Dwelling in Probabilities

Pride StoryBundle 2021 - Interview with Andi C. Buchanan

2021-06-11T18:56:30Z

This interview is part of a series of interviews with authors who have books in this year's StoryBundle! The Bundle will run until 7/1 and includes books by Heather Rose Jones, Melissa Scott, Matthew Bright, Anya DeNiro, R.B. Lemberg, dave ring, Ebony Dunbar, J. Scott Coatsworth, Leigh Harlan, A.J. Fitzwater, Langley Hyde, Andi and me. Get all 16 books at the $20 level and help support Rainbow Railroad's life-saving work with LGBTQ refugees!

Can you tell us about the book you have in this StoryBundle?

There was really only one solution: it was time to write about witches. We got together, pooled our skills, shared ideas, and began writing light novellas, set in New Zealand, about contemporary witches.

Succulents and Spells is my contribution (my first contribution, I should say - it inevitably turned into a series). It’s about Laurel Windflower, a young witch who lives in a slightly grotty flat in Wellington with a monster under the floor and is feeling at a bit of a dead end. That is until one winter’s day when Marigold Nightfield, a scientist with magical interests, shows up at her door.

If you want a taste, I wrote a short prequel, First-years and Familiars, which is free for subscribers to my newsletter. There’s also a sequel called Microscopes and Magic, told from Marigold’s point of view, and more on the way.

What do you find engaging or important about writing LGBTQ+/queer fiction?

I couldn’t have said this even five years ago, but there’s a normality about it: of course I’m going to write about people like me and about people like those I love; it’s just my community. But even then I do it in the knowledge that I just didn’t have these same stories to read growing up - that (even in a book filled, fairly accepting household) any sort of queer representation is hard to find.

Then there’s another type of queer story, which is where it interrogates or has something more to say about queerness, or about existing in this world - or another - as some stripe of queer. Our experience, how life paths, our communities, are entangled in so many different ways - and sometimes non-realist elements are the ways to explore those that come naturally.

What other books or stories do you have out that readers of this StoryBundle might enjoy?

Aside from the other works in the Windflower series mentioned, From a Shadow Grave (Paper Road Press, 2019) is an exploration of the murder of a teenager in pre-war Wellington, and the possible lives she could have had. It’s genre crossing and definitely queer.

My recent short fiction includes “Ōmarino”, the pandemic story I wrote in 2019 (because of course I did) in Rebuilding Tomorrow, an anthology about disabled people rebuilding society after the apocalypse, and “Even the Clearest Water” (Fireside, 2020) about water fae and autistic families.

Aside from your own work, what are some of your favorite queer reads you would recommend to folks?

This bundle includes some of them, especially The Four Profound Weaves and No Man’s Land. I really like that we’re at a place where we have enough good queer reads to choose from, so here are just a few that comes to mind.

I love Darcie Little Badger’s Elatsoe which is part murder myster, part exploration of history and culture and magic, part coming of age, from the point of view of an asexual protagonist. Euphoria Kids by Alison Evans is a magical, hopeful story about queer/trans teens. Nino Cipri’s Finna is an all too real exploration of millennial precarious employment and the graphic novel Mooncakes by Suzanne Walker and Wendy Xu is a delightful story of witchcraft and love.

If you enjoyed Succulents you might want to check out some of the other Witchy Fiction novellas - and if you’re looking for queer fiction in particular I’d recommend Riverwitch, Overdues and Occultism, and Holloway Witches.

Thanks, Andi!

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Pride StoryBundle Mini-interview with R.R. Angell, author of BEST GAME EVER

2020-06-21T13:57:31Z

Next up on my list (see A.C. Wises' interviews here) of Pride StoryBundle authors to interview is author R.R. Angell. In addition to this terrific novel about queer college students and virtual gaming, Bob has had stories appear in Asimov's and The Baltimore Review, amongst other places. Welcome, Bob!

• Can you tell us about the book you have in this StoryBundle?

Best Game Ever is a nerdy virtual reality tech / queer love story set at Bolin College. This group of gay, nonbinary, and straight programming geeks are on a VR design team racing toward a deadline. Robby’s roommate dies of an apparent suicide after playing their favorite VR first-person flyer game, Flying Squirrels. Robby suspects foul play. With the help of his teammates, Robby exposes a threat to all VR gamers, and the SaikoVR AI game engine, Virtuella, fights back. Can Robby and his friends defeat Virtuella, save the world, and find love in the BEST GAME EVER? And will Robby ever figure out that he’s hopelessly in love with the unattainable gender-fluid Miles?

I had the idea for this novel while on a business trip to Silicon Valley where I was at VPL Research with Jaron Lanier getting to play with his new virtual reality worlds. They were clunky by today’s standards, and you could walk or fly through walls and “solid” objects. On the drive back to the hotel, I got nervous about my expectations of reality, as if I’d been deprogrammed slightly and was afraid I might try to drive through a guardrail. I started writing the novel in 1992 and have rewritten it over five times. The last complete rewrite did the trick.

• What do you find engaging/important about writing LGBTQ/queer fiction?

I write the stories that I want to read, the ones that I don’t see out there in the world. I like exploring ideas, and have always written to make queer life the most normal and accepted thing in the world in all my fiction. A lot of my literary works explore the constraints and restraints society imposes as it guides and molds us to fit in. Most of that is for me, a way to understand how I got to this point in my life.

• What books or stories do you have out that readers of this StoryBundle might enjoy?

My queer SF novella, In The Space of Nine Lives, is about a boy growing up on a deep space transport ship whose life course is determined by his love for another boy. It was bravely and originally published in Asimov’s way back in January 2006, and republished as a stand-alone novella in 2019. Print and ebook versions through my website or at Amazon.

Two other queer literary stories are available free online. Lost Anchors is a story about an aging gay couple. A Dry Wish is the story about a failing blogger riding out a binge in Vienna, Austria. You can find them here.

Thanks, Bob!

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Pride StoryBundle Mini-interview with Heather Rose Jones, author of FLOODTIDE

2020-06-20T13:05:23Z

Next up on my list (see A.C. Wises' interviews here) of Pride StoryBundle authors to interview is author Heather Rose Jones. In addition to writing a great historical fantasy series about queer women in a magical kingdom in Europe, Heather blogs extensively about lesbians and queer women in history and maintains a splendid podcast that mixes fiction, author interviews and historical research on the same topic. Welcome, Heather!

Can you tell us a bit about the book you have in this StoryBundle?

Floodtide is the story of an ordinary girl, thrown into the midst of extraordinary times. For the fourth book in my Alpennia historic fantasy series, I wanted to shake things up a bit: focus on a working class character, not the rich and powerful; view the world through a single viewpoint of limited experience; and give my collection of teenaged minor characters a chance to have adventures on their own while the adults were distracted.

Rozild is a laundry maid and aspiring apprentice dressmaker. Through her friendship with Celeste, the dressmaker’s daughter, she’s introduced to the world of the charmwives--the folk-magic side of the ceremonial magic and alchemy that dominated the earlier books. Roz has an awkward habit of falling in love with girls, which forms a counterpoint to all the other challenges she needs to navigate, but the deep friendships that survive the test are what save the day when the waters rise and fever stalks the city.

At the mid-point in the seven-book series, I wanted to write a story that could stand alone and be an introduction to my little magical Ruritania

What do you find engaging/important about writing LGBTQ/queer fiction?

Writing fiction is always a case of fixing a spotlight on a limited slice of reality (for a reality that can include fantastic and unreal things). Fiction doesn’t have the fractal diversity of real life, so it’s easy for an author’s own interests and biases (whether hidden or overt) to filter what gets onto the page. When all the filters that are allowed to be published are aligned on the same wavelength, the result is a polarized light that only allows readers to “see” a fraction of the world.

When I was a young sff reader just beginning to understand my sexuality, the closest identifications I could find in sff were metaphors and allegories: closeted magical races, the demi-monde of vampires, alienated teenage protagonists who only knew that they were different from everyone around them and who went on quests to find their destiny. Those are all marvelously rich literary tropes, but woman cannot live on tropes alone. I wanted characters who were like me and who also had those experiences.

Writing in the field of historic fantasy and historic romance--and especially given the hard work of researching and interpreting the lives and experiences of queer people in the past--I also feel that fiction has a key role in rooting our identities throughout the entirety of human existence. Queer people in the past weren’t just like us, but they were there. And that same filtered, polarized light in both fiction and non-fiction writing about history has insisted for too long that they were not there. Writing queer people back into history--even a fantastic history with magic--is my way of claiming my place as an equal member of humanity.

What books or stories do you have out that readers of this StoryBundle might enjoy?

Obviously, if they like Floodtide, then I highly recommend that they check out the entire Alpennia series, starting with Daughter of Mystery. By the time they come round again to the events of Floodtide they’ll have a new appreciation for how it all fits together. And if they’d like a non-fantasy story that shows just how queer the actual past could be, They might enjoy my free novelette “The Mazarinette and the Musketeer” which takes several real-life women of the late 17th century and throws them together in a fluffy adventure.

Aside from your own work, what are some of your favorite queer reads you would recommend to folks?

I’m going to suggest three very different works that have grabbed me in different ways. The first is T. Kingfisher’s The Raven and the Reindeer which is the f/f Snow Queen story that would have overturned my life if it had existed when I was a teenager. The second is Claire O’Dell’s near-future gender-flipped Sherlock Holmes series, the Janet Watson Chronicles (A Study in Honor and The Hound of Justice) which may have been a bit too painful in predicting the sort of future we now find ourselves in. The third is Nalo Hopkinson’s The Salt Roads which--in the midst of historic pain and tragedy--is a tightly-woven cloth of so many different ways of being, feeling, and loving that I felt more included than I do in 99% of books, despite none of the characters resembling my life at all.

Thanks, Heather! The Pride StoryBundle runs until 7/1 and our selected charity is Rainbow Railroad, an organization that works with LGBTQ+ refugees.

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