EDITORIAL
Third Times a Charm
INTERVIEWS
A Chat with Mary Robinette Kowal
The Writers Room – Aliette de Bodard
Featured Film Maker – Sam Taylor & Bjorn Aschim
FICTION
The Horses Under Her Skin by Leena Likitalo
Word for Word by Kate Heartfield
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Editors: Darryl Knickrehm & David Rees-Thomas Illustrations/Design: Darryl Knickrehm
Contribution Writer: Alisa Alering First Readers: Alisa Alering, Dawn Bonanno, Beth Cato, Micaiah Evans, Ewan Forbes, Marina J. Lostetter, Emi Morimoto, Sandra Odell
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Welcome to issue 3 of Waylines! It’s been a hectic few months since the last issue (and we send a big, special thanks to our First Readers, without which we’d still be trying to wade through the tsunami of submissions). But now it is May, winter has shaken loose its grip, and the cherry blossoms have come, at least for us here in Japan. It’s time for some great tales. It’s time for issue 3!
As always, we are excited to present our latest batch of gems, and in this issue, we even have a bit of a theme – a taste of fantasy. In each story, each film, each interview, fantasy has taken over, blooming with ideas, budding with enchanting atmospheres. So without further ado, let us introduce to issue 3.
For our stories:
Finnish writer, Leena Likitalo presents a beautiful, and evocative tale of love, magic, and death in the magical realms of “The Horses Under Her Skin.”
And…
Kate Heartfield offers a cautionary tale that explores life choices, sacrifice, and regret, all through one man’s magic box, in “Word for Word.”
For our films this issue, we have:
“Everything I Can See From Here,” a beautifully animated, whimsical tale by director’s Sam Taylor and Bjorn Aschim about a soccer-loving alien.
“Stanley Pickle,” Victoria Mather’s enchanting human-stop motion tale of a boy, a girl, and the magical world they live in.
And finally...
Evan Viera’s “Caldera,” an amazing animation delving into the subconscious world, one you won’t want to miss.
And last, but certainly not least, we have our interviews. For this month’s Writers Room, Alisa sat down with the BSFA Award winning writer, Aliette de Bodard. For our featured author interview, we chatted with Hugo Award winning author, and puppeteer, Mary Robinette Kowal as she took a small break from her book tour. And as always, we have our interviews with his issues writers/film makers.
If you want to send us a message, you can do so on our site, and we can also be found at Facebook and Twitter.
Also, Waylines is gearing up for Year Two and will be running our fund raising campaign from January 10-February 10, 2014. If you like the magazine, think about heading over to our Kickstarter campaign then. There are pledge rewards like posters, bookmarks, and our Zero Issue - an issue made just for our supporters. Help make Year Two a reality.
For now, enjoy Issue 3! Safe Journeys!
Sincerely,
D & D
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Our featured author for issue 3 is Mary Robinette Kowal, a Campbell and Hugo award winning author, who has just released the third book in her Glamourist History series, Without a Summer. When she’s not writing, she’s quite often busy doing voice acting, having recorded for authors such as Kage Baker, Cory Doctorow, and John Scalzi. She’s also a professional puppeteer.
We caught up with her during her recent book tour and asked her about her thoughts on everything from puppetry to pod-casting.
You recently released the 3rd book in the Glamourist History. Please tell us a bit about the series, and the new book.
TThis is an historical fantasy series that’s set in the early 1800s in England. The first book was often described as being like Jane Austen with magic. The magic system is called “glamour” and it’s an illusionary system of magic that young ladies of quality are expected to learn as part of the womanly arts such as painting and needlepoint. I worked very hard to create a magic system that wouldn’t break history.
Each book stands alone, although there is a long character arc for my main character, Jane. While the first book is very much in the Jane Austen plot mold, the subsequent books get progressively more swashbuckling.
In Without a Summer, I take Jane and her husband to London on a commission to create a glamural for the Baron of Stratton. While there, they uncover a plot involving the Luddite rebellion and proverbial chaos ensues.
Before writing success, you were, and still are, a puppeteer. What stories would you love to translate to puppetry, or vice versa?
I’ve always wanted to do an adaptation of Michael Ende’s Momo into a puppet play. It’s such a wonderful story and there are so many beautiful images in it that would really lend themselves to a production. Brave New World is also on my “someday” list. I want to use overt puppetry, where you can see the puppeteer, and use identical twins. I know a surprising number of them in puppetry.
You’ve been a host on the Writing excuses podcast for a few years now. How did you get involved, and what’s it like working with the others?
I started off as a guest on the show in season 3. Unbeknowst to me, the fellows were secretly auditioning female hosts. They’d realized that, being an all male cast, led to some blind spots in certain discussions. In the fifth season, they asked me on again as a guest, which was apparently my call-back. Later that same day, they asked me to come on board as a regular for season six.
It’s a wonderful experience. Since they all live in the Salt Lake City area, I fly in a couple of times a year and we record the episodes in chunks. We also try to get some guest authors on when we’re at conventions. I am always exhausted after these sessions because it’s like being on panels all day long. Since the episodes are only 15 minutes long, there’s no room for fluff. You have to be sharp and on for the entire episode. I love it.
You were also VP of SFWA for a while. How was the experience?
It was very rewarding. It’s nice to be in a position where you can not only see the things that need to be improved, but actually be in a position to help make the industry a better place for writers. At the same time, it takes energy and, though everyone recognizes that career comes first, it was a little bit of a relief to get out of office and realize that things were no longer my problem. I had so much free time that it was a little confusing.
That’s one of the things I emphasize in my Building An Online Presence for Writers class – how to do things efficiently and get the most use out of the time one spends poking around on the web getting distracted by cat pictures.
What books or authors have you read recently that have got you really excited, whether genre or not?
I just read Marie Brennan’s A Natural History of Dragons and really loved the book. It feels like an adventure memoir from the middle of the 1800s, but it’s a secondary world fantasy. She nails the historical tone beautifully, while delivering a rollicking adventure. I loved it and fully expect to see it on awards ballots next year.
What can we expect to see from Mary Robinette Kowal in the near future?
I’m currently working on a novella for Audible. It’s part of the shared world Metatropolis anthologies. It’s an interesting change of pace to write for audio after being primarily focused on printed fiction.
Mary Robinette Kowal is the author of Shades of Milk and Honey, Glamour in Glass, and the 2011 Hugo Award-winning short story “For Want of a Nail.” Her latest novel, just out, is Without a Summer. Her short f
iction appears in Clarkesworld, Cosmos and Asimov’s. Mary, a professional puppeteer, lives in Chicago. Visit her online at maryrobinettekowal.com.
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Aliette de Bodard lives and works in Paris, where she has a job as a Computer Engineer. In her spare time, she writes speculative fiction: her work has appeared in Interzone, Clarkesworld and The Year’s Best Science Fiction, and has been nominated for a Hugo, Nebula and Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Her trilogy of Aztec noir fantasy Obsidian and Blood is published by Angry Robot, and her Nebula-nominated On a Red Station, Drifting is out from Immersion Press.
How did you know you wanted to become a writer? Why did you choose to become a writer?
I’ve always been an avid reader from a young age (as Damon Knight said, I was the kid in the library with a pile of books taller than me). I dabbled a bit in writing when I was 10 or so. It was an illustrated story about cat-people and the space emperor that proved two things to me: 1. don’t do cat people, and 2. whatever else might be my strong suit, illustration wasn’t it!
I didn’t really get serious about it until I got to be a bored teenager in London; at which point I started reading “how to” books and slowly being inducted into the internet writing community--though I didn’t get serious about it until 2004, and didn’t get to cons until 2007.
You’ve said that The Weight of a Blessing is “one of those stories that took me a long time to write? Are you a fast writer? Tell us about your process.
I’m a fast writer... once I’ve worked out what the story is about. I generally brainstorm my stories for a long time without producing anything resembling a draft; once I’ve settled on a rough plot and an ending, I go on a writing binge. “Immersion”, for instance, took about 3-4 weeks of intense and frustrating brainstorming, but the actual writing of the first draft only took 2 evenings (it helps that I’m a fast typist).
For revisions, I usually do a first pass of handing the story out to readers to get a sense of what’s working and not working. I’ve learnt my lesson, and I try to have a reasonable variety of people, without being overwhelmed by critiques (I was on Critters once, and just couldn’t deal with the sheer amount of crits. I prefer to ask 4-5 people I trust, and then collate their opinion). I then do a revision sheet: it lists all the points I think should be fixed. Once I have that, I tackle actual revisions, generally in reverse orders (smaller revisions first. I know it’s not very logical, but it’s how I tend to work). I’ll go through anything from 1-3 rounds of revisions; but if it goes above 3 I generally need to stop and entirely gut the story, because it’s a sign that something is wrong on a level that mere revisions can’t fix...
This process, of course, has been broken numerous times as I saw fit.
If you weren’t a writer what would you be? What was your secret teenage dream job?
My secret teenage dream job was archaeologist a la Indiana Jones. I would go to all those countries, discover ruins, foil bad guys and learn to cook all the world’s cuisines! (about the only thing that survived was the cooking, though I discovered mastering one cuisine was already hard enough...)
You’re stranded on a remote and isolated planet. You can have one comfort food beamed down to you. What is it?
Vietnamese beef noodle soup aka pho?. It’s my one comfort food (and a hassle to cook so I don’t eat it that often). It’s a tie between that and Vietnamese pate (cha lua) with steamed rice, though. I ate so much cha lua when I was young that the taste of it in the mouth instantly reminds me of childhood.
What do you wish you were reading but aren’t, because it doesn’t exist?
Zelazny’s Amber series rewritten as the adventures of a Chinese/Vietnamese family (with Oberon replaced by the wily matriarch).
What should a reader do after reading this?
I’ll avoid the first self-serving answer which comes to mind. But I can suggest looking at the World SF blog to get a glimpse of SFF that’s beyond the “standard” Western Anglophone stuff that overwhelms much of the market. Alternatively, go get a good bowl of phở in a Vietnamese restaurant (the good stuff, the one where the meat comes thinly sliced and raw, and you let it cook in the broth; and where the broth has all the trappings such as meatballs, Thai basil, Mexican coriander, soy and sweet onion). Trust me. You’ll have no cause to regret it.
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Sam Taylor and Bjorn Aschim are the two creative genius behind the whimsical, animated adventure Everything I Can See From Here. If you haven’t seen it already, head on over to Waylines Issue 3 to check out the full film.
In May, we chatted with Sam and Bjorn about the film, their animation and their new studio. Here’s what they had to say.
What was the inspiration behind Everything I Can See From Here, the story behind the story?
The story was a brought together from a bunch of different drawings, ideas and sketches that we had collected over the years. We wanted to do something that felt quite realistic and kitchen-sink, something with the depressing-grimy quality of say Kes, but with a silly and anarchic edge to it. We wanted it to feel distinctively British. We’ve always had these two young characters popping up in various incarnations in different stories but they seemed to finally work as we brought the alien character element into it.
What was your goal with the piece?
I don’t think there was ever a specific goal from the outset. I think the major drive was for us to finally just make something together. We’d been studying and working together for many years on various longer bigger productions and we’d always talk about doing something in our spare time. As I (Bjorn) got back from a sabbatical in Asia we both rented a desk together in a studio in London and started working on the storyboards. The story went through various incarnations. The spaceship was as big as a mountain at one point, the alien was chasing the kid through the town and the stick used to be a cricket bat.
We thought the imagery in Everything I Can See From Here was striking. What inspired some of these beautiful designs and backdrops?
Drab british suburban townscapes and old post-industrial mining towns with gigantic slag heaps littering the landscape. These sad places that once were thriving cities but now just sad places full of council estate type buildings and abandoned factories and houses. Perhaps there is a slight absurd romanticism about these places as I think we both spent some time growing up in these types of environments. For me it was definitely an environment I was familiar with from my childhood. (Although I didn’t grow up in the UK) Someone made the comment about how the film feels like it takes place in that nowhere land right before you get called in for supper when you’re a kid. That’s a pretty good description of what we were trying to go for.
The aspect ratio is quite unusual for this film, but it frames the imagery in a powerful way. What made you decide to do this?
It was an idea that came to us right at the end of boarding the film which meant we had to re-board the entire film from scratch to take advantage of the tall format. Most of the action happens in the vertical axis and I think it compliments the story well. We also had in mind how these type of films are being watched these days. Most people find these films online and sometimes they are watching them on different devices like iphones and tablets. Featuring this film on TV or in the cinema was never really something we intended so it free’d us up to use whatever format we wanted. Watching it on an ipad is quite an interesting experience, it feels “closer” somehow, something I think we had never really seen before. Like a cross between a comic and a film.
What was involved in achieving such fluid animation? We’d love to hear some technical details. How long did all this take?
The animation was all done by hand by us and by our friends. We didn’t rotoscope or use 3D except on the aliens head. We were very lucky to get some amazingly talented animators
to help us out with certain scenes. It was all people we had met through different jobs and who we’d studied with throughout the years. They all did this in their own spare time. The animation took the best part of about a year I think. It was a challenging and long process that really nearly killed us at one point. There are long scenes that goes on for several minutes with all the three characters in full view for most of the duration. Choreographing and timing this is insanely hard. It is not something we’re very keen on doing again.
How big of a crew did it take to achieve Everything I Can See From Here? Are there any juicy production tales you’d like to talk about?
I guess in total we had about 35-40 people helping us out at various degrees throughout the production. I don’t think we’ve got many shocking tales. We organised a screening in a warehouse in London where we built life-size replica of the square spaceship. It was made out of wood wrapped in black landscaping sheets. The film was running on loop on a 52” TV screen turned on it’s side and there could only be about 15 people in the cube at a time. Sam’s brother made a lit up, paper-mache version of the mask and walked around the in a poncho all night. It was an amazing night and the turnout was incredible. You can see some of it in the making-of video. Seeing that so many people would come to watch an animated short film is kind of mind blowing. I’d like to plug the amazing work of Box Of Toys Audio who did the sound for the film. They joined in on the production at a low point where the wind had kind of gone out of the both of us and hearing the first draft of the soundtrack completely blew us away! The atmosphere and depth they brought to it was just incredible, they hired some analogue synths from the BBC workshop and really captured this organic and retro-sounding alien.