October 20, 2008
This week's Nuts & Bolts interviewee is author and publisher Kelly Link. Best known for her short stories, which have variously won the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, Locus, and Tiptree awards, Kelly also runs Small Beer Press with her husband, Gavin J. Grant. The two co-edit the tiny but audacious zine Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet and the fantasy side of the Year's Best Fantasy and Horror series. I asked Kelly about Pretty Monsters: Stories (Viking, October 2008), her first YA collection.
Genreville: Where did the idea of doing a YA story collection come from? What drew you to that idea?
Kelly Link: It wasn't so much an idea as a realization that, over the last few years, most of my recent stories were stories written for a young adult audience. I've never stopped reading science fiction and fantasy, and I've never grown out of reading young adult books, either. And there's always been significant cross-over between the genres: if you love fantasy, then you'll probably love Elizabeth Knox's recent young adult novels or Diana Wynne Jones, Margo Lanagan, Megan Whalen Turner, Ysabeau Wilce, M. T. Anderson, Holly Black, Joyce Ballou Gregorian, etc. If you're a young adult reader who loves Ursula K. Le Guin and Anne McCaffrey, then at some point hopefully you'll read The Left Hand of Darkness and Naomi Novik's Temeraire series, etc.
There's a great deal of cross-over between the fantasy/sf genre and young adult. My editor at Viking, Sharyn November, once said that what defined young adult work was that the protagonist was experiencing something for the first time--coming into a new world, entering into a new sphere of responsibility or danger. In young adult books, there's a sense of immediacy, of urgency. The stakes are high, which is something that's often true in fantasy and science fiction as well. Are you the heroine or hero of a young adult novel, or a fantasy novel? You may well be the chosen one. Dragons or vampires are drawn to you. There are portals into other worlds that only you can access. There are endless variations on these kinds of stories that you can tell.
GV: What challenges did you face while writing, selling, and promoting it?
KL: As far as the stories go, some of them came easily and some of them were harder to write. "The Wrong Grave," "The Faery Handbag," and "Monster" are stories where I had a fairly finished draft within a few days of writing down the first paragraph. Others, like "The Surfer," took months and moths. "The Surfer" is the first real science fiction story that I've ever written, and writing it was like pulling teeth.
As for selling the collection, Sharyn November made an offer I couldn't refuse as soon as my agent sent Pretty Monsters out. My earlier collections, Stranger Things Happen and Magic for Beginners, were projects that various editors were interested in, but in the long run, my partner and I published them through our own press, Small Beer Press. So: much easier!
As for promoting it, we'll see. Holly Black has lent me a button-making machine, and I've been making buttons featuring some of Shaun Tan's art. We've made stickers as well. I can't decide if I feel all punk/DIY, or Martha Stewart-y. Years ago, when Magic for Beginners came out, we released Stranger Things Happen under the Creative Commons copyright. We won't be able to do quite the same thing with Magic for Beginners when Pretty Monsters comes out, because there's significant overlap, but we're certainly planning to put out as much of Magic as we can. And on the Pretty Monsters website, we'll put up a couple of other stories that YA readers might like.
Mainly I'm just so happy. I love the cover and how the book is designed. It was the best thing ever to see Shaun Tan's illustrations for the stories.
GV: How did it inspire or discourage you? How is that experience affecting your current and future projects?
KL: I've been writing more young adult short stories. Have just looked at proofs of a story for Holly Black and Cecil Castellucci's anthology Geektastic, which also has stories by Libba Bray, Cassandra Clare, M. T. Anderson, and Brian Lee O'Malley, who produces one of my favorite graphic novel series ever, Scott Pilgrim.
At some point I'd still like to write a novel. Right now I'm rereading Charlotte's Web and Holes and The Thirteen Clocks. I'm a huge fan of picture books, and artists like Lizbeth Zwerger and Peter Sis. So I'd like to try writing picture books as well.
There will be no Nuts & Bolts for the next two weeks, as I'll be out of town and some fabulous guest bloggers with their own agendas will be filling in. (I'll post the full details later this week.) It will return on November 10th with Cherie Priest discussing her forthcoming novel Fathom (Tor, December 2008).
