By The Way...

Wednesday, January 17, 2007
8:43:00 PM EST
Hearing One Chance -- America
Welcome back to another installment of the Wednesday Author Interview. This week we've got a fast-rising literary star Tim Pratt, who switch hits between novels and critically-acclaimed short stories. The latter are in the spotlight in Pratt's latest book, Hart & Boot & Other Stories. If that's not enough, Pratt's an editor and a publisher, too. He's here to talk about it all.

1. Quick! Tell us a little about yourself and Hart & Boot & Other Stories.

Always happy to talk about myself! This is my second story collection (the first was called Little Gods, and it has totally different stories in it, so you won't feel cheated if you buy both). I also had a novel published in 2005, a cowpunk contemporary fantasy called The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl, and I have a new urban fantasy series with an ass-kicking sorcerer heroine starting this October. The first book in the series is called Blood Engines, and it features lots of weirdness and venomous frogs.

As for personal info, well, I'm thirty years old, I live in Oakland California, I'm married to a wonderful woman (writer Heather Shaw), and I work as a senior editor for a trade publishing magazine called Locus (where I do layout and write news and obituaries, mostly). In my spare time I play video games and drink wine. Life is good.

Hart & Boot & Other Stories is a collection of stories, most of them about love, with occasional monsters (including harpies, manticores, the Furies, komodo dragons, enormous memory-devouring catfish, evil magicians, ninjas, and fat guys with golden swords -- though not all in the same story). They're not all romances (though there are at least two romantic comedies), but they're all about human connections, or the failure to connect, or relationships forming, or relationships falling apart. My previous collection was sort of a kitchen-sink affair, collecting all my stories up to that point that didn't suck. This collection, in contrast, has much more of a heart and soul, and works better as a book.

Also it has a beautiful cover by Richard Marchand, featuring my character John Boot holding a big ol' shotgun, so that's aplus.

2.  "Hart & Boot" was picked by Michael Chabon for inclusion in the 2005 edition of the Best American Short Stories anthology, along with stories by Joyce Carol Oates, Dennis Lehane and Tom Perotta. What does an appearance like this do both for the story itself, and for the profile of you as a short story writer?

I found out about the sale one afternoon at work. The wonderful writer Kelly Link, who also had a story reprinted in that anthology, called me up to tell me my story had been chosen for the book too. At first, I thought it was a cruel joke -- I literally turned to my co-worker and said, "What have I ever done to piss off Kelly Link? Why would she tell me such a lie and crush my soul like that?" But then I heard from Michael Chabon, and it turned out to be true. I was pretty stunned. It's not the sort of honor I'd ever even bothered to hope for. I mean, I read those anthologies in college. There are whole university classes devoted to those books. They're supposed to be a snapshot of the best work being done in American short fiction in a given year. It was pretty mind-blowing.

As for the effect on me as a story writer, it certainly helped raise my profile, and I suspect it led to some invitations to submit to anthologies, etc. I put together this collection after "Hart and Boot" was selected for the Best American anthology, and the editor who bought it told me that reprint made the collection a much easier sell. (He assures me he loved the book as a whole, but the built-in marketing hook was welcome, I'm sure.)  Some of my friends told me I could probably pick my MFA program and get in based on that reprint -- I don't know if that's true or not. I don't really want to go to grad school anyway. I already have enough student loan debt already, thanks.

The story itself has gotten me lots of fan mail, invitations to do a couple of readings, and some attention from people who want to make the story into a movie (though nothing concrete has happened with that yet, as is often the case with movie stuff).

3. As a short story writer and as a professional observer of the publishing field, how healthy is the field these days -- both from the point of view of a writer, and from the point of view of a reader?

I actually think the publishing field is pretty healthy (though some recent upheavals in the publishing world threaten to put some small presses out of business; a major distributor just went bankrupt, and we're all holding our breath to see how things shake out). I've heard that, even though the percentage of people in America who read books is steadily falling, in terms of sheer numbers there are more readers now than ever --  because the population is increasing at a faster rate than the readership is decreasing! So you wind up with a smaller percentage but more actual readers. Which is simultaneously depressing and heartening. There's a lot of doom and gloom out there about the imminent demise of the publishing world, but people have been saying that for decades. The business will certainly change, but I don't think it's going to vanish.

As a reader, there's an embarrassment of riches now -- there are more books being published than ever before, and the hardest thing is just deciding what to read. I depend on trusted reviewers and the recommendations of friends to thin out the herd. (Though I can assure everyone that my collection is one of the good ones, oh, yes.) Especially in science fiction and fantasy, there are some amazingly interesting new writers with books out recently, or coming out soon, including Hal Duncan, Christopher Barzak, Nick Mamatas, David Schwartz, Theodora Goss, and Elizabeth Bear. We're living in a golden age! I just wish I had more time to read.

4. Tell us a piece of advice you've been given about writing.

In college I took a writing workshop taught by Orson Scott Card and told him I was exhausted from trying to work a part-time job, be a full-time student, and write a novel all at once. He told me not to worry about school so much and to concentrate more on writing the novel, because in the long run, the novel was more important. So there you go, kids! Type up and drop out! (I actually think it was pretty good advice, though, um, I guess I should say "Stay in school, don't do drugs, eat your veggies, drink your milk!" or something vaguely responsible instead.) I managed to do fine in college and write novels during summer breaks, though, so it all worked out.

5. You've written both short stories and novels. What are the challenges? Do you prefer one format or the other? Factoring in differences like length and time, is one easier or harder, or does it all really boil down to who the writer is?

I think to some extent it depends on the writer -- some people are naturally novelists, while some are naturally story writers. I'm ambidextrous, myself, and love writing both. I used to prefer stories, because they were less intimidating -- I could write one and polish it and put it in the mail all within a couple of weeks, and stories also tend to see print more quickly than novels do, so the gratification of publication comes more quickly. But in the past few years I've come to enjoy novels much more. Now stories intimidate me, because I feel more of a need to be a perfectionist, and not waste any words. Novels are more forgiving. I can have weird digressions (and parenthetical asides!) and oddball subplots in novels, in a way that's much harder to do successfully in short fiction. I love the short, powerful impact of a good story, but sometimes as a reader I prefer being able to immerse myself in the world of a novel. I go back and forth. I hope that's sufficiently noncommittal!

I've sold just about every good story I've written, though, so I should probably write some new ones soon.

6. In addition to being a writer and an editor, you're also a small press publisher. Tell us a little about that experience and how (and if) it enriches your experience as a writer.

"Small press" is too grandiose a term for what I do -- better to call us a minuscule press! I run Tropism Press with my wife Heather, and we do a little 'zine called Flytrap, and last year we started publishing chapbooks. It's great fun, actually, which is why we do it. I love almost everything about the process, from reading submissions to choosing stories to sending acceptances to doing layout (which might be my favorite part, actually -- I get very zen when I'm working on producing a 'zine or chapbook).

The only thing I don't like is sending rejections, and mailing can be kind of a drag. The experience has helped me as a writer, too, mostly by helping me understand the other side of the writer-editor relationship a little better. I understand the thrill of finding a perfect story now, and the sadness of having to turn something down because it isn't  _quite_ good enough, and the frustration of dealing with people who don't read guidelines or who argue with rejections. There's a tendency among some young writers to think of editors as cruel, capricious gods, but even at the minuscule press level of editing, I've learned enough to know better!

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Catch more of Tim Pratt on his blog.


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This entry has 3 comments: (Add your own)

• #3 Comment from curleycew1 
  1/20/07 3:31 PM | Permalink

  dude uour stupid
• #2 Comment from patrickjcleary 
  1/19/07 5:19 PM | Permalink

  Tim! I remember back when we used to correspond back in the day when "blog" wasn't a word at all. Now I own all your books and the anthology in which Hart & Boot appears.
  
  I couldn't be happier for your success!
• #1 Comment from monponsett 
  1/17/07 10:41 PM | Permalink

  If there was a literary Wierd Al Yankovic, there'd be a parody of this called "Fart and Toot."