to check–often checking one document against another for consistent information, checking the sex of the person against the ID (with body scan as a secondary check), scanning for contraband, arresting wanted criminals, etc. You have to pay for food and heat for your family, medicine if your son gets sick, other expenses that you can’t always predict. You get paid for each person you process, but your pay gets docked for making mistakes. The rules change every day, and to support your family you have to be both fast and accurate.

That’s what you might call the main focus of the gameplay, but there are quite a few other elements. A revolutionary group is just starting to get their foundations, and because you hold a position of relative importance they want to pay you to make selective mistakes that favor their group. But the Aristotskan government inspector is watching your every move, so you’d better consider very carefully what kinds of requests you want to take. Meanwhile, there are violent attacks on the border which close the office early for the day and which you can help stop. People coming through the gate may make requests of you–helping a recruiter find workers, offering to buy or sell items. The most poignant are ethical choices where a man’s documentation is all valid, but before he leaves the booth he asks you to let his wife through–you soon find her passport has expired. Will you let her through to meet her husband or will you follow orders and turn her away?

2014-10-03_00003 There are some moments of levity in the game–mostly around one guy who is gleefully criminal. After a body scan turns up something suspicious, you ask him what it is, and his response is “Is drugs!” But much of the game is quite dark, thinking about what it must be like for all these people trying to cross from one country to another, and weighing the ethical decisions when you’re torn between doing what’s right and what’s legal according to the laws.

There are twenty different endings, depending on the choices you make. The easiest to reach happens when you run out of money–you are thrown in jail for the crime of debt. You can reach other endings depending on whether you support or reject the revolutionaries (and whether you get caught supporting the revolutionaries), and other choices.

There is so much going on in this game, plenty to keep you entertained. Just the core challenge of checking documents is hard enough with all the changing rules and time limit and penalty for mistakes, and then all the ethical choices and storyline branching makes it all the better.

Visuals
Simple 80’s era visuals, but adequate.

Audio
Music/audio that fits the visuals. I like the inarticulate garble the loudspeaker makes when you call the next person in line.

Challenge
This game is moderately challenging with a reasonable learning curve. The first day is easy–just need to check the country name. As the game goes on there are more things to check and more documents which can reveal discrepancy. I got significantly better with practice, but in the later levels it was still a challenge.

Story
Good story. The main objective of the game is to make sure that you and your family survive by processing enough immigrants and making few enough errors that you don’t get penalized. But there are other branches along the way that can lead to different endings. You can choose to support or resist revolutionaries at several points in the story, you can choose to let people through who engage your sympathies or if you will always stick to the policies.

Session Time
Pretty fast. The game auto-saves after each day. The clock is ticking on each day so if you’re not paused the time is slipping away every moment. Some of the days are cut especially short if there’s an attack on the border. You can get a day in with just a few minutes.

Playability
Easy to learn, hard to keep track of all the little details that change from day to day. If you make a little excess cash you can make your life easier by purchasing some booth upgrades that will give you shortcut keys to cut down on mouse interactions.

Replayability
Quite a bit of replay potential here. There are many different endings which you can reach by making particular choices. Each country in the region also has a special token that can be obtained by helping a person from that country, but the path to those are not always obvious either. Your save file lets you reload from any previous day and it keeps track of multiple different branches, so you can go back to day five and make different choices in that day and try to process more people and after you finish that day you can load from either branch.

Originality
Very, very original. I never would have thought that a game about processing immigration paperwork could be anything but extremely dull, but the game both provides challenge in the manner of attention to detail, but also various ethical conundrums.

Playtime
I’ve spent about 8 hours playing this game, I think I finished a full run through in 5-6 hours, then went back to replay some different paths.

Overall
The list price on Steam is $10. Very reasonable price. Great game. Easy buy.

Interview: Eric Laster

Eric Laster is a YA author, former ghost writer, and orphan/homeless advocate. Welfy Q. Deederhoth: Meat Purveyor, World Savior is the first of a trilogy.

CARL SLAUGHTER: Before publishing your own book, you were a YA ghostwriter. What are some of the YA novels you worked on?

ERIC LASTER: Actually, I published one book under my own name, through Simon & Schuster, entitled The Adventures of Erasmus Twiddle, which is what led to my being hired as a ghostwriter. I’m not legally allowed to disclose specifically what YA novels I ghosted because I signed an NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement). What I can tell you: I ghosted a fantasy trilogy, two volumes of which perched awhile on the New York Times YA bestseller list. More recently, and unrelated to YA, I worked as the unacknowledged ghost/credited editor of a lush photography book entitled 108 Rock Star Guitars by Lisa S. Johnson, the soft-cover of which comes out in November (obviously, I did not sign a NDA).

Does an author provide a ghostwriter with a synopsis, an outline, a rough draft manuscript, recorded dictation of ideas? Do you meet with the author for a question and answer session? What type of communication and how much communication goes on between a ghostwriter and the author about what the author wants to accomplish with the novel?

I can, of course, only describe how the process worked for me. When I first met the credited author of the YA stuff I ghosted, she told me the plot outline of what would become the first book in a trilogy. After hearing the outline, I said that it sounded as if she knew the broad gestures of the plot, but little else. Yes, she knew the main characters’ general backstories, but she didn’t have a single scene in which characters spoke or interacted with one another, and I said that she’d have to be okay with me making all of it up. Once we came to terms and everything was official (she hired me, not a publisher), I received notes on various elements of the book’s invented world,weapons, means of travel, that sort of thing. In addition to changing some of the given characters’ backstories, I wound up conceiving of a number of my own weapons, characters, and creatures.

Incidentally, though I didn’t say this to the credited author at the time, I suspected at the outset that the broad gestures of the plot would not fully remain once the characters were going about their business. For me, in this kind of writing, there’s a rhythm to a plot or story, which is dictated by what seems natural for characters to think or do, and which is set going once the writing starts. It’s best to listen to that rhythm rather than superimpose a structure onto their doings. If an element of a preconceived plot works,great. If it doesn’t, forget it. So the first book I ghosted did not follow the original outline, though many of the most important broad strokes remained. For book two of the trilogy, I was left alone,meaning that no plot points were discussed beforehand, no ideas bandied about until I’d already started writing. For book three, I made a concerted effort to involve the credited author more in discussions of plot, etc. But in general, for all three books, I would send new chapters every several weeks or so, and we would then discuss them. I was very lucky in that she seemed to like the choices I made. Overall, we had an excellent relationship and are now friends, though we both admit to sometimes feeling weird about the whole thing. Publishers weren’t keen to have both of our names on the books. A proper, exhaustive credit for the trilogy would be: story by credited author and me, written by me.

We did have some rough patches in the beginning. I mistakenly assumed that because I was being well paid, I had to write whatever she told me to write. At one of our earliest meetings, after she’d read some chapters, she suggested a change that I didn’t agree with. “I’m not going to do that,” I said, being really impolitic, and to which she didn’t take kindly. I thought I would quit and return the advance I’d received. We talked it through: as long as I truly listened to and entertained her suggestions, I didn’t have to use them, provided I made a good case for why I wouldn’t. But sometimes what seems (or is) a bad editorial suggestion leads you unexpectedly to good results. You start asking yourself what about the story caused the suggestion to be made in the first place. If you can find the answer to that question, and rewrite the manuscript to pre-emptively counter it (the revision is pretty much never the original bad suggestion), the rewrite,at least for me, so far,is often an improvement.

It’s important to note that when I was hired, since there was no manuscript, there was as yet no publishing deal. A deal was secured only after I’d completed approximately 150 pages of a manuscript. The verbal pitch to editors had always been excellent, but they wanted to see the quality of the writing before making an offer.

What did the credited author want to accomplish with this project? She had a great, commercial conceit that she wanted to see fleshed out as a legitimate narrative. Not being a writer, and realizing that a great conceit wasn’t enough, she went looking for someone who could pen the books, which have become the Big Bang, as it were, of an imagined universe that has now expanded across a variety of media platforms. Sorry to sound like a marketing guy, but it’s true.

Why did you decide to switch from ghoster to author?

As mentioned earlier, I had published under my own name before becoming a ghost. But much as I’d never set out to write for children,Erasmus Twiddle was marketed as “middle-grade” fiction; it came into being after I wrote a paragraph in a voice I didn’t know I was capable of,I never planned on becoming a ghostwriter. I agreed to do it as an experiment, wanting to be less reverential toward what I commit to paper (and yes, I write on actual paper). Not that I ever wished to take less care with what I write. I wanted confidence that, when pressed to revise, I could conceive of word/sentence/plot variants at least as interesting as what I’d originally set down,even more, I wanted to develop the professional habit of always (up to a point!) questioning my choices so as to arrive at more nuanced, more revealing, more fun or dramatic. Five years as a ghost completed, I was eager to publish under my own name again. And while I enjoy writing things like Welfy Q. and YA, I’m simultaneously at work on material for an older crowd.

Why did you choose an orphan as a main character?

Welfy Q. pokes gentle fun at the standard conventions of sci-fi while exploiting them. Welfy is the “prophesied one” in an alien world. I thought the pithiest, most dramatic way to counterbalance this was to make him an orphan, a runaway from the foster care system, a kid who has never been the one chosen for adoption by prospective parents. Plus, I think it’s heroic for anyone, but especially a young person, to survive in the face of misfortune, neglect, systematic indifference, or undeserved hostility.

What are themes/messages you want young people to take away from this story?

I don’t think about infusing messages into the fiction that I write. With Welfy Q., themes and motifs developed the further I got into the story. Once the book was finished, I teased out and/or tightened certain narrative threads, motifs, themes. But as to what, specifically, I want young,or any,people to take from this story, I have no answer. What I read in Welfy Q. is not what others will read. The most I hope for is that people find the book both fun and, for one reason or another emotionally resonant. Obviously, I have certain beliefs, an ethical code, and there are subjects about which I feel strongly and am drawn to explore; I wouldn’t be human if these things didn’t find their way into my writing.

Some of the characters’ names are Nnnn and Ffff and Grrrmmph. Is this just for fun or is there a method to it?

It’s “Grrrrmmph” with four r’s. The names are a nod to the great Italian writer Italo Calvino, whose book Cosmicomics features characters with the names “Llll” and “Qfwfq.” Besides, it’s fun to hear Siri stutter over them on an iPhone or iPad. Nor does it seem unreasonable to assume that what we as earthlings might consider goofy names are, elsewhere, to alien ears, not at all goofy. We hear “Ann” and think it’s perfectly normal, but to citizens of distant worlds it might sound just as odd as “Nnnn” does to us.

Some of the aliens say things like “gxo rlimoi Tryndian kcjcio,” “am gxo jcml lr gxo Tryndian,” “xoi jlicgalm ah ilmraimol.” Again, is this just for fun or is there a method to it?

Both. The alien language in the book (less than one page total) is not random. It’s a code, systematically translatable into English. As to the rest of the above quotations, here are the translations: “gxo rlimoi Tryndian kcjcio” means “the former Tryndian palace,” the Tryndian being an alien race. “Am gxo jcml lr gxo Tryndian” translates to “in the land of the Tryndian,” and “xoi jlicgalm ah ilmraimol” translates to “her location is confirmed.” Besides patterns in the alienspeak (the repetition of “gxo,” for example), the book contains further clues that the Brundeedle language can be translated,alienspeak followed by its English equivalent.

I don’t think it’s necessary to translate any of the alienspeak to enjoy the story, if readers don’t want to. Again, the total amount of Brundeedle dialogue takes up less than one page of the entire book. It just seemed wrong to have the aliens automatically speaking English when Welfy first appears among them. Often, bi-linguists will revert to their original language when voicing asides, etc. Why should the Brundeedles be different? But because I’m not a linguist and cannot, like Mr. Tolkien, invent an entire language, I decided to have the Brundeedles’ “gibberish” be a code, which kids who are so inclined can decipher. I had a bit of fun with some of what the aliens say in this code, knowing that only a special group of readers would ever likely decipher it.

The first-edition paperback and Welfy Q. ebook don’t explain any of this, by the way. I was leaving it to readers to figure out on their own. Nor are certain Brundeedle letters underlined or otherwise differentiated with asterisks and the like, as they are in the second edition, to help ease translation. But I’ve included a page at the end of the second-edition paperback that explains the Brundeedle language. It reads:

Out of the seventeen English letters that constitute the Brundeedle language, nine of them look as if they can stand for two different letters in English. For instance, an “a” in Brundeedle might either translate to an English “i” or “z.” To determine which English letter the Brundeedle “a” represents, you need to see if it is underlined. Thus, “a” in Brundeedle equals an English “i,” whereas “a” in Brundeedle translates to a “z” in English. Exceptions to this underline rule are “g” and “j.” A plain “g” is equivalent to an English “t,” but the same letter with an asterisk,”g*”,is equivalent to an English “k.” A plain “j” is equivalent to an English “l,” but if the same letter appears as “Ã‹Ëœj” (note the strange smiley mark!), then it is equivalent to an English “q.” Proper nouns (names of people, places, creatures) are not translated.

Are there going to be further adventures of Welfy?

Yes, at least two more books, which I’m currently in the process of writing. But it’s very likely that a different book of mine will be published first. Tentatively titled Aftereffects, it’s a coming-of-age story cum murder mystery, complete with meds, young love/lust, family dysfunction, and an afterlife Walmart. In 2015, I’ll be at BEA and numerous Comicons, both to promote Welfy Q. and to build anticipation for Aftereffects prior to its publication.

Tell us about your involvement with orphans and homeless.

At present my involvement is minimal, and though I’ll be traveling a fair amount next year, I hope to rectify that somehow. Previously, I volunteered as a teacher in a Los Angeles literacy program. I grew up in New York City, where the homeless are omnipresent and yet willed into invisibility by those hurrying past them on the streets. Los Angeles too has a large homeless population. I have been around the homeless and hungry for as long as I can remember, and I have a BIG problem with the most vulnerable members of a population,kids,being punished by society because they got a less than stellar draw in the birth-lottery. Consider this dilemma: you’ve told me that some of the orphans you work with are cynical, and suspicious of do-gooders who appear in their midst, because they know that these do-gooders will soon abandon them. But are the do-gooders any less well-meaning because they vanished? Unlikely. They are, I trust, doing what they can, and very few people are able to devote a large portion of their lives to helping strangers, however much they might want to. Yet I don’t blame the kids for being wary of part-time do-gooders. If they haven’t had a stable homelife, or consistent emotional support from dedicated sources, how can they be expected to accept that fleeting emotional attachments to supportive individuals, largely strangers, are better than no attachments at all? How can it not seem just a cruel tease, a reminder of what they haven’t had, especially when hardships have conditioned sentiment out of them as a means of survival? My involvement with orphans and the homeless is a work-in-progress. On welfyq.com, I maintain an ever-expanding list of resources for people in need. Suggestions to add to the list are always welcome.

Got any advice to aspiring YA writers?

Read, persevere, read, persevere.

Carl Slaughter is a man of the world. For the last decade, he has traveled the globe as an ESL teacher in 17 countries on 3 continents, collecting souvenir paintings from China, Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, and Egypt, as well as dresses from Egypt, and masks from Kenya, along the way. He spends a ridiculous amount of time and an alarming amount of money in bookstores. He has a large ESL book review website, an exhaustive FAQ about teaching English in China, and a collection of 75 English language newspapers from 15 countries.

Game Theory in Writing Part 3: Why Money Should Always Flow to the Writer

written by David Steffen

This is the second article in a series considering the applications of game theory on writing. Game Theory is the study of strategic decision making. I won’t get into the mathematics of it, just high level concepts. The first article in the series discussed differentiating between goals and milestones. The second article in the series discussed ways for writers to keep score on their submissions that will encourage them to reach their goals.

An oft-quoted phrase in writing circles is known as “Yog’s Law”: Money always flows to the writer. I don’t really care for the name, since it’s not a law in either the legal sense or the scientific sense, but it’s an important guideline to keep in mind to help new writers avoid vanity publishers and publications that charge fees for submission.

What does it mean?

When I hear “Money always flows to the writer” out of context in the company of people who are not writers, I always wonder what those writers think. Do they picture the writer as Scrooge McDuck swimming in a vault full of money they never spend? Do they picture the writer’s landlord demanding rent to which the writer will reply “Money always flows to the writer” and slam the door in the landlord’s face?

Obviously writers spend money on goods and services as anyone else does. Yog’s Law refers only to interactions in pursuit of publication. That is, a writer shouldn’t pay submission fees. A writer shouldn’t pay publication fees. The writer is providing value in the form of their writing, and the writer should be paid for that writing.

Note that there are cases that seem to fit this description that aren’t really a problem–especially in self-publishing where the writer may pay for an artist to make cover art or a copyeditor to help them proofread. That’s because in the case of self-publishing the writer herself is also wearing the publisher hat and so the traditional roles are shifted.

Why?

So, why, from a Game Theory perspective, does the money need to flow to the writer? One of the important things I’ve learned from Game Theory is that a system or “game” is that the rules of a game should be designed so that the desired behavior results from everyone acting in their own selfish best interest. If the system is set up in any other way, then you have a conflict of interest that’s going to set the writer in conflict with the publisher rather than putting them together on the same team.

In a traditional sale to a magazine, the publisher will pay the author a one-time fee for publication rights and then the publisher will distribute the magazine either charging for readers to read the issue or taking donations and providing the content for free to recover the costs of paying for the story and other expenses, (and ideally will turn a profit on the deal to sustain the magazine). In this case, both the editor and writer have the same goals from the transaction–to get the story ready for publication as quickly as possible, to get it packaged up in an issue, and getting in front of as many readers as possible.

In traditional book publishing, similar idea, but on a larger scale and with royalties.

But let’s consider a vanity publisher which charges editing fees of the author. It’s in the publisher’s best financial interest to drag that editing process out as long as possible–if you’re determined, you can always find something to fiddle with, but that’s not a publisher you want to work with, sucking away your money in an endless stream of nitpicks that the editor never has an incentive to end. The editor doesn’t have an incentive to get the book in a publishable format in a timely fashion because edits are where the money is at.

Consider next a vanity publisher that charges publication fees. It’s in the publisher’s best financial interest to rush everything to publication, regardless of quality, and to not bother supporting it in any kind of marketing or any other fashion in the future. The revenue stream maximizes by maximizing the number of titles that are published in such a low quality format that probably no one but the author’s family is going to buy. Although this publisher will naturally tend to get stories to publication, they are making money regardless of the quality of the publication and so do not have an incentive to help the writer make the product as good as possible.

Consider a magazine that charges submission fees. The author, in that case, is paying a fee (often on the order of $3 but sometimes higher on the range of $20) to, in all likelihood, get a form rejection. Guess how much effort it takes to send a form rejection? If the system is set up efficiently, probably one or two clicks. The magazine maximizes their revenue stream from that by not bothering to read the slushpile at all, publishing stories they solicit directly and just rejecting the rest.

Note that in these cases, I’m not saying that all publishers who adopt these practices are scammers, or that they have the result I suggest. But with those flawed plans in place, there will be constant pressure toward practices that are directly detrimental to the writer, and a writer would do best to avoid them entirely.

Interview: Bud Webster

When an author stops breathing, the stories stop coming, but the presses keep rolling. Ah, but do the checks keeping coming? Enter: Bud Webster of the SFWA’s Estate Project.

CARL SLAUGHTER: Why does the SFWA operate an estate project? How does liaisoning for deceased authors help SFWA members?

BUD WEBSTER: Well, with the advent of e-publishing both online and through Kindle/Nook readers, more and more of the classic sf/fantasy stories and novels are in demand. The Estates Project was created primarily to enable both paper and electronic publishers to approach heirs and/or agents in order to seek permission, sign contracts and make royalty payments. How does that help current members? Well, the glib answer is that eventually they’ll ALL be estates, but aside from that it adds to the list of services SFWA as an organization offers. The more we do to protect authors’ rights, whether those authors are above or below the ground, the better off our members are. Of course, the Project extends to non-members as well, as it should; SFWA advocates for ALL sf/fantasy writers, not just the ones who pay dues every year.

CARL: How does the estate project help publishers, editors, agents, and anthologists?

BUD: Publishers come to us looking for contacts with an estate. In many cases, the estate is handled not by an agent but by a family member or other heir. Using the database (over 500 names at this point), we hook the two sides up so they can do business. Some are looking to reprint stories, others want to publish novels. In a few cases, a publisher would like to make a writer’s entire body of work available, and this makes it possible for them to do so legitimately and legally, with benefit to them, the heirs and the readers. Agents are more willing to represent estates if they know that there is a resource for editors and anthologists to use to find them.

CARL: What constitutes due diligence when determining whether a story is public domain?

BUD: A good question, but one that doesn’t have a simple answer. You can’t just Google a name, not find anything on the first screen, and assume that the estate is dead. Nor can you find one source offering the work for free and claiming it’s PD and not look further. That ain’t no way diligence, due or otherwise. For me, due diligence is looking for as long as it takes to find an answer one way or another. If that means asking a few people, fine. If it means checking the Copyright Office website for specific renewal notices, searching for the possibility that the magazine that originally published a story may not have registered copyright then looking further to see if the author did at a later time, then that’s equally fine. I will point out here, though, that to my direct knowledge the information at the CO website is not always accurate; in one specific case, an e-publisher checked the status of a novel there, found no notice of renewal, and issued the book. When the author – still alive and writing, I’ll point out – found out about it, he was able to show the publisher his paperwork proving that the rights HAD been renewed. To the publisher’s credit, they immediately issued a check in the amount the writer asked for. So, due diligence? It’s whatever it takes. Now I know that’s not terribly responsive, and it’s certainly NOT a legal definition by any means, but it’s what I do.

CARL: How does the current copyright law place authors and estates at a disadvantage?

BUD: Hard for me to say, as I’m not a lawyer. I consider myself a copyright conservative – I think publishers should always err on the side of the estate – but I do consider the current term of copyright (life of the author plus 70 years) to be unreasonable. It is the law, however, and that’s what we have to deal with, not what we think it should be. I don’t think it places either authors or estates at a disadvantage, though. Again, I’m not a lawyer. The most important thing that the law does, in my distinctly un-humble opinion, is to give the authors or their estates control over what is done with their work. This is more vital than you may think, as there are cases in which copyright has been blatantly violated. A couple of years ago, for example, a photo of two gay men kissing was used, without their or the photographer’s knowledge or permission, in a campaign against a Colorado politician who had advocated gay marriage. The Southern Poverty Law Center brought suit, but it was a split decision. To me, it was clear-cut – no permission, no rights. Until and unless I declare work of mine to be PD, I am the ONLY one who gets to say where, when or if that work is reprinted either in paper or phosphors. Or even mind-control rays from Venus.

CARL: Do you provide legal consultation on the copyright status, get involved in dispute resolution between estates and publishers, get involved in the prosecution of copyright violation, or post notice of violations?

BUD: Indirectly, yes, but as I said above, no lawyer be I. I can alert an estate to possible piracy (and do), suggest that they talk to a lawyer and perhaps aim them at one of the legal eagles in SFWA, and I do post URLs of pirate sites for other writers to use to look for possible pirate editions of their own work, but I cannot and do not act as a legal advisor. SFWA itself, in the forms of the Grievance Committee and Writers, Beware does act for the membership and has been very successful in doing so.

CARL: What about relatives who don’t want their names listed on the SFWA website?

BUD: We don’t list the names of ANY private individuals on the website unless they specifically ask to be listed. That way lies potential madness. Estates handled by family or other heirs are listed on the Estates Project page with a link to my official e-mail address. When I get a query, I either forward it to the family or blind-copy them when I reply to the inquirer. That way they can respond directly in their own time.

CARL: The publisher’s office, the agent’s office, the copyright office, the Internet, how hard can it be to get information about an estate?

BUD: Ah, there’s the rub. The problem isn’t finding information, it’s finding valid, accurate and current information. That’s tougher than you might think. You have to look deep, find more than one source, and verify verify verify. Anything less isn’t due diligence.

CARL: The estate liaison office lists contact information for more than 500 authors and is seeking contact information for an addition 65 authors. Finding and updating information for so many authors must require a huge staff.

BUD: Don’t I wish? Nope, it’s just me right now, and my faithful team of mutants, avengers and super friends. Seriously, I can put out a question to several hundred other people on the listserves I’m on, add to that the occasional notice in LOCUS and other info and news-oriented periodicals in the field and eventually find an answer – most of the time. Those estates I haven’t been able to find in the seven years or so I’ve been doing this are, very likely, orphaned; until I know for certain, though, they remain unknowns.

CARL: These names must be very familiar to you because you’ve written extensively on the history of science fiction. Tell us a little about that. Or better still, tell us a lot about that.

BUD: Funny you should ask….One of the reasons I was tapped for this task is my deep interest in and knowledge of classic sf and fantasy writers. It’s my geek, if you will. I started out writing in my own fanzine, Log of the Starship Aniara (later just Aniara), then gradually began writing for other markets beginning with a sercon (read: serious content) ‘zine called bare*bones in 2001, then moving on to paying markets like David Hartwell’s New York Review of Science Fiction and Science Fiction Chronicle a few years later. Those were all articles on sf and fantasy anthologies, an itinerant column I called “Anthopology 101.” In 2008, William Sanders and a few others of us started an onliner called Helix SF, and that’s where I began the “Past Masters” series. We did Helix for ten issues, then stopped; the column continued in Jim Baen’s Universe and when that died, went to Eric Flint’s Grantville Gazette. Both columns have been collected and are available in print from Merry Blacksmith Press. In addition, the Anthopology 101 collection is available in e-book format from ReAnimus Press.

There ain’t a lot of money in this (although I certainly won’t object if anyone reading this, like, buys a copy or two), but there has been an enormous amount of satisfaction and gratification over the past 13 or so years, not to mention the extreme pleasure of interviewing people like Jack Williamson, Phil Klass (william Tenn), Robert Silverberg, Harlan Ellison and Barry Malzberg. The passion I feel when I delve into our shared history, the sheer wonder I experience in digging into Yesterday’s stories of Tomorrow is overwhelming; like a solar flare straight from the heart of the Sun, it brightens my life and fires my intellect. I like to think that I have been able to impart some of that to my readers; and in my work with the SFWA Estates Project, I hope to repay those old masters for the Wonder they have given me over the decades.

Game Theory in Writing Part 2: Gamifying Your Submission Process

written by David Steffen

Much of focus of Game Theory centers around “gamifying” everyday decisions, giving them a goal and a way to keep score to determine how well you’re meeting that goal. One thing that writers can struggle with is keeping stories in circulation–you can’t sell stories if you don’t submit them–so for this article I’ll be considering ways to keep score that encourage the behavior you want.

The Wrong Behavior

Some rules that seem entirely sensible can actually encourage the wrong behavior (“wrong” as in contradictory to the behaviors you want to pursue). For instance, I know some people who use acceptance percentage. Sounds good, right? A newbie starts with 0%. You might imagine that a big name might have, I don’t know, above 50% (I’m not saying that’s actually a reasonable number, but one might imagine it is).

But consider the consequences. When you’re a saleless newbie, no problem. If the fraction is 0/1 or 0/2 or 0/100, it all comes out to 0% acceptance. But someday you get a sale, let’s say it’s your 100th resolved submission. Calloo! Callay! You have raised your acceptance ratio to 1%. Wonderful news!

But what happens next? You want to keep submitting other stories, right? So you can sell more, get your stories to more people, crack all your favorite magazines, right? But… you think to yourself, what if that submission gets rejected? Then my acceptance ratio would be 1/101. What if the next 99 are rejections too? That would bring your acceptance ratio to 0.5% and you’re now half as successful as you had been. So, maybe you’ll just wait until you see a submission opportunity that you’re certain you can nail with no risk.

Look what your scoring system has gotten you. Now you’re reluctant to take risks. You can’t sell without submitting–never up, never in. You can’t get those big sales without submitting to markets that have very low odds. Avoiding risks will ensure stagnation of your progress.

The Right Behavior

So what should you pick for gauging your progress then? Total # of acceptances (rather than acceptance ratio). Total number of professional-paying sales. You can pick something that fits your values, but just consider what behavior it will encourage before you really stick to it.

To encourage me to submit I have found Dean Wesley Smith’s submission scoring system to be extremely valuable in motivating me to keep stories in submission. It’s pretty simple. For every short story you have submitted right now, you get 1 point. For every novel you have an excerpt out for, you get 3 points. For every complete novel manuscript submitted right now, you get 8 points. Submitting the same story to multiple venues simultaneously does not get you more points. When you get an acceptance or rejection, you lose the points associated with that submission.

The great thing about the system is that it encourages you to not mope when you get a rejection–if you find a new market to submit that story to, then you can keep the score up. And it encourages you to write more stories–your maximum score is the number of stories you’ve written. I intend to incorporate automatic scorekeeping using this system into The Submission Grinder at some point, because I believe in it.

So, writers out there, do you have any score or statistic that you follow to help motivate you in your submitting? Your writing?

Interview: Martha Wells

Martha Wells writes adult and YA fantasy and Star Wars/Stargate tie-ins. She is best known for her Raksura series.

Wells’ first published novel, “The Element of Fire,” was a finalist for the Compton Crook Award, and a runner-up for the William Crawford Award. Her second novel, “City of Bones,” received a starred review from Publishers Weekly and a black diamond review from Kirkus Reviews, and was on the Locus Recommended Reading List for fantasy. Her third novel, “The Death of the Necromancer,” was nominated for a Nebula Award. Her fantasy short stories include “The Potter’s Daughter” in the anthology Elemental, which was selected to appear in The Year’s Best Fantasy #7.

She has published 2 Stargate Atlantis novels, Reliquary and Entanglement. Her Stargate SG-1 short story, “Archaelogy 101,” was published in Stargate Magazine #8. In 2013, Lucas Books published Wells’ Star Wars novel, Empire and Rebellion: Razor’s Edge.

The first volume of her Raksura novellas was published in September 2014. The second volume will be released in April 2015.

She has also published 2 YA fantasy novels, Emilie and the Hollow World in 2013 and “Emilie and the Sky World” in 2014.

Wells is known for the complex, realistically detailed societies she creates. This is often credited to her academic background in anthropology.

Check out the awesome art and music for the Raksura characters.

CARL SLAUGHTER: The music for your Raksura universe is so dramatic and so haunting. Your website says “fan music,” but the music is so well produced and so appropriate for the story, I have to wonder if it was written and produced by a professional musician. Who is Peter Cline and how did he get involved?

MARTHA WELLS: Peter Cline contacted me through my Live Journal and said he was inspired by reading the novels to do some pieces of music, and would I like to hear it. I loved them and asked him if I could put them on the site for other people to enjoy. That’s really all there was to it.

CARL: The Raksura art is direct and immediate. You don’t have to analyze it to understand the art represents. And it’s all about the characters, rather than landscape or costume or whatever. Did you have a hand in designing the art?

MARTHA: No, I didn’t design or commission any of the art. The professional art for the covers was commissioned by the publisher, and the fan art was done by readers who were inspired by the novels and wanted to do some art. The artists usually email me and say they’ve done fan art and would I like to see it, and I say yes, and link it or host it on the site if the artist is okay with that.

CARL: How much of the art is fan and how much is professional? Which ones are for the cover, which are for the inside of the book, and which are just for the website?

MARTHA: The two cover paintings on the art section of the Raksura site are labeled as covers. One is by Matthew Stewart, the cover of The Cloud Roads (it was the winner of a Chesley Award for best paperback illustration in 2012), and the other is by Steve Argyle, the cover of The Serpent Sea. The cover art of the novels was commissioned by the publisher. There isn’t any art inside the novels. I didn’t commission any art for the web site. (I can’t afford to.)

CARL: I also noticed that there’s more than one artist. Is there a different artist for each book? A different artist for each character?

MARTHA: Matthew Stewart did the cover for The Cloud Roads, and Steve Argyle did the covers for The Serpent Sea and The Siren Depths. There isn’t an artist for each character, as the only official art commissioned by the publisher were the cover paintings for each novel. There is art by three different fan artists on the site, and the link to each piece of art is labeled with the artist’s name. Some people drew the individual characters, the others drew groups. I didn’t tell any of the fan artists what to draw, they drew what they wanted.

CARL: Before you wrote Stargate and Star Wars stories, how much research did you do? Did you watch all the episodes? Did you read other Stargate/Star Wars novels? Did you consult with anyone on the TV/movie production team?

MARTHA: I was/am a long time Star Wars fan, and a Stargate: SG1 and Stargate: Atlantis fan. I saw all the movies, and watched all the episodes when they first came out before I knew I was ever going to write the books, and have them all on DVD. I didn’t consult with anyone in the production departments, just the editors for the publishers who were licensed to do the tie-ins.

CARL: Are there guidelines for writing franchise tie-in stories? Is there an editor assigned to keep everything within a canon? Do you submit outlines and so on? Or do you have creative freedom?

MARTHA: Yes, there are guidelines, and they are different for every franchise. There is an editor (all professionally published novels have editors) who helps with canon questions. I did submit outlines, but submitting an outline doesn’t mean I don’t have creative freedom. I’m not entirely sure what you mean by that in this context. I wrote the books I wanted to write.

CARL: Did the franchises contact you or did you query them? Is there an application process for writers who want to break into franchise writing?

MARTHA: I queried for the Stargate: Atlantis novels. The Star Wars publisher contacted my agent and asked me if I’d be interested in doing the book. I don’t think there is any standard application process. I think it’s different for each franchise.

CARL: Did you feel artistically inhibited writing about a universe you didn’t create?

MARTHA: No, but I feel an obligation to get the story and the characterization as close to canon as possible.

CARL: After doing so much adult fantasy, why did you decide to delve into YA sci-fi?

MARTHA: When I was a teenager, I enjoyed a lot of books that would now be classified as YA. I wanted to write the kind of books I wanted to read back then.

CARL: Did you study the YA genre or consult with any YA author/editors?

MARTHA: I read YA books because I enjoy them, I don’t know if that counts as studying the genre.

CARL: The main character in your YA stories is a girl named Emilie. Is she modeled after someone, real or fictional?

MARTHA: She’s fictional, and I made her up. She isn’t modeled after anyone.

CARL: Will there be further adventures with Emilie?

MARTHA: Probably not. The publisher was Strange Chemistry, the YA line of Angry Robot Books, and they shut down earlier this year.

CARL: Got any advice to aspiring speculative fiction writers?

MARTHA: Just research the industry so you know how publishing works, and write the kind stories that you love to read.

RAKSURA MUSIC:
The Solitary:

Chime:

Deceit of the Fell:

The Fell Flight Attacks:

www.marthawells.com

Game Theory in Writing Part 1: Goals vs. Milestones

written by David Steffen

This is the first of a short series of articles about applying Game Theory to writing. Game Theory is the study of strategic decision making, a field of study made most famous by mathematician John Nash (which the movie A Beautiful Mind was based on). I won’t be getting into the math of Game Theory, but I thought it might be interesting to discuss some applications of strategic decision making in the writing/submitting/publishing process because I’m both a writing geek and a programming geek. A discussion mixing the two topics lights up all kinds of synapses in the geek centers of my brain.

So, for this installment I’m going to talk about the importance of differentiating between goals and milestones. What does this have to do with game theory? Well, much of the focus of game theory is based around “gamifying” ordinary activities by defining scoring rules and ways to determine your level of success in the game, and thus defining ways to look at a scenario that will encourage the outcome you want. By choosing carefully how you determine your own level of success you can exert some control over what behaviors you encourage. Choosing well can generate energy and momentum to drive you to bigger and better things. Choosing poorly can leave you disheartened and weary.

But what are goals and what are milestones?

Goals
Goals are things you can accomplish which you have complete control over (or at least as complete control over as you have over anything). In writing, some goals might be:

to write every day
to finish writing a novel in 2015
to write 5000 words a week
to never trunk a story
to write every other story in a character unlike yourself in some major way
to submit to pro-paying markets only

Milestones
Milestones are things which would laudable and worthy of celebration, but which are not under your direct control.

to sell a story for the first time
to become eligible to be a member of SFWA
to sell a story to Asimov’s
to be nominated for a Hugo
to get a positive review from Lois Tilton

In some ways goals and milestones are very similar. You can fail or you can succeed to reach goals or milestones, and they are both kinds of ways to measure success. Both are things worthy of celebration if met. So what’s the point in differentiating between them. The primary difference is in how you can best react to NOT meeting them.

Because goals are entirely under your control, you can react however you want to not meeting them. Maybe the goals were too ambitious for your lifestyle or skills–that doesn’t necessarily mean you shouldn’t have pursued them, and there certainly can be things outside of your control that may have blocked you (personal illness, death in the family, change in career, eviction, etc). If you don’t meet them, maybe they still helped you reach higher than you otherwise would have, or maybe you need to aim lower to avoid discouragement. However the goals motivate you, run with it. I find that setting goals of daily butt-in-chair time combined with goals that maintain a quick turnaround of a story to another market after rejection have served me well to keep rejection from getting me down and to make sure I sit down and actually produce. (I’ll talk more about setting good motivating submission goals in a later article)

Because milestones are not under your control, you shouldn’t beat yourself up over it. You can write an amazing story and Asimov’s might reject it for any number of reasons. You can’t control how people react to your stories, and if you beat yourself up for it, that’s a quick route to discouragement and disheartening funk. If you’ve chosen your goals wisely, they will be setting you on a path to try to reach your milestones and that will let you exert your control as best you can, but at the end of the day those milestones still depend on other people and you shouldn’t beat yourself up for what other people do. Milestones are things to be celebrated, and you can even set up structured ways to celebrate them, such as the Bingo Card that Christie Yant uses, but it’s important to remember that they’re still out of your control.

Interview: Sandy Williams

Sandy Williams is the author of the Shadow Reader YA trilogy by Ace. Her next book is a space urban fantasy/science fiction romance due in January 2015. She is currently reading The Wise Man’s Fear, book #2 in Patrick Rothfuss’ Kingkiller Chronicles. She has taken the ice bucket challenge.

CARL SLAUGHTER: The love triangle between McKenzie, Aren, and Kyol created a lot of buzz on Good Reads. Readers spent a lot of time discussing which guy is sexier, which one is better suited for McKenzie, and her decision making process when she chose between the two. Why did you choose to include a love triangle in the story?

SANDY WILLIAMS: Ah, the love triangle question. Readers either love them or hate them. Surprisingly, a good number of readers who usually hate love triangles enjoyed McKenzie’s story. I think that’s because I didn’t write it as a love triangle. I wrote a story about a girl who falls out of love with one guy, and into love with another. When I was writing the story, I tried really, really hard not to make McKenzie go back and forth between the two guys. She’ll always love Kyol, of course, but it’s a different kind of love, and once she made the decision to move on, she moved on. That didn’t erase all the memories she had with him, or the fact that he’s a good, respectable man, but she found Aren, and he lets her be who she wants to be. He lets her take risks and doesn’t protect her from the knowledge of the evil in the Realm. They fit together better.

CS: When McKenzie finally gets what she’s been asking for for 10 years, a normal life in the human world, she goes back into the fae world and stays. Was she really happy or did she really at home in the fae world all along?

SW: She definitely wasn’t happy with a normal job and life in the real world. After ten years, she’d built too many relationships to be able to say goodbye to the Realm. When she gets a taste of normal, she realizes that she’s permanently changed, and that she doesn’t need to be like everyone else on Earth; she can be herself.

CS: At the beginning of the series, McKenzie is a Nancy Drew type, using her gift to analyze the scenes where fae transported. By the end of the series, she has learned how to wield a sword and uses it in battle. So she’s become a sort of warrior princess type. Why the transformation?

SW: I love the transformation! McKenzie has always been a strong, brave person, but in a world where everyone else has wielded a sword since they could walk, she’s never stood a chance against her enemies. She’s always had to have a protector. I wanted her to be able to take care of herself. She has the courage for it, and because of a certain event at the end of The Shattered Dark, she starts developing the skills. I love how that changes her character.

CS: If “Shadow Reader” is turned into a movie, who would you want to play McKenzie? What about Aren, Kyol, Lena and the other characters?

SW: This is one of the hardest questions I’m asked. I can point to actors and actresses who look similar to the characters in my head, but they’ve never been in a role where they acted like my characters, and a person’s movements, expressions, posture, etc. make up such a big portion of a character in my mind. But, if I’m forced to identify specific actors and actresses, I can do that. 🙂 For McKenzie, if the model on the cover of my books has any acting ability at all, she would do phenomenally. She looks EXACTLY like McKenzie. I’m so lucky my cover artist found the perfect match. I’m not a huge Brad Pitt fan, but Brad from the movie TROY totally works as an Aren. Kyol is probably the hardest match to find because there’s so much in his personality that makes him unique. Gah. I seriously can’t think of any actor that comes close to Kyol, but I’m going to say Stephen Amell, just because I love ARROW and he can be intense.

CS: What’s next for Sandy Williams?

I’m planning to release a sci-fi romance early next year. I’m excited about it. Both the hero and heroine can kick some serious butt, and they have a fun history. You can read an excerpt of the first chapter here . I can’t wait until it releases!

The Best of Well-Told Tales

written by David Steffen

Well-Told Tales was a pulp fiction podcast which also produced some short films, run by Kevin Colligan and which was active from about 2007 to 2009. They ran stories in the mystery, horror, and science fiction genres. That’s… pretty much all I know because the site itself is no longer maintained and there doesn’t seem to be a good source of the information that I can find. I was able to find the episodes for download here on Archive.org although unfortunately that is only their numbered episodes, which does not include their short films or their serially-released full-cast production of the comedy superhero story “I Killed Awesome Man”. I found another listing that has 5 of 8 episodes of “I Killed Awesome Man” here. I haven’t had any luck finding the full “I Killed Awesome Man” for download–if someone knows where to find it, please post a link in the comments. One nice thing about the Creative Commons podcast licenses is that it’s completely legitimate for a third-party site to post an archive of episodes even when the original site is no longer maintained.

Overall, I thought the quality of the show was kind of uneven, even accounting for my general disinterest in the mystery genre–quite a few of the stories were full of tired overused ideas and didn’t really do anything new with them. But some of the episodes were good, and I liked enough of them to make the list.

1. Parliament of Me by Patrick Hurley
Man has a vision where he meets all of the alternate selves he could’ve become, who are now voting to decide which one gets to be the real person.

2. Fourth Wall by Maddie Ward
A boy is worried for his sister who’s started talking to herself in her room, narrating her life as if she has an audience, but is there someone actually watching?

3. Tequila by Finn Colgan
The horrors you find at the bottom of a tequila bottle

4. I Used to Love Her by Theodore Carter
A tale of a relationship turned sour. Also, she might not really be human anymore.

5. The David by Jonathan Kravetz
A woman has lost her Will to Live, literally, and a detective is hired to find that Will to Live and bring it back.

Honorable Mention

The 30-Day Baby Company by Darren Callahan

Interview: Ann Leckie

Ann Leckie‘s Ancillary Justice swept the awards. (See the list below.) The sequel, Ancillary Sword, is due in October 2014. The third novel in the trilogy will be titled Ancillary Mercy. Lecke is a Clarion West graduate, former VP of SFWA, founder of GigaNotoSaurus, and former slush editor for Podcastle. Her short fiction has appeared in Realms of Fantasy, Strange Horizons, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Subterranean Magazine.

CARL SLAUGHTER: YOU’RE A CLARION GRADUATE. WHAT DID YOU LEARN AT CLARION THAT MADE A CRUCIAL DIFFERENCE IN YOUR WRITING CAREER?

ANN LECKIE: I learned a *lot* at Clarion West. It would have been difficult not to. But I think there were two things that made the biggest difference.

One was something that, when I say it, maybe sounds kind of trivial. But it was so important. Which was, that before I went, I knew that I wanted to write, and I had been writing–of course, you have to send a sample of your fiction with your application. And I had written two novels (now trunked, fortunately) and several short stories, and had been submitting those short stories. But I was hesitant to say, “I’m a writer.” I would, when asked, kind of hedge. “I’m trying to write.”

After six weeks of being with people who took my work seriously, who all assumed that of *course* I was a writer, I went home feeling like I could take my own work seriously now. Not that I was holding back, or not taking it seriously before. But the “gosh should I really be doing this, am I wasting my time, what if I’m not really a writer?” part of my internal critic was gone, which psychologically freed me up to push harder and be more confident in my work. This might not be a big deal for some folks, but it was really important to me.

The second thing is maybe also a bit odd. So, our week six instructor was Michael Swanwick. Who is awesome. I mean, he read every single story each of us had applied with and also every single story we’d turned in during the entire workshop, and gave us critiques on every one of them. This is an amazing commitment, an incredible gift to us. And he’s Michael freaking Swanwick, right? So when he critiqued the story I’d turned in for week six, he gave me all kinds of fabulous advice, much of it very specific, and I noted it all down and was all set to revise the story according to his advice. Because, seriously, it was, no question, excellent advice. How could it not be?

But the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me that it was excellent advice for an entirely different story. Not the story I’d written, but the story he’d perceived in the shambles that was my first draft. And I said to myself, “Self, you can’t actually take any of that advice. Instead, you need to rewrite the story in such a way that Michael Swanwick would not have misread it.”

That story turned out to be my first genre sale, my first pro sale, and my first appearance in a Years Best anthology. And the vitally important lesson Michael Swanwick taught me was that sometimes you ought to ignore even the very best advice. Even if it comes from Michael Swanwick. Maybe that sounds trivial, too. But anyone who’s been faced with several, possibly contradictory critiques of a story will probably know how incredibly useful that knowledge is.

CARL SLAUGHTER: FROM THE FIRST DRAFT OF ANCILLARY JUSTICE AS A SHORT STORY UNTIL YOU SOLD THE NOVEL MANUSCRIPT WAS, WHAT, 10 YEARS? WERE THERE TIMES DURING THAT DECADE WHEN YOU THOUGHT YOU’D NEVER FINISH THE BOOK OR THOUGHT IT WOULD NEVER BE GOOD ENOUGH TO SELL?

ANN LECKIE: Oh, merciful Unconquered Sun, yes. Pretty much the entire time I was working on it, plus the entire time I was querying agents. I’ve come to think of that as the normal emotional background of writing, actually.

CARL SLAUGHTER: YOU WERE WORKING ON THE MANUSCRIPT WHILE YOU HAD YOUNG CHILDREN IN THE HOUSE. HOW DID YOU MANAGE BOTH AT THE SAME TIME?

ANN LECKIE: With some difficulty. At first, I would write in the few hours a day that my toddler napped, while my older child was at school. When he stopped napping, I signed him up for morning nursery school and wrote then. Once both kids were in school full time it got easier, though I’d made my life a bit more complicated by taking a job as a lunch lady. I wasn’t able to finish Ancillary Justice, though, until I quit that job and had school hours to myself. It would have been a zillion times harder if I’d had a full-time day job to handle. I’ve been really, really lucky.

CARL SLAUGHTER: ANCILLARY JUSTICE SWEPT THE AWARDS. ANY IDEA WHAT THE APPEAL OF THE STORY IS THAT MADE IT SO POPULAR?

ANN LECKIE: I honestly don’t. Well, I did sit down to write a kind of story that I thought I’d enjoy reading. I threw in things that appealed to me–heck, I crowbarred them in. I was working the whole time with the assumption that it would never sell so I might as well please myself. I guess there are other people out there who like the same kinds of things I do!

CARL SLAUGHTER: YOU HAVEN’T DONE SHORT STORIES IN A WHILE. TOO BUSY WITH NOVELS?

ANN LECKIE: Pretty much, yes! Though I’d like to do more short fiction some time.

CARL SLAUGHTER: WHAT WAS YOUR INVOLVEMENT WITH GIGANOTOSAURUS AND WHAT WERE THE HIGHLIGHTS OF YOUR TIME THERE? WHAT ABOUT YOUR ROLE AT POD CASTLE?

ANN LECKIE: I started GigaNotoSaurus because I’d inherited a bit of money, and I felt that there weren’t enough places publishing longer fiction. I’ve been really pleased with how it’s turned out: in its first year, two stories I published were nominated for Nebulas, and another one the next year. And I published some amazing work by amazing writers, like Zen Cho’s “House of Aunts” or Benjanun Sriduangkaew’s “Woman of the Sun, Woman of the Moon.” Or Yoon Ha Lee’s “The Winged City.” Or…I could go on.

Podcastle–when Rachel Swirsky became editor of Podcastle (that was before PC had even started running) she asked me if I’d like to read slush for her. And I said yes, because it seemed like it would be fun. And it was! I also did some episode intros, and narrated some stories, which was also great fun. When Rachel was ready to step down, she asked me if I was interested in editing, but I was already setting up GNS, and felt two editing gigs would be too much. So I stayed on slushing for Anna and Dave when they took over.

I enjoyed it very much, but I’ve stepped down as slusher there, and turned over my GNS editing duties to Rashida J Smith, because noveling right now is taking up a lot of brain space.

CARL SLAUGHTER: WHAT PERSPECTIVE DID YOU GAIN DURING YOUR TIME AS SECRETARY OF SFWA?

ANN LECKIE: There’s a lot of work that goes on behind the scenes at a volunteer organization. Orgs like SFWA continue to exist and function because of the hard work of folks who actually have lots of other things to attend to, and they spend their free time doing that hard work. And it’s easy for members to think of the Board (or whatever the org equivalent is) as “them” to our “us” but really “they” are us to begin with. I’ve come to be a bit more patient with how slow some organizational decisions are, and how easy it is to think a particular issue or procedure is just a matter of immediately doing one particular thing, when really it’s more difficult and complicated than that, for reasons that aren’t necessarily visible to me.

CARL SLAUGHTER: GOT ANY ADVICE TO ASPIRING SPECULATIVE FICTION WRITERS?

ANN LECKIE: Yes! Don’t give up. Be willing to take criticism, be willing to reconsider what you’re doing, but once you’ve decided on what you’re doing, do that. Don’t worry about what someone told you editors want or don’t want, don’t worry about whether your work is marketable, don’t worry about lists of “rules” that tell you not to use second person or never to use adverbs or whatever. Just do it, and do it as awesomely as you can at that particular time in your life, and trust the universe for the rest. And when it’s done, send it out and try to forget about it, and start working on the next thing. And speaking as a former slusher–when you submit, always read and follow the guidelines!

Ancillary Justice won the following awards:

2014 Hugo Award for Best Novel
Golden Tentacle for best debut novel of 2013.
Arthur C. Clarke Award for best science fiction novel of the year.
British Science Fiction Association BSFA Award for Best Novel of 2013.
Nebula Award for Best Novel.
Locus Award for Best First Novel.

The novel was also nominated for the following awards:

Shortlisted for the Philip K. Dick Award.
Tiptree Award Honor List for 2013.
Finalist for the 2013 Compton Crook Award.