Babel Clash

Oh, the opportunity for self-promotion. What every author lives for…when we’re not hiding underneath the bed, that is, which is usually what I can be found doing when this particular dog-and-pony show. I sort of wish I could run up to the whole world, shove books into their hands, squeak, and run away. Since that isn’t an option…

The fifth book in my October Daye urban fantasy series comes out this September. The Toby books are about fae living alongside the mortal world, focusing on Toby herself, half-fae, half-human, all pretty much annoyed at the universe for forcing her to deal with every little thing that comes along. One Salt Sea is about mermaids, kidnapping, murder, war, and not nearly enough coffee. I love Toby so much. She’s the protagonist I’ve been living with the longest, and the one with the most books in her ongoing story. I really do recommend reading these in order; the first book is Rosemary and Rue. All five books are published by DAW, and the first four are available now from a bookstore near you. Assuming there is a bookstore near you. You could be on an Arctic research base, or in Atlantis, or something. In which case, go go Gadget online ordering.

The first book in my shiny new urban fantasy series, InCryptid, comes out in March of 2012, also from DAW Books. InCryptid is about a family of cryptozoologists working to protect the cryptid population of the planet from humanity, and occasionally working to protect humanity from the cryptid population. It’s a multi-generational story, beginning with the adventures of Verity Price, professional ballroom dancer and part-time cryptid social worker. Her story starts in Discount Armageddon, which is about finding yourself, getting a little bit lost, ballroom dance, old rivalries, hot European men, talking mice, and jumping off tall buildings with very little provocation. I’m super-excited about this book. Like, really, really super-excited. I love this family, I love this setting, I love the fact that Verity really does fight monsters in impractical shoes, and she does it on purpose. Please please please check it out. (I have no pride.)

The final book in the Newsflesh trilogy, Blackout, will be coming out in May 2012, under the name “Mira Grant.” This is the conclusion of my vast story of virology, conspiracy, politics, and journalism, all set against the backdrop of a post-zombie America (the zombie apocalypse was twenty years ago, and we survived). You should definitely read these in order; the first in the trilogy, Feed, has been nominated for the
2011 Hugo Award for Best Novel, which makes me a little giddy to this day.

I also have a lot of short fiction, always, but those are the big projects. What’ve you got, Devon? Bring us home!

Devon and I are here to spend the next few weeks talking about genre, and the fact that we’re willing to work in multiple genres at the same time, which is, I suppose, naughty and not the sort of thing that good girls do.  Before we can really do that, though, we’re going to need to decide what a genre is.  (Sidenote: The trouble with the word “genre” is that it doesn’t lend itself particularly well to crappy puns, which are usually the way I sort of ease myself into a topic.  Yeah, this makes me a lot of fun on first dates.  Anyway…)

According to Wikipedia, which is, as we all know, the font of all knowledge, a genre is “the term for any category of literature or other forms of art or culture based on some set of stylistic criteria.”  It goes on to state that “genres are formed by conventions that change over time as new genres are invented and the use of old ones are discontinued. Often, works fit into multiple genres by way of borrowing and recombining these conventions.”  So genres change with time, and sometimes get kicked to the curb as they cease to become relevant.  Groovy.

The whole concept of the genre was codified by two of my favorite dead Greek dudes, Aristotle and Plato.  Before they, and others like them, decided that you should be able to tell whether something would make a good date movie based on subject matter alone, the whole idea of the genre was sort of alien territory.  Skipping forward a couple of hundred years…

We live in a world where genres are rigidly defined and controlled.  Sure, you can mix them, but there’s always going to be one genre that gets called out as the “real” genre for the work.  Got magic?  You’re writing fantasy.  Got ghosts?  You’re writing horror.  And so on.  The genres give us basic rules and conventions, which is awesome.  They also give us expectations and automatic judgments.  “The butler did it.”  “You’ll die if you have sex.”  “And they all lived happily ever after.”

Naturally, the reality isn’t quite that simple.

Living in two different genres gives me two very different sets of expectations to contend with.  By day, I am the perky Disney Halloweentown Princess known as Seanan McGuire, author of urban fantasy, superhero wackiness, and the occasional adventure of the Fighting Pumpkins cheer leading squad.  By night, I am the slightly manic cornfield hazard known as Mira Grant, author of scientific science fiction, zombie mayhem, and lots of things involving pandemic disease.  I’m actually one of the luckier cross-genre authors, in that my two names allow me to maintain a degree of separation–something that can make all the difference when it comes to setting reader expectations.

Why do I write multiple genres?  Because I live in multiple genres.  My life is, by turns, a romance, a comedy, a situation comedy (different rules), an animal adventure, and a musical.  Mostly it’s a musical-slash-something else.  The idea of saying “I will only write one type of life, and one type of story, forever,” sort of makes my skin crawl.  And if you don’t think that you live in multiple genres, well…

This is gonna be fun.

Today is July 4th, but in the Babel Clash world, it’s the Monday before the changing of the guard.  For the last two weeks two of horror’s best authors, Jonathan Maberry and David Moody, have been gracing us with posts about zombies, the craft of writing, and giveaways.  Not bad for two weeks!  I wanted to thank them both for spending the last two weeks with us!  Please use today to promote to your heart’s content - past, current, and future projects (Oxford comma!)  Also, for those of you who have entered David’s giveaway, tune in tomorrow to see who won the autographed books!

You should also tune in tomorrow because we have another set of amazing authors slated to begin posting for us.  Starting tomorrow, we’ll be joined by Seanan McGuire and Devon Monk!

Seanan McGuire is the author of the October Daye series.  In the series, we learn that fairy tales are real, and the main character, Toby Daye, is a changeling - half fae, half human.  The latest Toby Daye novel is Late Eclipses, followed by One Salt Sea in September (notice the Shakespearean references?).  Besides writing the Toby Daye series, Seanan McGuire also spends some of her time writing under the name Mira Grant.  The books by Mira Grant form the Newsflesh Trilogy (the second in the series, Deadline, was just released) and they involve a very interesting take on zombies.

Devon Monk also writes an urban fantasy series.  Her series stars Allie Beckstrom.  Beckstrom is a Hound - someone who can track a spell back to its caster.  In Beckstrom’s world, the use of magic incurs a physical (or mental) cost.  It’s interesting to read how Monk touches on the implications of the use of magic in her Beckstrom novels. The latest Allie Beckstrom novel is Magic on the Hunt, with Magic on the Line due out in November.

Devon steps aside from Allie Beckstrom briefly for a new series. The first book in her new steampunk comes out tomorrow, July 5th. That book, Dead Iron, takes place in the American Wild West in a time where bounty hunters, gunslingers, magic, and steam all intermingle. If paranormal and steampunk are your thing, Monk’s new series starring Cedar Hunt is right up your alley.

Readers, please join me in thanking Jonathan and David while also welcoming Seanan and Devon to the blog. It’s going to be another great two weeks!

It’s that time again where we must say goodbye to our current guests and welcome our new guests.  Special thanks to Mira and Jesse who filled the last two weeks with all things zombie.  I had a blast reading your posts and getting a peek into your world.  Do come back again!  If you have any last words (or zombie survival tips, or book plugs), we’d love to hear them. 

Next up, we switch focus from the undead to the epic with New York Times Bestselling authors Brandon Sanderson and Brent Weeks (who have both coincidentally started new series with their recent releases)! 

In The Way of Kings, Brandon Sanderson brings us the first in a ten book epic fantasy series called The Stormlight Archive.  Brandon was also one of the very first guests on Babel Clash and we’re glad to have him back on the blog.

Brent Weeks is also another Babel Clash alum (who could forget Brent’s epic debate with Joe Aberbrombie).  Brent’s new book is the first in a brand new series featuring Gavin Guile, a prism with only five years to achieve five goals. 

Welcome back to Babel Clash, Brandon and Brent.  We can’t wait to see what you have in store for us.

No, Jesse, you’re wrong; it will not all be okay, and the odds are good that the mean ol’ series will kill me in the night.  I will take comfort from knowing that yours is likely to do the same to you.  The series is the monster under my bed and in my closet, and since you probably have both a bed and a closet, one night, when you least expect it, you’re going to realize that you have a ten volume science fiction epic eating your brain.  And then?  Then I will laugh.

I do think that any really lively idea–and yes, this includes zombies, even if the zombies themselves can’t exactly be described as “lively”–is very likely to take over your brain and make you do what it wants.  I think of catching a story as being less like contracting the zombie virus, and more like getting one of those charming parasites that can take over ants and drive them around like little armored cars.  Once it’s in there, you just have to pray that it goes somewhere else before it chews your head entirely off.
 
Yes, I am a lot of fun at the dinner table.

The “where do you get your ideas?” question is common as mud.  The problem is…so are the ideas.  Seriously!  Putting together a good story is a lot like cooking a good meal.  You start with your protein, be it zombies or werewolves or vampires or a travelogue romance.  You add a vegetable–the end of the world, a political campaign, a race around the world, a case of mistaken identity, whatever.  Maybe you should get some starch in there: a love interest, the rumor of a cure, something in the cornfield.  Season to taste, serves four to six people per hundred pages.
 
Ideas are easy.  Combining ideas in a way that seems fresh and new (even if it isn’t) and keeps you interested until you finish writing the first draft, that’s the hard part.  Combining ideas in a way that keeps someone else interested is even harder, which is why so many stories wind up going untold, even in today’s storypalooza of Internet and print media and information everywhere.

Things that have caused me to write a book:

* Jetlag
* The Counting Crows
* Fish
* This interesting blueberry bush near my friend Michael’s house
* Fluke parasitism
* Reading Kenneth Muir’s Horror Movies of the 1980s cover to cover
* A blue sweater
* So You Think You Can Dance

Things that have remained entirely true to the original idea:

* …

…so yeah, there’s that.

Ideas have never been the problem.  Finding the exact right recipe to make those ideas come alive, that’s the hard part.  Sometimes you get it wrong.  Sometimes you’re halfway through the process before you realize that it should have been turnips, not potatoes, and you have to start basically from scratch.  Most of the time, you’ll get a better meal because you did that.  When you don’t, you’ll get a learning experience.  Not as tasty, definitely necessary to your growth as a writer.

And you can’t have my thirty-six hour days, Jesse.  I sold my soul at the crossroads to get them, fair and square, and you’re going to have to get your own.  If you’re really interested, I have a number you can call, and operators are always standing by…

See, I have a little problem: I am incapable of thinking in one-book increments.  Feed actually started as my attempt to write a book that would have no sequels, largely because I envisioned it as ending in such a way that none of my cast would ever be willing to work with me again (assuming any of them lived that long–this was a lot of drafts ago, and I honestly have no idea who was originally supposed to walk away when the dust cleared).

I tend to start less with plot than I do with situation.  In this case, my starting “what if?” was “what if the zombie apocalypse came, and the human race didn’t end in a blaze of bodily fluids and bullets?”  I wanted to play with the ecology of zombies.  Plot, and character, really didn’t matter to me, because I wasn’t going to write the book.  I was just going to play with the dead things.

Then I met my protagonists, Shaun and Georgia Mason, and character started to matter to me.  Who were they?  Why were they those people?  What did they think about each other?  About the people around them?  About the zombies?  I have literally hundreds of pages of notes on things like “what does Shaun eat for breakfast” and “how does Georgia feel about the current weapon licensing system?”  This had the handy side-effect of leaving me with hundreds of pages of notes on the world and how it worked (and people who thought Feed had a lot of data in it, you really have no idea…)

I was about halfway through writing Feed when I realized that there was going to be a sequel, and what that sequel was going to be about.  I did a lot of swearing, and took a lot more notes.  I was about two-thirds of the way through when I realized it was a trilogy.  Thankfully, there isn’t a fourth book (yet), because if there were, I think my head would probably explode.  But all in all, this is a good microcosm of how I write series.

For me, a series is an organic, living thing, a story that sprouts unexpected branches and then goes trundling merrily along them, like a snowball rolling down a hill.  Stories attract stories attract stories.  Sometimes, stories have endings, and that means the series is done; the Newsflesh trilogy really is intended as a trilogy, whereas the books I write under my urban fantasy ID (Seanan McGuire) tend to be part of long, twisty, ongoing series–and even those tend to grow on me when I’m not looking.  I live in a sea of literary kudzu.

It’s rare that I get to want anything; mostly, I just follow the story where it takes me, and, when necessary, break out the hammer of logic to force everything back on track.  It’s exciting.  In that “oh God oh God oh God what am I doing where am I going is that a hill?” kind of way.  Good thing I like roller coasters, huh?

I envy people who can decide “I think I’m going to write a series today,” rather than waking up and finding themselves six books into something that promises to be twenty-seven books long.  It must be restful.  So yes, Jesse, you have my envy.

So Jesse mentioned the concept of the “why” at the end of her last blog.  I like the “why”.  I like the “why” a little bit too much, as the occasional narrative restraining order will illustrate.  I was the little kid who would keep asking “Why?” for an hour, not because I wanted to be obnoxious (although I often was), but because I really truly deeply honestly wanted to know.  Why was the sky blue?  Why do cats have whiskers?  Why can’t I unleash an unstoppable army of cyborg dinosaurs to destroy all in their path before making me unquestioned ruler of the shattered world?  Why?

(Atmospheric scattering, so they can figure out whether they can fit through small spaces, and because my friends won’t let me.  You should probably thank my friends.  They are all that can stand between mankind and my frequently quixotic wrath.)
 
Now, I am the first to admit that things are scary even when they’re unexplained.  If you open your closet and a live rattlesnake is rattling at you from the middle of the clean towels, you’re not going to go “Well, this snake would be frightening and venomous if only it had a motivation and a logical reason for being here.”  You’re going to go “AHHHHHHH CRAP SNAKE!” and slam the closet door.  Even if you know why the snake is there–you live in rattlesnake country, you’re in the middle of a Syfy Original Movie, I came for dinner and my bag was making ominous rattling noises–you’re still probably going to go “AHHHHHHH CRAP SNAKE!” and slam the closet door.  Knowledge does not always eliminate fear.

Knowledge can, however, be used to enhance fear.  Imagine you’re swimming in a warm tropical river, content and serene.  Now imagine I come drifting by in a nice boat, refusing to touch the water.  That would be worrisome, right?  Now imagine I proceed to explain that I’m staying out of the water because it’s full of candiru, otherwise known as “urethra fish,” and go on to detail exactly what will happen if the candiru find you.  (I would do this.  Gleefully.  Because I think things like the candiru are cool.)  You’ll go from “tranquil” to “terrified” in under a minute, all because of knowledge.

That being said, in some cases, too much knowledge can actually cancel out fear.  I grew up in black widow country.  I have black widows living under my house and on my back porch.  I know what they look like, what their bites feel like, how dangerous they are, and how to avoid them.  I know that they’re actually pretty shy, as spiders go, and that if I don’t mess with them, they’re not likely to mess with me.  I am not afraid of them, because I know too much about them.  The “why” has become the antithesis of horror, and that’s, y’know, bad news for you if you were hoping to scare me with spiders any time soon.  (It’s also bad news for the people who choose to room with me in places like, say, Australia, where the spiders are the size of dinner plates and thirst for the taste of human souls.  I think they’re adorable.  This is bad for the health of everyone around me.)

So it’s a delicate balance between knowing/not knowing, and one that has to be maintained with the utmost care.  I believe that a little bit of knowledge can go a long, long way toward enhancing the quality of terror, like a pinch of salt can go a long, long way toward enhancing the taste of chocolate chip cookies.  Without that tiny bit of bitter, the sweet isn’t nearly as strong.  Well, without that tiny pinch of comprehension, the terror isn’t going to last nearly as long.

Like G.I. Joe once said, knowing is half the battle.

The other half involves a chainsaw and a shotgun.

So you’re preparing your ultimate zombie-themed dinner party, and you’re stuck for a dessert. Or you’re entertaining a zombie who’s recently gone vegetarian, and is jonesing for those good old days of gray matter and the delicious taste of human brains. Whatever your reasons, you need a brainy treat that puts the “sweet” back into “sweetmeats.”

Luckily, I’m here for you.

These delicious desserts were created by Jennifer at Cups and Cakes Bakery, in San Francisco, California, and she was kind enough to let us come in and record the entire process. Here’s how you, too, can create delicious bite-sized brains for you and your victi…er, guests. First up, a quick instructional video, followed by a detailed recipe.

HOW-TO!
YOU WILL NEED:

* A pastry bag.
* A decorating tip (I recommend a Wilton’s Round #6 or #7).
* Vanilla frosting.
* Food coloring.
* Cherry flavoring (the juice from a jar of maraschino cherries should work).
* Cupcakes.

…what, you don’t expect me to tell you how to bake, do you? Trust me, unless you like the taste of flame, you don’t want that.

The first thing you need to do is get the color of your icing right. The cherry flavoring will not just make your icing delicious; it will make it pink. This is good. Add cherry flavoring to your icing until you have a pale, medium pink color–the sort of thing you’d use for a My Little Pony cake at an eight-year-old’s birthday party. If you don’t like cherries, you can use red food coloring. Or human blood. Whatever makes you happy.

Once your frosting is nicely pink, get out the blue food coloring, and add a drop. Mix thoroughly. Add another drop. Repeat until your icing has turned an unpleasant shade of grayish-pink. It shouldn’t take much, and you don’t want to overdo it–brains aren’t meant to be purple–but once you get the color right, you’ll have something nicely vile looking.

Load up your pastry bag with icing, and let the fun begin!

MAKING THE BRAINS:

Step 1: Make a little mound of icing at the center of your cupcake. The key word is “little”: this is going to give height to your brain, and we want human organs, not giant mutant globes. That’s another kind of cupcake.

Step 2: Choose a “hemisphere” and begin using your frosting to make little ripples and whorls. You should only need one continuous line to make the right sort of messy, biological, gooey-looking ridges that you’d get in a real brain.

Step 3: Turn the cupcake around, and repeat on the other hemisphere.

Step 4: BRAINS!

If you’re going to be serving these to an appreciative audience, you can improve your presentation by putting them in the fridge for half an hour or so to set the icing, and then dripping just a bit of cherry juice on the brains and the plate when you bring them out (this won’t work with red food coloring, unless you want to resemble a Troma flick).

It’s so simple, and disgustingly delicious!

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So Jesse–who is apparently a lot more destructive than I knew, and by the way, if you come over, Jesse, I’m hiding the C4–wants to know why mankind has not yet descended into chaos and anarchy and lots of Mad Max-style hairstyling in the Newsflesh universe.

The short answer: Because I didn’t want it to, and I’m the author, so I get to have my way.

The long answer: The collapse of civilization isn’t a guaranteed result of any given apocalypse.  Look at Independence Day.  The aliens wiped out like half the planet in a very short period of time, and you still walk away from the movie feeling like they’ll be rebuilding by the end of the year.  The Canadians burned down the White House once, and we built a new one; why not just do the same after the aliens atomize it?  Mankind is very fond of reconstruction.  We’re sort of like wasps that way.  Kick over a wasps’ nest, the wasps will just build a new one.  After stinging the ever-loving crap out of you, that is.

The total collapse of society is predicated on several elements:

1. Population loss.  You need a lot of people to die, very quickly.
2. Lack of government response.  You need the government, for whatever reason, to delay action.
3. Failure of vital systems.  You need to lose power, shipping, communications, and law enforcement, all very quickly, all without replacement systems in place.

Stephen King’s The Stand achieves the collapse of society primarily through step one: population loss, with a lovely extra dose of step two: governmental denial.  Dawn of the Dead, on the other hand, achieves the collapse of society primarily through step three: even before most of the people are dead, the power’s out, there’s chaos in the streets, and everybody’s shooting wildly at everybody else.  As a rule, you need two of these elements to totally destroy society, and all three if you want to salt the ashes.

The apocalypse in Feed (colloquially known as “the Rising”) was specifically designed to avoid hitting any of the steps above whenever possible.  First off, while we did suffer some pretty major population loss, the start of the infection was documented enough that the death rate was a lot lower than it might have otherwise been.  Secondly, thanks to the CDC and WHO, the government was involved on a global scale almost immediately, which also did a great deal to keep things intact.  Finally, the fact that it was the zombie apocalypse meant that we had a very high geek survival rate…and they, along with the speed of governmental response, kept the power on.

Breaking everything so badly it can’t be fixed takes an incredibly fast death rate and a speed of collapse that is frankly not pretty (and probably leads to multiple unpleasant nuclear reactor incidents, since zombies can’t vent the core).  Plus, I’ve done it before.  I wanted to see what it would take to put society back together with duct tape and paranoia.  And it was fun!

So why did you feel the need to break everything?  Apocalypses like that are the reason the dystopian future can’t have nice things.

So Jesse wants us to get into the funny.  That’s cool.  I can roll with the funny–and not just the sort of funny that involves erecting elaborate scarecrows around the edges of the campsite while everyone else is still sleeping (although that was pretty funny).  I’m a funny girl.  I have to be, because funny is an absolutely integral part of horror.  Allow me to elaborate.

Have you ever been scared?  I mean really, really scared?  I’m talking about the kind of scared that makes your stomach drop down to your ankles and your head feel like it’s full of helium while your feet feel like they’re made of lead.  Think about that feeling.  Now?  Think about the way you felt immediately after you realized that you weren’t about to be eaten alive by an undead clown made entirely out of spiders.  Are you giggling nervously?  Well, you’re not alone.

Laughter is a natural human response to fear.  When something scares you, you try to laugh it off.  You make light of it, make jokes about it, because that keeps your brain from completely overloading.  (The line between “healthy, cleansing laughter” and “scary, hysterical laughter that makes everyone inch away from you and consider taking their chances with the zombies” is tragically thin, by the way.  So try not to laugh too much.)

My favorite horror movies and novels have always been the ones that included an element of comedy.  Stephen King’s IT is a beautiful example of blending screams with laughter–the kids may have everything evil under the sun to deal with, but they still get the giggles, goof off, and generally act like actual people put into an unbearable situation.  Or take Slither, written and directed by James Gunn.  That movie is insane, and I mean that in the best way possible.  And yes, all those people keep laughing, keep making jokes, and keep getting obsessed with little things, because that’s what keeps you sane when things get unbearable.

I find it really troublesome when horror loses its sense of humor.  No, a decapitation shouldn’t be funny, but that’s an extreme, and there’s a whole lot of room on the other end of the scale.  If things get too grim, too unrelentingly dark and depressing, why should I even bother trying to make it through?  It might be better to bow out while I still can, and go enjoy a story that still allows for a little bit of giggling in between the screams.  (It’s also possible to go too far toward the funny, resulting in things like Jason X, which was a lot of fun, but wasn’t really a horror movie.  Finding that fine line is part of the art of writing horror, like walking a trapeze line over a swimming pool filled with hungry mutant piranha.)

You can’t spell “slaughter” without “laughter.”  And that’s exactly the way I like it.