Abyss & Apex editor and writer, Wendy S. Delmater

I met Wendy at World Fantasy last year. We sat at the same table during the mass book signing. She was gushing over a particular story in an issue of Abyss & Apex because it was so fresh and well-written. Oh, to have an editor do that about one of my stories! Well, maybe they have when I wasn't listening. Anyway, I found Wendy a delightful tablemate and I am so glad of this opportunity to get to know her better and share her with my readers.

Wendy is the Editor in Chief for Abyss and Apex magazine and a speculative fiction writer herself. In fact, she just sold "Jack & the Beanstalker" to a new webzine called Uncast Shadows, publication date TBA.

AW: What or whom inspired you to write? To become an editor?

WD: My father was a reading tutor and he got me reading at a college level before fourth grade. And it was a lonely childhood: my mother was sick since I was three, and my father worked two jobs (and was often bitter and abusive). So I was an avid reader as a child; an avid reader who needed an escape into the worlds of Kipling, Frank Baum, Walter Farley, Louisa May Alcott, and Robert Louis Stevenson. I grew up with some very talented friends – but they were all authors.

Connie Willis once said that she had read so much she was no longer surprised, so she wrote stories to surprise herself. I found that to be a big part of the draw of writing. But I also wanted to write things that had that “aha!” moment, a reveal for the reader. To learn how, I joined the Del Rey Online Writing Workshop when it was about six months old. It eventually morphed into the Online Writing Workshop and I was a member for six years. I made lasting friendships there, people like author Charles Coleman Finlay, Melinda Goodin (who does the Locus Spreadsheet), Ilona Andrews, Ruth Nestvold, Marsha Sisolak (former editor of Ideomancer), copyeditor Deanna Hoak, writer (and blogger and editor) K. Tempest Bradford, and so many more you’d run out of space if I listed them all. You really bond with people when you share manuscripts: it’s like baring your soul and those who deal kindly and constructively with your faults are a treasure.

Oh, and by the way this meant I was no longer lonely: in writers and editors I’d found my “tribe”, as it were.

AW: When did you latch onto speculative fiction and why?

WD: Do you know what editor John W. Campbell called the golden age of science fiction? About twelve to fourteen years old. I was privileged to have a middle school right next to a public library and I dropped by several times a week. The new book acquisitions were done by a serious genre fan. She introduced me to Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, Pohl Anderson, Arthur C. Clarke, Clifford D. Simak and Ray Bradbury. I was thrilled to discover that Andre Norton was female. I was introduced to Tolkien and from there to fantasy authors like Lloyd Alexander, C.S. Lewis, Madeline L’Engle and more.

I was well and truly hooked. It was the worldbuilding that drew me in, and the “what ifs”. How would people respond to having magical powers or objects? How would human nature respond to this or that new technology or disaster?

AW: Are you often surprised by prose submissions? I mean in a good way. Something that is truly unique?

WD: *laughs* I’d better be or I’d never buy anything!

AW: Do you notice a difference in writing style between men and women?

WD: Nope. Next question?

Seriously, I am pretty much gender-blind. There have been many messy blog wars and accusations of bias made about other editors (who will remain nameless). Fur has flown on the issue. Genre watchdogs do headcounts on how many male vs. female authors a mag publishes, and to be honest my staff has some internal stats: percentage of male/female submissions vs. how many of each we publish. Me? I pretty much strip off the headers and go by the story itself. And I am no longer shocked at how well guys “get” what it means to be female, or how macho (if you will) a woman writer can write.

AW: Are women able to pull off a male protagonist as well as a female one, generally? And can guys get women protags right as easily as they can men? Do you think this is something writers struggle with?

WD: We’re writers. We make stuff up based on research and observing people. If we are good at it, they publish us. Anyone can observe the opposite sex or study them, and then writers can have someone of the opposite gender read a manuscript to see if it sounds authentic. Simple.

AW: I imagine that you have to contend with a lot of overused phrases and devices. What was the 2009 crop like? What phrases and devices should writers avoid in 2010?

WD: Anything derivative. I mean that! Editors watch TV and movies, and they know what’s hot and what’s not. Your Twilight fanfic or your thinly veiled Famous Role Playing Game scenario with the filed off serial numbers? We see right through those, yes we do. And it does not endear you to us at all. Please do not copy the Next Big Thing. We are looking for originality.

AW: What is the Abyss & Apex guidelines instruction most often ignored by writers?

WD: It’s a tie: about half of them ignore the “no horror” admonition and the other half ignore our reading periods.

AW: What was your favorite story in A & A? What made it stand out above all the others?

WD: I have to pick one? I had trouble picking a dozen, and they went into The Best of Abyss & Apex, Volume one from Hadley Rille Books.

I guess I am always fondest of the current edition. The First Quarter 2010 edition of A&A leads with Lisa Koosis’s “How We Fly,” which (as I was telling Gardner Dozois at the SFWA reception) is an amazing story. You know that sense of wonder, that human connection, that awe and tears that the reality of our humanness can create? It’s all there.

AW: Do you still find time to write? Are you working on something now?

WD: I just quit my engineering job in NYC, got married, moved to the Deep South, and terraformed my house. Yes, I still write a little, but although I have novels nearly done it’s just short fiction at the moment. It looks like I sold a story this week but I will not mention where until they send me that all-important contract. (This was the aforementioned "Jack & the Beanstalker". )






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Interview on PodioRocket of yours truly and Avatar - again

Well, now it's my turn. Due to various emails going astray, my scheduled interview for tonight is postponed. What's up with gmail anyway? Or is it on their end. Hmmmm. Anyway, Brian Rathbone interviewed me during World Fantasy and the interview just posted on PodioRacket yesterday. It's with an interview with one of my cohorts, Andrea Howe of Blue Falcon Editing.


Give it a listen.

Of course this reminds me that I have one-hour interview at a local radio station that I still need to edit down and break up. I read a complete short, short story during the interview. I was going to pull that out and edit the thing down. I can make the whole thing available, too, but that would be huge file.

But when? I have to catch up on writing, reading and reviewing.

For anyone who still hasn't seen Avatar. Are you kidding me? Go! Now! But you'll have to buy tickets in advance and get there early for a good seat. I still need to make the trip to an IMAX theater to see it. I'm so ready to see it a third time. It's setting all kinds of records. According to an article in BBC News, it may be the most successful movie - EVER!


Official Avatar Movie









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Cat Rambo on writing and Clarion West

I met Cat through Broad Universe. She's been REALLY busy lately. She's cranking out stories, anthologies and is managing editor for Fantasy magazine. Her stories have appeared in the best magazines, including: Asimov's, Strange Horizons, and Weird Tales.

She runs an online game called ArmageddonMUD, is a Clarion West graduate and a former tech writer for Microsoft's Visual Basic.

AW: Who encouraged you to write?

CR: My grandmother, Helen Francis, encouraged me to write as well as to read. She bought me my first typewriter when I was twelve or thirteen, as well as my first copy of The Lord of the Rings. Others included John Barth, Stephen Dixon, Grace Paley, William O'Rourke, and of course all the fabulous people I've been meeting since deciding to attend Clarion West in 2005. My mother supported me every step of the way and even paid the application fee for the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars where I got my MA. I've also been extraordinarily blessed in having a spouse who is supportive of my writing as well. He encouraged me to go to Clarion West, and has been shouldering the mortgage and household bills for the past four years. This also kicks me to be productive - I like working at home, and I'd like to justify his faith in my work.

AW: Do you have trunk stories or novels? Will you resurrect them or call them good practice and keep them for posterity? Do you pull them out to see how far your craft has come?

CR: I have several NaNoWriMo novels, one about a dimension-traveling dysfunctional family and another set in the game world of Zalanthas from Armageddon MUD. I also have a superhero novel, but it's buried on some media I can't access at the moment. I may pull them out at some point, but right now I've got plenty of projects to work on. I haven't taken those out to look at recently, but I was looking at my papers from grad school a couple of weeks ago. I still like some of the stories from then, such as "The Accordion," which recently appeared in my collection, but there are a few, like a story told in two parallel columns, one describing the players and the other describing the roleplaying game they're playing, that are so wacky and experimental that I find myself wondering what the heck I was thinking. I'm kinda amazed I got into Hopkins with that one.

AW: What can you tell my readers about Clarion West?

CR: I recently talked about writing programs for Jeff VanderMeer's excellent book for writers, Booklife, and I'll reiterate that advice here: A writing workshop can be great, but you need to go in not expecting it to be a magic key. You also need to go in with both a willingness to listen to others' opinions, and enough strength to be willing to stick to your guns if there's something you don't want to change. One of its greatest values lies not in the teaching, but in the networking opportunities it provides.

What I strongly suggest with any workshop is reading at least a little of the instructor's work beforehand. That gives you a sense of their strengths and weaknesses, allows you to see where they're pulling from their own experiences in teaching, and lets you ask intelligent questions. And pay attention to your classmates - keep in touch with the ones you feel some affinity to, because they'll be a source of critiques and suggestions for the rest of your life if you cultivate the relationship. As far as Clarion West goes, it's a six week writing workshop where the group has a different instructor each week. Most are writers but the fifth week is traditionally an editor. In 2010, the instructors will be Michael Bishop, Maureen McHugh, Nnedi Okorafor, Graham Joyce, Ellen Datlow, and Ian McDonald, which is a great lineup. It's an intensive workshop - you are expected to write a story each week, and one of the things it does is convince you that you are capable of writing a story a week.

I went through the program in 2005, studying with Octavia Butler, L. Timmel DuChamp, Andy Duncan, Connie Willis, Gordon van Gelder, and Michael Swanwick. For me, it was a terrific experience, and our class has produced a number of strong writers, who've gone on to do some great stuff. In that I'm particularly thinking of Rachel Swirsky, both a writer and an editor of the excellent fantasy podcast site, PodCastle, Katherine Sparrow, who I think will be our next Carol Emshwiller, and Heather Lindsley, who's had some terrific and wonderfully funny stories in the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, but there were so many strong people in our class that it's hard to do justice to it. I've kept working with Clarion West on a volunteer basis, and I participate in their fundraising Writeathon every year. I think it's a great institution, and I meet a bunch of great people each year. The locals in my class started a writing group that takes in a few new local Clarion West attendees each year, and that group is a source of inspiration and some terrific friendships.

AW: What's it like co-editing a spec-fic magazine? Does it help your writing? How do you still find time to write?

CR: It's fun! And it's hard work! I've learned a great deal from it. It helps my writing in that it forces me to read widely in the field, as well as to help sharpen my sense of what makes a story good. It hurts it in that it does take time away from writing. When I first started, Edmund Schubert, the editor of Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show, kindly took some time to talk to me about it and warned that too much focus on the magazine and I'd find my writing failing.That's still a struggle for me, and probably will remain one. But I really enjoy working with the magazine.

AW: Has your sense of humor ever gotten you into trouble?

CR: All the time. I can't begin to say how many times I've stuck my foot in my mouth, thinking I was being entertaining. Luckily, people have been very forgiving. I have had a couple of people complain about my lack of formality in editing, and it's invariably been an occasion when I was being far less funny than I thought I was.

AW: What's your funniest or strangest convention experience?

CR: At ConFusion, where I was a writer GoH, I witnessed a showdown between pirates and a zeppelin crew. Unfortunately, they did not respond to the crowd's suggestion of a dance-off.

AW: What's your favorite story in the anthology you co-wrote with Jeff Vandermeer, The Surgeon's Tale and Other Stories?

CR: I love "The Surgeon's Tale." It was a great experience collaborating with Jeff on that, and I think the story turned out amazingly well, with depths to it that I'm still figuring out. To me, it talks about love, and the expectations and assumptions that we surround a lover with. Plus it's funny and lovely, and features a disembodied, crawling hand. What could be better than that? I'm also very fond of "The Dead Girl's Wedding March," which was the first story I sold to Fantasy, and one of the reasons Jeff asked me to collaborate, I think. I had a lot of fun writing that story, and there are moments that still make me grin.

AW: When can we expect to see The Moon's Accomplice? Can you tell us about it?

CR: The Moon's Accomplice is set in a fantasy world, Tabat, which a number of my stories share. It's a world where intelligent magical creatures are assumed to be subhuman and there to be owned by the humans, and it is in part an exploration of how we both infantilize and demonize those we oppress. A story that appeared in the December issue of Realms of Fantasy, "Narrative of A Beast's Life", is actually a chunk of the novel.The main characters are: Bella, a disgraced gladiator; Skilto, a Merchant Mage who wants to be purely a scholar; and Teo, a young shapeshifter just arrived in the city and seeking shelter from the priesthood he's been promised to. Bella is offered a chance to redeem herself by spying on a strange circus for the Duke of Tabat, and Skilto and Teo find themselves drawn to the circus as well. There's centaurs, a sphinx, dead dryads, minotaurs, and a wide array of other creatures, all caught up in a moment that promises to be revolutionary for their world.

AW: What else are you working on now?

CR: I just finished a young adult novel, Phat Fairy, and I'm about to turn to a horror novel, Queen of the Fireflies, that I've got about 40 thousand words on so far. The first is in part my reaction to Twilight and how the young woman in that is somewhat...inert. The second is a response to several coming of age/horror novels, specifically Stephen King's It, Dan Simmon's Summer of Night, and Robert McCammon's A Boy's Life. All of those are boy's stories (yeah, I know there's some women in them, but they seem peripheral) and I'm a little troubled by the method by which the kids in It escape from the menace initially. So I wanted to do something with girls and coming of age. I'm sure I'm not the first, but I hope to do something interesting with it. It draws heavily on the experiences of growing up in a Midwestern town, South Bend, Indiana, in 1976, when the Freedom Train came through, and I'm really looking forward to writing a particular scene that takes place aboard the train. I still like writing short stories and among the ones I've finished lately is a sequel to "Kallakak's Cousins" called "Bots d'Amor." I've also written some dark fairy tale-type pieces, a horror story about television, and some urban fantasy.

Find Cat online at www.kittywumpus.net.



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SF TV - Attack of the remakes

Well, if you're East of the Rockies, you can already tell me how the remake of the series "V" is. If not, check it out with me. ABC 8PM PT.

I received this article link from Christopher Farley, editor of the culture blog for the Wall Street Journal.

Firefly fans will want to take note. Morena Baccarin was Anara on Firefly and the movie Serenity. She was also a nemesis on Stargate SG1.

I also just heard that The Prisoner is getting redone in a miniseries. It's on AMC and begins Nov. 15 starring Jim Caviezel as number 6 and Lennie James (Jericho) as number 147, the content villager who drives a taxi and has a family. It's supposed to have a more satisfying conclusion than the original.

Here's the complete list of the World Fantasy Award winners.


That's it for tonight. I have books to read, shows to watch and interviews to write questions for.

Here are some of the interviewees I've lined up for your reading pleasure:

• Jeff VanderMeer (2009 WFC award nominee)
  
• Ann VanderMeer (2009 WFC award nominee)
  
• Kage Baker (2009 WFC award nominee)
  
• Tim Powers
  
• Jay Lake
  
• Ellen Datlow (2009 WFC award nominee)
  
• Kij Johnson (2009 WFC award winner)
  
• Louise Marley
  
• Nisi Shawl (2009 WFC award nominee)
  
• M.H. Bonham
  
• Madeleine Robins
  
• G. David Nordley & C. Sanford Lowe
  

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