Browsing the archives for the codex blog tour tag.
Subscribe via RSS or e-mail      


Judson Roberts: “A slave … set upon the path to becoming a great warrior”

Interviews

Judson Roberts is a former organized crime prosecutor and current full-time writer living in Texas. His series of historical novels set among the Vikings, The Strongbow Saga, was originally published by HarperCollins and is now finding even greater success published through Roberts’ own Northman Books. This Codex Blog Tour interview considers violence in novels, Roberts’ fascination with Viking culture, and young adult versus adult fiction.

Your book series, The Strongbow Saga, follows the fortunes of a Viking thrall-turned-warrior. What spurred your fascination with this time period and character?

My first efforts at a novel, which spanned a number of years but did not result in anything publishable, were focused on writing a contemporary mystery/thriller, trying to follow the advice “write what you know”–I’d spent most of my adult life working in law enforcement. After hearing novelist Bernard Cornwell speak at a conference, though, I started thinking about writing a historical novel. I’d been fascinated by the Vikings as a child, and at the time there was very little fiction out there set during the Viking period, so that seemed a likely period to focus on.

I devoted about a year to in-depth research before I even considered beginning to write. That led me to realize that my childhood perceptions of the Vikings, based on such sources as the old Hollywood movie The Vikings starring Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis, had been quite inaccurate. Although many Viking-age Scandinavians did engage, at least occasionally, in organized piracy, they were far from the primitive, fur-clad barbarians of popular perception. I came to realize that they in fact had a highly developed culture that in many ways resembled that of the ancient Mycenaean Greeks of Homer’s Iliad. Moreover, I discovered that much of what we consider today to be concepts, rights, and heritage derived from medieval England had in fact originated with the Viking–things set down in the Magna Carta like the right to a trial by jury, a belief in an individual’s right to freedom, and the concept that even the king (or other central government) was subject to and must obey the law. My plan to write a good story set in a historical period grew into a desire to use that story to portray the Vikings in a more realistic, favorable light than had been done in the past.

Of course, there were challenges in trying to make the Vikings sympathetic to an audience of modern readers, because they did have their dark sides. The Vikings were heavily engaged in the slave trade, for instance. How could the hero of my story have distaste for, and even choose to avoid being involved in, some of the unsavory aspects of Viking culture that the typical Viking would not even question, without making him unbelievable by giving him modern sensibilities? I decided he had to be both a member of the Vikings’ culture and society but at the same time an outsider–a technique that James Clavell used so effectively in Shogun. So Halfdan, the protagonist of The Strongbow Saga, begins the story as a slave, a victim of the Vikings, but through a twist of fate is freed and set upon the path to becoming a great warrior among them.

Did you come up with a particular plan for handling the violence in the books early on, or did you play it by ear?

I didn’t have any plan specifically about violence. It’s very important to me, in this series, to try and portray Viking society and culture as accurately as possible. One of my major research sources has been the Viking sagas. Most of them were put into written form during the early Middle Ages, after the actual time of the Vikings, but they were derived from the Vikings’ strong oral literature tradition. Again, there’s a strong similarity to Homer’s Iliad—both were put into the written form that has survived to the present time centuries after the original stories were first created as oral literature, but archeological and other research has confirmed that there’s a great amount of underlying truth in both the Iliad and in many of the sagas.

What is striking in reading the old sagas is that extreme acts of violence could erupt so suddenly in the Viking culture. It was a fairly violent period of history anyway, and when the Vikings’ touchy sense of honor was added into the mix, it seems that frequently it did not take much of a spark to ignite a deadly confrontation. To draw another parallel, the strong coupling of honor and violence are strikingly similar to the medieval Japanese samurai culture that Clavell evokes so effectively in Shogun. To portray Viking culture accurately, the violent side cannot be ignored, but I tried never to insert gratuitous violence into the story.

Your books were originally marketed by HarperCollins as young adult novels, although my sense is that the series is written with adults in mind first of all. What are your thoughts about the series as young adult versus adult? Is this a meaningful distinction for your work?

When planning and writing the series, it was always my intention to be writing adult fiction. The agent whom I signed with, who was the first agent I’d been able to interest in the book (I had completed book 1 at the time, and had an outline and a very rough, early draft of the next two in the series) after a long and rather demoralizing search, specialized in children’s and teen books, but she assured she handled adult fiction, too. She proved unable to interest any editors of adult fiction in it, though, so after some months asked my permission to try selling the book to young adult fiction editors. I’d never even heard of the term “young adult” before then, but I agreed, and fairly quickly after that she made the sale to the Children’s Division of HarperCollins.

Had my editor there asked me to rewrite the books to make them more suitable for children, I’m not sure how I would have felt or responded. Fortunately, though, she didn’t—she said she felt older teen readers were perfectly capable of reading the books as I wanted to write them, so I continued to write books 2 and 3 of the series as adult fiction. So the “young adult” designation did not in any way affect how I wrote the story of The Strongbow Saga, but it certainly had a major impact on the series in other ways.


Roberts has made an impressively successful transition from traditionally published author to indie self-publisher. In a follow-up interview, we’ll talk about his tactics, expectations, and results in supplanting HarperCollins as the publisher of his own works.

No Comments

Lawrence M. Schoen: “Marginally self-aware collections of atoms”

Interviews

Lawrence M. Schoen is cognitive psychologist and Hugo-nominated writer living in Philadelphia, whom I first met 20 years ago when he taught a class in psycholinguistics at New College in Sarasota, Florida, where I was studying for my BA. His stories have appeared in venues like Analog and Andromeda Spaceways, as well as in translation in a variety of languages around the world. This Codex Blog Tour interview delves into the intersection of writing, cognitive psychology, Schoen’s life, and in a way, everything else that matters in the universe.

You have a pretty fascinating combination of careers: cognitive psychologist, small press publisher, and writer, with a past decade spent as a professor and a serious involvement on the side with the Klingon language (that sultry minx). Does this multiplicity of interests work for you? Is there much synergy among these parts of your life?

I like to keep busy. No, scratch that. I need to keep busy. I’m the poster child for that bit about idle hands. Really though all the things you mention, the cognitive psych, the writing, the publishing, the Klingon, they’re all different facets of the meeting points of creativity and language.

At some level I truly believe that all human endeavor is the same endeavor. All art and science is after the same thing. All dreams and efforts are attempting the same thing. Whether you call it trying to understand the world, or finding purpose, or justify our existence doesn’t matter. It’s all commentary, from a single mind, expressed to a mostly indifferent but occasionally intrigued world. This applies whether we’re talking about paintings on a cave wall, a mathematical proof, the lines in a teenager’s diary, or the cutesy names I give to my dog (who this very morning I was calling “vomit puppy”). I don’t want to get all touchy-feely and say we’re all “star stuff” (though we are), but at the end of the day we are all marginally self-aware collections of atoms with opinions and ideas about other collections of atoms. To not find synergy in the actions and directions of a person’s life would be a great surprise.

At a less heady level (which is probably what you were going for, sorry), yes indeed, the different tangents of my life do indeed influence one another on a regular basis. My training as a research psychologist with a particular fetish for language and memory constantly informs the fiction that I write. The fiction that I write colors what fiction from other authors that I edit and publish, and vice versa. My interest in Klingon is fueled by my expertise in language as a psychological construct, by being a genre author and publisher, by appreciating the combination of timing and technology that put me in the right time and place with the right skill set to lead an international effort to work with a constructed language.

Or more simply, I have a really great life!

A lot of your fiction to date has been about the spacefaring hypnotist The Amazing Conroy. What is it about Conroy that is compelling for you as a writer?

BUFFALITO CONTINGENCY, Schoen's latest book

Like many writers of my generation, I grew up reading Burroughs and Heinlein. I like my fiction to have a happy ending. I like to see everything resolved and tied up with a bow at the end, for the good guy (or girl) to win out over the bad, and for the unjust to be defeated. Conroy does that for me. He’s the little guy who wins, not necessarily because of any great attribute he possesses, but because he’s got a good heart. He’s a decent enough guy, despite being a bit of a rogue.

They hypnosis part means he gets to play with people’s reality. This isn’t just fun, it’s also a great vehicle that I need to remember to take better advantage of. Conroy gets to change what people believe, perhaps only for a few minutes while they’re on stage, perhaps in subtler and longer lasting ways. Of course, we all do that every day, but we’re not usually doing it so overtly or deliberately or as a form of entertainment.

And too, there’s a lot that’s autobiographical in Conroy. He wants to be liked (don’t we all?), and he wants to succeed. He wants to be special. He makes mistakes, but doesn’t always see them. He’s the center of his own world — a point that is played up by my always writing him in the first person — but he’s more often a protagonist than a “hero.” He’s a good guy, trying to be better, but he’s flawed. I think all of these factors make it easier for readers to identify with him.

Have cognitive psychology and linguistics offered you any insights into how to write or why you write? Additionally, do they help with characters, stories, or voice?

I used to wish I was one of those authors who claim they “have” to write. Like I’ll go mad or become self-destructive or commit violence if I don’t have that release. Nyah, sorry, that’s not me. But I am fascinated by people, and always have been. That’s probably what propelled me into psychology way back when, the variety of people and their behaviors, the manifestations of their motivations and the choices they make. I do believe that everyone has a story but that most of them don’t have the means to tell it well.

I’m very comfortable writing dialogue. I’m usually pretty good about having different characters sound like different people, and I can be impatient or incredulous with authors who can’t do this. Both sides of that stem from a passion for language that goes back at least as far as being twelve and hanging out with people who were trying to teach me articulatory phonetics and elvish in the same afternoon.

So, yes, my background in psychology and language do have an effect on my characters and my stories, and most definitely on my voice. There are a lot of writers in our field with PhD’s and/or who have spent time as professors. Most of them have degrees in the “hard” sciences, disciplines like physics and chemistry and biology. I was trained using the same tools, the same scientific method as they were, but my subject matter has the added kicker of volition and attitude and the other experimental irritants that go along with consciousness. My worldbuilding is less concerned with getting right the mixture of gases that make up a planet’s atmosphere and more about social structures or language quirks or the impact of alien attributes on memory. For example, one requirement that I gave myself for every Conroy work is that someone in the story has some mental phenomenon that we might label as some form or other of “telepathy,” and that they have to be different every time. This allows me to play with the impact of such a device on the psychology of the people and world around it. If I were a biochemist or an astronomer, I don’t think I’d care about it so much.

What’s your biggest challenge at this point in your life? What quest are you on?

About ten years ago I had a philosophical awakening in my life, and turned myself around. I like to say that I greatly reduced my asshole quotient (though there’s still plenty left) and I became a much nicer person. At the heart of this was the realization that I’d spent most of my life unconsciously sabotaging every relationship I’d been in, professional, social, romantic, you name it. Fortunately, included in that realization was the means to stop screwing things up. As I began rebuilding my life, I made a deliberate choice to stop engaging in zero-sum games. No more of the “for me to win, you have to lose” mindset. Since then, I strive to create win-win scenarios, defining the terms for my own success and well being on ensuring that I bring the other person(s) along with me. It has made an amazing difference.

In the summer of 2009 I turned fifty, and I made another major life decision. As I began to move into the beginning of my second half-century, I acknowledged that I’d accomplished pretty much every goal I’d ever set for myself. I’d been married to a wonderful woman. I’d achieved recognition in my academic field. I’d published a novel. Things like that. Which meant that moving forward at fifty, it didn’t have to all be about me! I’m still writing, more so than ever actually, but with less pressure. Instead, I’m looking for more ways to pay it forward. I’m doing more mentoring. I’m trying to take the things I’ve learned along the way and assist colleague and friends, as well as younger and beginning writers, to achieve their aims and write the stories they want to tell. And you know, it’s incredibly gratifying. More surprising still, is that it’s making me a better writer. Talk about your win-win scenarios, all unlooked for.

I’m not sure where it’s all going to go, where it’s going to take me. In February of this year my wife and I hosted a new writing workshop out of our home. Six writers came together for a very long weekend of feedback, critique, and novel blocking. It was brilliant. It was exhausting. It was incredibly satisfying and transformational. And I want to do it again, every year, possibly twice a year. It’s an incredible feeling to connect with other authors in this way, to be part of a community that helps one another to become better, to share in the creative process so freely. I said it above in answer to your first question, and I can’t think of a better way to end here. I have a really great life!

You can find some free examples of Schoen’s work online, including the story “Mars Needs Baby Seals,” posted for International Polar Bear Day at http://www.lawrencemschoen.com/freebies/ipb-2011/ and his reading of “Sweet Potato Pie” for the Balticon podcast: http://balticonpodcast.org/wordpress/2010/04/bc44-89-lawrence-m-schoen-reading/.

2 Comments

Kelly Barnhill: “Gifts to the child I was”

Interviews

Kelly Barnhill is a teacher, mom, and writer from Minneapolis. Her stories have sold to magazines like Postscripts, Clarkesworld, and Weird Tales, and she has written thirteen nonfiction books for kids. This Codex Blog Tour interview delves into where she finds time, focus, and inspiration to write, and how her writing complements the other parts of her life.

So you have a new novel for middle grade readers called The Mostly True Story of Jack coming out from Little, Brown in August, but you have a lot of prior experience writing science books for kids (e.g., Sewers and the Rats That Love Them). Does the nonfiction writing help you in writing fiction for kids of the same age group?

Oh, absolutely. My work writing nonfiction for children was something I actually never set out to do. I had written to Capstone Press a year earlier, hoping to do some curriculum work. They came back asking me to write them a couple of books – and very specific books indeed. These books needed to appeal to both boys and girls, they needed to be informative, factual, and funny. They needed a strong voice, smooth readability, short sentences, chunked information, and high interest. I had insanely strict word counts – not only in total, but I had limits as to how long my average sentence length could be, how long my paragraphs could be, how many words could be on each page. It was like nonfiction haiku. But funny. Hardest thing I ever did.

The thing is, that work – that painstaking, back-breaking, soul-crushing work – was probably the best thing I ever did. I became ruthlessly economical. I became much more concerned with voice. I learned to see the humor in everything (now, granted, when you’re writing a book on the history of the sewer system, the humor just, um, flows, but when you’re writing a book on famous hoaxes, or weird rituals, or horrifying medical practices, you’ve got to be pretty flexible and open to humor). My work as a nonfiction writer built me into the writer I am now. And really, it convinced me that I really could write for children. And then I started my novel.

What do you hope kids get out of reading your fiction? Is the most important thing that the story be fun, or are there lessons to be learned, or is the goal something less concrete than that?
I guess I never really thought of it that way. I think, in a lot of ways, people who write for children are secretly writing letters to the person we were as children. I write about loneliness because as a child I was lonely. I write about characters who struggle with anger and disillusionment and the mercilessness of hope because as a child I was angry, and disillusioned – and I knew that hope, while redeeming and sustaining, was also merciless. Hope makes requirements on a person. I write fiction because I want to tell the child that was – the lonely child, the struggling child, the hurting child – that friendship is possible, and love is possible, and hope doesn’t always hurt.

I write fiction to give gifts to the child I was: strong legs, clear eyes, quick hands and wings – wings made of ink, wings made of paper, wings made of pencil shavings and eraser bits. And I can’t say for sure, but I’m pretty sure she received them. I’m pretty sure she stepped out, scanned the skies, ran, leaped, and flew.

What has been the biggest obstacle to your writing so far? Have you had to take any special steps to deal with it?

The biggest issue for me right now is time. I teach; I parent; I write. Unfortunately, those three occupations spring from the same place in my heart – which is a bit of a strain. For a lot of years, the entirety of my writing time happened between the hours of four and and six in the morning. At six, the children woke, and my day followed the rhythm of my children. Lately, things have gotten easier – all three kids are in school, and I have the great luxury of working during the daytime. Even still, it is now the rhythm of the story that I have to contend with – and that is a rhythm that is not my own. Because I don’t outline – and I approach story writing in the same way that I approach story reading, that same sense of wonder, expectation and excitement – I often wander down trails that I later have to abandon. Characters emerge, flourish, and disappear. Stories are written, then re-written from memory. It’s a messy process and an unpredictable process, but it’s mine, and I’ll keep it.

4 Comments


%d bloggers like this: