This month sees the release of Axiom's End, the new novel by YouTuber and film critic Lindsay Ellis, who has become popular online for her video essays and fun loving personality. Axiom's End centres on Cora, a young woman whose father is on the run from the government for leaking sensitive information, including claims that the government has made first contact with aliens. When Cora gets dragged into this mystery, however, she will learn a truth that will not only change her life, but the entire world.
I got the chance to sit down with Lindsay and talk about the book, her process of writing it, and some titbits about the next book in the series.
In the blurb for the book it talks a lot about the cover-up, and -
And that's not what it's about (laughs).
Yeah, it makes this big thing about the leaks and trusting the government.
I feel like I'm getting dinged for that, but I think thematically that's what it's about. It's kind of like a Simpsons episode where it starts in one place and veers in a very different direction. That was my call, my deep dark secret is that I pretend I don't have any control over it but I have all of the control over it because I wrote that into my contract. I had to be if not in charge of the marketing, then I needed to sign off on the marketing, they can't do anything without my permission. I have to okay everything, so I wanted to push it in this bury the shit out of the lead direction because I wanted to draw in an audience that might not think they're into that sort of thing. So it's like 'come for the government conspiracy, stay for this bizarre love story'.
I also wanted it to be un-gendered, because early on when they were doing the covers it was girly to the point that the first few covers that I got back were very 'is this for 10-year-old's?' They were pink and purple. We pushed it in this Saul Bass direction in the marketing because I wanted it to be as a-gendered as possible. I didn't want it to look girly or masculine, I didn't want it to look like a thriller, I wanted it to look like a vibe. So I guess I pushed it in that direction because I think burying the lead would allow people to accept it on it's own terms because it wasn't marketed like The Shape of Water.
One of the things that very quickly started jumping out at me was the relationship between the two leads, Cora and Ampersand. You'd spoken in some of your videos about misunderstood monsters and romances with monsters, was that the kind of story you've wanted to tell for a while, is that a theme that connects with you?
Yeah, totally. In the previous life of this book that's what I wanted, but was a total chicken-shit about it. The emotional core of it was buried and non-existent. So the result was, in my opinion, a story that was way more boring. Just people doing things in a sequence, not because they're motivated by any emotions. So it wasn't until Kayleigh Donaldson at Pajiba started tweeting about The Shape of Water and this other graphic novel that came out around the same time around the end of 2018 and she was like 'our day has come, monster fuckers of the world unite'. And there was this giant thread of people being like 'yeah', and I thought maybe that's what the kids are into. So I guess that's kind of what galvanized me to approach this story the way I always wanted to but was too cowardly to do in my younger years.
But also I wanted to play it completely straight. That's the other thing that makes this really challenging, because I didn't want it to be like a joke. But I also didn't want it to be like a hot boy that says he's a monster sometimes because that's really popular still. So that was my personal challenge, can I make this work, and not just for people who are already into that, but for a mainstream audience.
Did you ever get any push back on that, because as opposed to things like Twilight or Warm Bodies where they're a monster but still a hot boy Ampersand is so alien?
Yeah, I wanted to make it as physically alien as I could go without it being distracting or unbelievable, though I guess it is fundamentally unbelievable. Visually I like to think of him as this exact middle ground between Geiger's Xenomoprh from Alien and Eve from Wall-E. So whatever the exact middle point is where he lives. But I don't think you ever really see anything like that outside of movies because in books it does tend to be very conventional, they're almost always white, they're always young, they usually have brown hair; it's a very specific look. I just read one where his flaw was he had a scar on his cheek but he was otherwise the sexiest boy who ever sexied, and I just don't find that interesting.
It's a lot more of a challenge to make this believable. Because that's another problem I had with The Shape of Water was that there wasn't really a curve. In The Shape of Water Elisa and the fish man just instantly have a connection, they have an E.T. heart bond, and there's no real period of mistrust. There is a kind of learning about each other but it's always in complete good faith so their relationship doesn't really change as the movie progresses. And I think that's more appealing to me in this type of narrative, in a Beauty and the Beast story like 'barely even friends then somebody bends', that's the appeal.
Were there any monsters that helped inspire Ampersand or played into your creation of him and the other aliens?
Well the ironic thing is, and I'm sure this is coming down the pike, I had sold this book about a month after Bumblebee came out (laughs) and as I was watching Bumblebee I was enjoying the shit out of it as it's the only good Transformers movie, but I was also like 'oh no, I'm going to get accused of plagiarism' because similarities are there. There are a lot of similarities, but from a character perspective it is honestly kind of rare because usually it'll be for kids. If there's a sympathetic monster character it'll be E.T. or the Iron Giant, so usually whenever you have any genuinely inhuman looking character it's for children's media.
I think the Transformers movies are these weird outliers, but it totally does that, it doesn't do it well but it tries. Then Arrival kind of does it, but I think the thing about Arrival is the aliens are still kind of like ideas more than characters with personality, and I think that's the real trick, crossing the line from being almost like a plot device to having a personality and having understandable motivations that change over the course of the narrative. So I think its something that you don't really see, and a lot of people felt it was like YA, but it doesn't; it feels younger than that because you don't see that sort of thing in adult media very often, but it doesn't feel like YA because you never see anything outside of a hot white boy as the love interest.
But no, I can't say that he was. I think any media is kind of a reflection of the author, so I think he's sort of like that part of myself that's really distant, and self contained, and controlling, and micromanaging; and I guess fearful. I liked this idea of it being a mutual disgust. I think that's also something you don't see very often outside of thought experiments. 'We assume that the aliens are scary and bad, and are here to kill us but what does the reverse look like? What is potentially frightening about us?' And so I felt that at least in the first half a lot of his motivations are dictated by that.
Yeah, I enjoyed how there's that moment where he mentions about her being a meat eater and it seems to freak him out, and you realise he's just as scared of her, and seeing that change was great. There's the 'nesting' scene -
That's funny because that's what we called it too (laughs).
That moment where you realise he's figured out he doesn't have to be scared of her, and she's having almost the same realisation. That's the point where I thought 'okay, these guys are falling in love', and I suddenly realised I was starting to love this book.
Oh it's one of those (laughs). I had some many of my friends who were sort of like the Arrested Development scene with dead dove do not eat where they're like 'well I don't know what I expected from you'. I had one friend DMed me after finishing it saying 'you sneaky bitch, you wrote a monster boyfriend book', and I'm just like 'what did you expect?' (laughs).
Are there any designs for Ampersand? I had a really clear image of him in my head and I thought Lindsay's probably got a really clear idea what she wants him to look like and I don't know if my version is like that, but I can't translate that to drawing.
I think it's one of those things where it's out there, that's how prose works, you write the thing and however somebody reads it is correct. There's no wrong way to read a description and visualise it. But it's also kind of tricky. I did hire a concept artist to help me just get it down so I could have something to work from when I'm describing not just Ampersand, because there's about 30 of them in there and they're all roughly the same shape but different sizes. And it was really hard because instead of describing them the way I do in the book I was pulling from visuals like 'this more, or this dinosaur', stuff like that, and it was this back and forth that I found really hard because it kept not being correct and eventually I was kind of like 'well this is good enough' because working with a concept artist I could never get it quite right.
I feel like it's always going to be this wildly different thing in your head, or anybody's head, and that's fine, that's not wrong. It might not be what I had in my head, but it's sort of like this death of the author thing where I did the best I could but if the descriptions aren't vivid enough that's on me.
When I finished the book this was one of the first books that elicited quite a strong reaction in me. Film or TV I'll cry at the drop of a hat, but books don't tend to do that but there was something about this story, and I realised after sitting and thinking about it for days was that it's the way you wrote a 'monster' who turns out to be a really kind person and it's the fear of the unknown. And that connected with me because like most of these kinds of stories as a minority you kind of get a lot of that in real life and people have that kind of reaction to you. Did you think about that kind of thing while writing it or is that something that evolved in the process?
A lot of the details and the way things go down changed over the course of revising this over however many years the basic plot points, especially in regard to their dynamic were always set in stone. I'd see some reviews talk about how Cora's this really unsympathetic character which strikes me as very odd because to me the thing that makes her unique, her defining moment is basically an act of compassion which happens towards the first third of the book. She can't really articulate why she does this thing but it felt like the right thing to do, and that sort of being the catalyst for how their relationship develops.
Basically it takes Ampersand a while to see that for what it is, let alone place any value on it, because you can from this outside perspective see it as this arbitrary decision but the fact that it happens more than once and the fact that this is helping you more than the reason you came here and I think that was intentional and important. I think it does make her somewhat unique where you see this thing and you don't get it, and in some ways will never get it, but your instinct is to show compassion rather than aggression. That's sort of the central core to their relationship, compassion versus fear.
I'm sure the answer is going to be no, but are you able to tease anything that might happen in Truth of the Divine or where the characters might go?
I guess I had one friend kind of compare it to Into the Woods act two because effectively the second book is the one I had in my head before the first one. The second book is about the fallout. This is kind of a light spoiler, but one thing that I hadn't seen done very often, again except for Transformers, is how does society cope with the existence of first contact and the fact that it happened? The world didn't end, we have our economy, we get on with our lives and for all we know this is just the world now. You don't really see that happen. What I was interested in was how it shapes society, which is part of the reason why it's an alternate history so we can almost sort of have fun tracking the way the two different timelines diverge.
I wanted to tell a story that was just about that, how society copes with this change in our understanding of ourselves, and in order to do that I had to write the first one because I had to set it up. But at the same time it's also fundamentally about the relationship of these two characters. So I guess the second one is much more about the societal fallout, because that's in the background of the first book but it's not really front and centre. In the second book it's much more front and centre. These two have a fundamentally impossible relationship because they're so different and it's really frustrating and so the difficulty of having this relationship with this other being is also very front and centre. It's also a lot darker.
That's a bit worrying as this gets dark at times.
Really? I thought this was was the fun one.
No, there's a moment towards the end where I almost put the book down thinking 'if this goes the way I think it's going to go I can't finish this', but luckily it wasn't that dark.
I did see one review that wished it had gone the way I think you thought it was going to go and they said it would have been a lot braver and that it was the cowards way out, but I've got five books, come on.
Other than this series do you plan to do more writing, is there a chance Commercial As Fuck will come out at some point?
No. This is kind of a difficult conversation to have because you have to be careful what you say, but part of the issue with Commercial As Fuck was very much 'stay in your lane'. I talked to my publisher about having this other book, and I that I was feeling kind of iffy on it. The only thing I told him about it was that the main character was a woman of colour who was also disabled, and he was like 'I'm going to stop you right there, no' and that was the end of that. He didn't need to know anything else. The answer was no.
We're in this ecosystem right now, and I don't want to start to claim that I have the answers, but we saw this big controversy around American Dirt and who gets to tell who's story. And when I was writing it in 2016/2017 it didn't really ping to me as a bad idea but then as time passed I grew more and more uncomfortable with it. Right now I think were, rightfully so, in a phase where Own Voices, the people who are living these experiences should be in charge of who tells their own story. Plus it also dealt with some other scientific things that are like an ethical minefield because it was near future and had to do with genetic engineering. That's the main reason why I don't think that one will be revisited anytime soon. But, I'm in talks with some more mainstream publishers to do some licensed work with characters that are not mine.
That's a very cool tease, I look forward to finding out what that might be.
It will surprise you (laughing), whatever you're thinking you're probably wrong. You'll be like 'wow, I did not see this for you'.
In the blurb for the book it talks a lot about the cover-up, and -
And that's not what it's about (laughs).
Yeah, it makes this big thing about the leaks and trusting the government.
I feel like I'm getting dinged for that, but I think thematically that's what it's about. It's kind of like a Simpsons episode where it starts in one place and veers in a very different direction. That was my call, my deep dark secret is that I pretend I don't have any control over it but I have all of the control over it because I wrote that into my contract. I had to be if not in charge of the marketing, then I needed to sign off on the marketing, they can't do anything without my permission. I have to okay everything, so I wanted to push it in this bury the shit out of the lead direction because I wanted to draw in an audience that might not think they're into that sort of thing. So it's like 'come for the government conspiracy, stay for this bizarre love story'.
I also wanted it to be un-gendered, because early on when they were doing the covers it was girly to the point that the first few covers that I got back were very 'is this for 10-year-old's?' They were pink and purple. We pushed it in this Saul Bass direction in the marketing because I wanted it to be as a-gendered as possible. I didn't want it to look girly or masculine, I didn't want it to look like a thriller, I wanted it to look like a vibe. So I guess I pushed it in that direction because I think burying the lead would allow people to accept it on it's own terms because it wasn't marketed like The Shape of Water.
One of the things that very quickly started jumping out at me was the relationship between the two leads, Cora and Ampersand. You'd spoken in some of your videos about misunderstood monsters and romances with monsters, was that the kind of story you've wanted to tell for a while, is that a theme that connects with you?
Yeah, totally. In the previous life of this book that's what I wanted, but was a total chicken-shit about it. The emotional core of it was buried and non-existent. So the result was, in my opinion, a story that was way more boring. Just people doing things in a sequence, not because they're motivated by any emotions. So it wasn't until Kayleigh Donaldson at Pajiba started tweeting about The Shape of Water and this other graphic novel that came out around the same time around the end of 2018 and she was like 'our day has come, monster fuckers of the world unite'. And there was this giant thread of people being like 'yeah', and I thought maybe that's what the kids are into. So I guess that's kind of what galvanized me to approach this story the way I always wanted to but was too cowardly to do in my younger years.
But also I wanted to play it completely straight. That's the other thing that makes this really challenging, because I didn't want it to be like a joke. But I also didn't want it to be like a hot boy that says he's a monster sometimes because that's really popular still. So that was my personal challenge, can I make this work, and not just for people who are already into that, but for a mainstream audience.
Did you ever get any push back on that, because as opposed to things like Twilight or Warm Bodies where they're a monster but still a hot boy Ampersand is so alien?
Yeah, I wanted to make it as physically alien as I could go without it being distracting or unbelievable, though I guess it is fundamentally unbelievable. Visually I like to think of him as this exact middle ground between Geiger's Xenomoprh from Alien and Eve from Wall-E. So whatever the exact middle point is where he lives. But I don't think you ever really see anything like that outside of movies because in books it does tend to be very conventional, they're almost always white, they're always young, they usually have brown hair; it's a very specific look. I just read one where his flaw was he had a scar on his cheek but he was otherwise the sexiest boy who ever sexied, and I just don't find that interesting.
It's a lot more of a challenge to make this believable. Because that's another problem I had with The Shape of Water was that there wasn't really a curve. In The Shape of Water Elisa and the fish man just instantly have a connection, they have an E.T. heart bond, and there's no real period of mistrust. There is a kind of learning about each other but it's always in complete good faith so their relationship doesn't really change as the movie progresses. And I think that's more appealing to me in this type of narrative, in a Beauty and the Beast story like 'barely even friends then somebody bends', that's the appeal.
Were there any monsters that helped inspire Ampersand or played into your creation of him and the other aliens?
Well the ironic thing is, and I'm sure this is coming down the pike, I had sold this book about a month after Bumblebee came out (laughs) and as I was watching Bumblebee I was enjoying the shit out of it as it's the only good Transformers movie, but I was also like 'oh no, I'm going to get accused of plagiarism' because similarities are there. There are a lot of similarities, but from a character perspective it is honestly kind of rare because usually it'll be for kids. If there's a sympathetic monster character it'll be E.T. or the Iron Giant, so usually whenever you have any genuinely inhuman looking character it's for children's media.
I think the Transformers movies are these weird outliers, but it totally does that, it doesn't do it well but it tries. Then Arrival kind of does it, but I think the thing about Arrival is the aliens are still kind of like ideas more than characters with personality, and I think that's the real trick, crossing the line from being almost like a plot device to having a personality and having understandable motivations that change over the course of the narrative. So I think its something that you don't really see, and a lot of people felt it was like YA, but it doesn't; it feels younger than that because you don't see that sort of thing in adult media very often, but it doesn't feel like YA because you never see anything outside of a hot white boy as the love interest.
But no, I can't say that he was. I think any media is kind of a reflection of the author, so I think he's sort of like that part of myself that's really distant, and self contained, and controlling, and micromanaging; and I guess fearful. I liked this idea of it being a mutual disgust. I think that's also something you don't see very often outside of thought experiments. 'We assume that the aliens are scary and bad, and are here to kill us but what does the reverse look like? What is potentially frightening about us?' And so I felt that at least in the first half a lot of his motivations are dictated by that.
Yeah, I enjoyed how there's that moment where he mentions about her being a meat eater and it seems to freak him out, and you realise he's just as scared of her, and seeing that change was great. There's the 'nesting' scene -
That's funny because that's what we called it too (laughs).
That moment where you realise he's figured out he doesn't have to be scared of her, and she's having almost the same realisation. That's the point where I thought 'okay, these guys are falling in love', and I suddenly realised I was starting to love this book.
Oh it's one of those (laughs). I had some many of my friends who were sort of like the Arrested Development scene with dead dove do not eat where they're like 'well I don't know what I expected from you'. I had one friend DMed me after finishing it saying 'you sneaky bitch, you wrote a monster boyfriend book', and I'm just like 'what did you expect?' (laughs).
Are there any designs for Ampersand? I had a really clear image of him in my head and I thought Lindsay's probably got a really clear idea what she wants him to look like and I don't know if my version is like that, but I can't translate that to drawing.
I think it's one of those things where it's out there, that's how prose works, you write the thing and however somebody reads it is correct. There's no wrong way to read a description and visualise it. But it's also kind of tricky. I did hire a concept artist to help me just get it down so I could have something to work from when I'm describing not just Ampersand, because there's about 30 of them in there and they're all roughly the same shape but different sizes. And it was really hard because instead of describing them the way I do in the book I was pulling from visuals like 'this more, or this dinosaur', stuff like that, and it was this back and forth that I found really hard because it kept not being correct and eventually I was kind of like 'well this is good enough' because working with a concept artist I could never get it quite right.
I feel like it's always going to be this wildly different thing in your head, or anybody's head, and that's fine, that's not wrong. It might not be what I had in my head, but it's sort of like this death of the author thing where I did the best I could but if the descriptions aren't vivid enough that's on me.
When I finished the book this was one of the first books that elicited quite a strong reaction in me. Film or TV I'll cry at the drop of a hat, but books don't tend to do that but there was something about this story, and I realised after sitting and thinking about it for days was that it's the way you wrote a 'monster' who turns out to be a really kind person and it's the fear of the unknown. And that connected with me because like most of these kinds of stories as a minority you kind of get a lot of that in real life and people have that kind of reaction to you. Did you think about that kind of thing while writing it or is that something that evolved in the process?
A lot of the details and the way things go down changed over the course of revising this over however many years the basic plot points, especially in regard to their dynamic were always set in stone. I'd see some reviews talk about how Cora's this really unsympathetic character which strikes me as very odd because to me the thing that makes her unique, her defining moment is basically an act of compassion which happens towards the first third of the book. She can't really articulate why she does this thing but it felt like the right thing to do, and that sort of being the catalyst for how their relationship develops.
Basically it takes Ampersand a while to see that for what it is, let alone place any value on it, because you can from this outside perspective see it as this arbitrary decision but the fact that it happens more than once and the fact that this is helping you more than the reason you came here and I think that was intentional and important. I think it does make her somewhat unique where you see this thing and you don't get it, and in some ways will never get it, but your instinct is to show compassion rather than aggression. That's sort of the central core to their relationship, compassion versus fear.
I'm sure the answer is going to be no, but are you able to tease anything that might happen in Truth of the Divine or where the characters might go?
I guess I had one friend kind of compare it to Into the Woods act two because effectively the second book is the one I had in my head before the first one. The second book is about the fallout. This is kind of a light spoiler, but one thing that I hadn't seen done very often, again except for Transformers, is how does society cope with the existence of first contact and the fact that it happened? The world didn't end, we have our economy, we get on with our lives and for all we know this is just the world now. You don't really see that happen. What I was interested in was how it shapes society, which is part of the reason why it's an alternate history so we can almost sort of have fun tracking the way the two different timelines diverge.
I wanted to tell a story that was just about that, how society copes with this change in our understanding of ourselves, and in order to do that I had to write the first one because I had to set it up. But at the same time it's also fundamentally about the relationship of these two characters. So I guess the second one is much more about the societal fallout, because that's in the background of the first book but it's not really front and centre. In the second book it's much more front and centre. These two have a fundamentally impossible relationship because they're so different and it's really frustrating and so the difficulty of having this relationship with this other being is also very front and centre. It's also a lot darker.
That's a bit worrying as this gets dark at times.
Really? I thought this was was the fun one.
No, there's a moment towards the end where I almost put the book down thinking 'if this goes the way I think it's going to go I can't finish this', but luckily it wasn't that dark.
I did see one review that wished it had gone the way I think you thought it was going to go and they said it would have been a lot braver and that it was the cowards way out, but I've got five books, come on.
Other than this series do you plan to do more writing, is there a chance Commercial As Fuck will come out at some point?
No. This is kind of a difficult conversation to have because you have to be careful what you say, but part of the issue with Commercial As Fuck was very much 'stay in your lane'. I talked to my publisher about having this other book, and I that I was feeling kind of iffy on it. The only thing I told him about it was that the main character was a woman of colour who was also disabled, and he was like 'I'm going to stop you right there, no' and that was the end of that. He didn't need to know anything else. The answer was no.
We're in this ecosystem right now, and I don't want to start to claim that I have the answers, but we saw this big controversy around American Dirt and who gets to tell who's story. And when I was writing it in 2016/2017 it didn't really ping to me as a bad idea but then as time passed I grew more and more uncomfortable with it. Right now I think were, rightfully so, in a phase where Own Voices, the people who are living these experiences should be in charge of who tells their own story. Plus it also dealt with some other scientific things that are like an ethical minefield because it was near future and had to do with genetic engineering. That's the main reason why I don't think that one will be revisited anytime soon. But, I'm in talks with some more mainstream publishers to do some licensed work with characters that are not mine.
That's a very cool tease, I look forward to finding out what that might be.
It will surprise you (laughing), whatever you're thinking you're probably wrong. You'll be like 'wow, I did not see this for you'.
So you're not going to be writing the better sequel to Phantom of the Opera than Love Never Dies?
No joke, my co-writer Angelina and I have been sort of joking-not-joking about this for years. I think we might have gotten scooped because Netflix are doing a Phantom mini-series. But we're constantly joking that there is no good adaptation of Phantom of the Opera, the best we've got is the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical so we would always talk about how we would make it work and make a Phantom of the Opera adaptation that is good and works. We've seen it done in fan fic, we know it can be done, but we never stated it. But maybe if this book does well I'll be in a position to say 'hey, I hear you like phantoms, I've got a pitch'. (laughs)
You were saying the second book is exploring more of the fallout and that that's what initially drew you to it, is that the reason why book one is set in 2007, did you have to jump backwards so that the second one would be closer to the point where you were coming up with the idea?
The second one takes place in 2008, so that's why. I have this thread of neologisms of terms that didn't exist back then and I think people wrongly think that thread's about Axiom's End, and it's not, it's about Truth of the Divine, the second one. But no, it was more of an aesthetic thing, and the fact that the idea of the story happening now in Trump's America is more absurd than any of the alien shit (laughs). Because its like second Trump got elected people were saying we know there not aliens because he would have blown the lid off that in two seconds.
But also because a lot of the background stuff that happens in this in regards to the political fallout and keeping this thing secret depends on the assumption of political decorum and honouring ideals. Right now we have a scandal every day but you look back at the 90's where Bill Clinton got impeached for a blowjob and it's impossible to imagine that happening now. So it needed to be at a time where there are actual consequences for lying, and I think people are so used to this concept of aliens as a trope that it's hard to appreciate how much that would really shake society. At least for a little while. I think Carl Sagan oversold it, I think he thought it would completely change everything, but I don't know, I think it would for a little bit but it would settle back into new normal very quickly. That's just human history, that's what happens. It just couldn't happen now. After 2016 everything's just dashed on the sidewalk.
Is there anything that you changed along the way from previous drafts that you regret losing?
Not really. I think the axiom 'kill your darlings', I don't agree with that. It's only your darling when you write it, but then if it needs to go you realise it does. Although there is one exchange in this that I had to cut. There's a YouTube comedian called Chris Fleming. If you're a Phantom of the Opera fan google Chris Fleming Phantom docks his boat for the winter. I had an exchange that was an extended quote from that video, and the ten people who'd get it would have thought it was a knee slapper, but I had to cut it. So little things like that where if the scene doesn't work and there's a line or two that I had to cut that'll be kind of a bummer, but in general nah.
At first it was just coming up with this hypothetical civilisation and an evolutionary history for them, why there language is what it is, why there physiology influenced what we would call 'trans-human' or 'post-human', what an alien version of that might look like. In earlier drafts of the book I didn't spend a lot of time thinking about motivation, especially on Ampersand's part. What was he doing during this month or so before he enters the narrative proper, and why was he doing it? How does he feel about it? How does he feel being here? And I think it's much richer for me having thought about all that and working in biases.
Like being human we don't really think about what an anti-human bias would look like. Because a lot of times it'll be like 'you're inferior', but the narrative doesn't really explain why. But for him to have really concrete reasons to feel this way that makes sense. Like if you're descended from herbivores the idea of an omnivorous alien would be horrifying. And also if you were descended from a race that isn't as jealous or competitive; because I think if you take a step back our competitiveness is why we have advanced so quickly, and I can see where that would seem terrifying to outside eyes if that's a value they don't hold as a good thing.
When you were developing the alien race and thinking about their backstory, you mention in the book that there are three space faring races and two of them get explained. Did you know what the third one was going to be or did you leave that open for something that you could come back to later if you needed it?
Well, I know what it is. Ampersand describes them as post-biological and kind of leaves it at that. A lot of it is based on science fiction and future humans and speculation on where we might go. So effectively we had this one ancestral species and broke off and had a shit million attempts at establishing a civilisation, of which three have survived. But it's one of those things where if it feels like set-up it's because it is. The sister species we will meet eventually because they are very heavily foreshadowed in this one.
Other than Ampersand are there any of the aliens that jumped out at you as favourites of yours who you enjoyed writing, or might be looking forward to writing more of if they come back?
There's a new main character in the second one who is mentioned once in the first one, offhandedly and very quickly, and I hope that one will be a favourite with readers. He's a lot more eccentric than any of the other ones. Woodward and Bernstein, people really seem to like them, even though they're barely there. I like Esperus, but I think because I know what his deal is and the reader doesn't, so I guess that'll be a thing that gets explored.
In your YouTube video where you talked about the process of getting published you said about how people assume having a platform can help, and how it didn't help in the early stages. Did you ever consider doing something like publishing under a pseudonym to separate your YouTube from your writing?
No. Basically what my agent told me, and I think that this turned out to be true, is no publisher is going to buy your book if they would not have bought it anyway. It has to be good enough to stand up on its own. But, if you have a platform they might give you more money, and I think that's turned out to be true. So I don't think that would help, at least for this sort of thing. I think the only reason to do that is if you're trying to create a totally different brand that your established audience would not be interested in. But I think it doesn't really help because it's getting more and more to the point where publishers kind of assume you need a platform, even a modest one. It's becoming more and more of a prerequisite that was not the case five years ago for fiction writers. But it is becoming more and more the norm. So when I say it didn't help what I meant was it didn't help because they assume that's what you need to get your foot in the door.
You might not be able to answer this because you mentioned you've got something in the works, but if you could write in any universe is there one that you'd go for?
Transformers (laughs). Ten out of ten, definitely Transformers. You can never plan for where opportunities will come from but I feel like that's the only one that I know the universe well enough that I'd feel comfortable.
Do you have any advice to anyone who wants to get into writing?
It's funny because every time I do people get disappointing because it's never fun stuff. You don't need advice on the fun stuff, you already know what you like. But you've just got to get really comfortable with rejection. I found that the only way that I could move forward with it was to get really comfortable with the idea that this might never happen. You have to prioritise other things, otherwise you'd resent the shit out of the fact that people aren't reading your work the way you want them to. And you just have to be okay with the fact that you might be the only person who gives a shit, and that's the truth, most people who try to get published won't. We're not doing anybody any favours by pretending that's not the case.
I think the other truth is that people get really hung up on these extreme outliers of people that get a six figure book deal right out of college, like Tomi Adeyemi or Veronica Roth. People are like ' it does happen', so they'll get really disappointed when your first try doesn't sell, or your second try, or your fifth try. The only way to stay sane is to think that it might not happen this time, and it might never happen. You might be way too into a niche thing, because a lot of time it's genuinely not your craft. And it's impossible to tell too.
That's the dark secret of mine. When I was querying it last summer, and it was a very tepid query, but all the ones who requested came back saying 'I don't think I know how to sell this'. Which is funny because it sold in a week, which is really fast for a debut author. But the issue was Cora's age, because in the first draft that my agent read she was eighteen and was in college, but then i changed it to she's a drop out and temping. So we aged her up to nineteen, and then in the end aged her up to twenty one, and I'm glad we did that for a lot of reasons, but it was just this three year age difference that was the difference of being able to get an agent and selling it in a week. So that really is kind of arbitrary. My agent looked at it and said people are going to be a little squidgy about this because it feels a little YA curious and the genre is a little too borderline. But that was a really easy fix, and in hindsight it's bonkers to me that nobody saw it that way.
I guess I never thought about the age think making such a big difference, but certain books get lumped into being YA because the characters are a certain age.
Yeah. It is a marketing term. And people are like 'what's YA', but it doesn't really matter because it doesn't mean anything. It's just a marketing term, but it matters to publishers because they obsess over this sort of thing and they don't want to be having to push this thing that's in the wrong category. And that's another thing that I did, focusing more on the political angle to make it feel more adult. All of that was there in the earlier draft but it got played up. My point is that it's really hard to tell how much of it is you needing to improve your craft and how much of it is agents not thinking they can sell your work.
If this got picked up to be adapted into a film or TV show is there someone who you think would be best to capture what you've made?
I don't know. I'm not selling it as a film. This was a conversation I had, I told them it's TV or nothing. I don't trust film anymore, I think it's way too sprawling to work as a two hour film. I think television would afford a lot of opportunity to actually spend time with all of the stuff that happens off screen. Since you have one point of view character there's a lot of stuff that happens off screen that I feel television would afford the opportunity to expand on and make the world feel more realised. Because right now Cora's father Nills doesn't actually engage in the narrative, he's almost like this god figure that's dictating the events of the book from across the ocean, but in a TV show you would be able to actually spend time with him, see where he's getting his information and what his machinations actually are, what his plans are, and introduce new characters altogether. That would be my thing, but I'm not holding my breath. Ignoring the fact that we are in a plague year streaming television is a bubble, it's about to burst. But if I could sell the option for some money for doing literally nothing that would be nice.
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