Omnivoracious

Stage and Page: The Relationship Between TED Talks and Authors

TED Talks -- a series of recorded lectures in which industry leaders in technology, entertainment, and design are invited to present forward-thinking ideas -- are a relatively new phenomenon for the nonprofit organization TED. To put this into perspective, the first TED conference, held in 1984, included Sony and Lucasfilm; they presented the CD and 3D graphics respectively. Two decades later, TED started posting the talks online, and now they seem to be everywhere.

Often a presenter's biography will mention a book he or she has authored, and sometimes the speaker is even an author by trade. In fact, currently among the top 20 TED Talks (determined by views) are Bonk and Gulp author Mary Roach (No. 19) and Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert (No. 13).

Some other author TED vets you may recognize include Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling, McSweeney's founder and editor Dave Eggers, food and agriculture expert Michael Pollan, The Joy Luck Club author Amy Tan, and The Fault in Our Stars author John Green.

But there was a moment, a week or so ago, when something truly new happened: our two bestselling books were Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg and Daring Greatly by Brene Brown. Each was the debut book by a TEDTalker-turned-author who used her presentation as the basis of her book. Is it a new trend? Is there such a thing as a "TED effect" now?

It's too soon to tell, but we're keeping our eyes open. Meanwhile, TED has teamed up with Kindle Singles to publish shorter nonfiction (around 20,000 words) pieces by many TED Talks participants. You can find them here.

Which of your favorite authors would you want to see give a TED Talk? Which TED Talks presentations would you like to read more about in a book? Comment below.

Sara Says: Nora Ephron Knew From Lucky Guys

On the one hand, Lucky Guy seems like a strange thing to have been written by the late Nora Ephron. It's a play, for one thing; it's about tabloid journalism in New York in the 1980s; it centers around a very hard drinking, Irish-American columnist named Mike McAlary, who won a Pulitzer Prize after some very public career ups and downs; it has no love story (a la Sleepless in Seattle), no sisterhood of wise cracking women (ditto, plus You've Got Mail, plus the fact of Ephron's three writer sisters in real life); no whimsy (unless you count the little bit of singing Lucky Guy's characters do in their many bars); it has no happy ending. And yet the play –- which runs on Broadway through June 16 –- turns out to be as Ephronesque as it could be, as longtime fans of the author/screenwriter will note.

Ephron was once a journalist for The New York Post, one of the tabloids that also employed McAlary, albeit in a different era. It's about writers and their sometimes blind ambitions (see characters throughout Ephron's oeuvre, and the fact that she was famously married to Carl "Watergate" Bernstein, as well as journalists Dan Greenberg and Nick Pileggi). And yes it's a play -– but so was Love, Loss and What I Wore, which Ephron and her sister Delia adapted from a charming novel. It's also -- most lovingly, if in a slightly sharper, more masculine way -- about New York, Ephron's longtime hometown, the setting for most of her writings, and a character in itself. And it stars Tom Hanks as McAlary; Hanks, as you recall, was in Sleepless, and was one of Ephron's good friends.

Photo: Joan Marcus

But even more than all that, there are lines and bits in this play that are vintage Nora, that display her unerring ear for dialogue. (One of my favorites: Eddie Hayes, the celebrity lawyer/operator who handles McAlary's career , brags he can get McAlary so much money that he could buy a house that "could have six kids" in it. "Eight, if they aren't too big." And, as one of McAlary's frenemies proclaims, McAlary is "a two-bit hack who got [Jimmy] Breslin's slot but not his talent."

Still, the word that comes to mind most throughout Lucky Guy is "legendary." In a couple of dozen short scenes, Ephron manages to evoke a whole world that might have been small, in that it took up only a little time and space, but that lives large in its own legend. It's only the reporters onstage, but they remind us of so many other people and places of the time: Donald Trump as he's divorcing Ivana, Elaine's (now defunct) restaurant, The Lion's Head (the writers' bar), Joey Buttafuocco, Rudy Giuliani, McAlary himself. Writing about legends, of course, should come as no surprise, since Ephron was and has, since her death last June, become pretty legendary herself.

If you can't get to the Broadhurst theater by June 16, console yourself with some of other Ephron's great writing: Wallflower at the Orgy (written close to the time of the events in the play); Heartburn; I feel Bad About My Neck; I Remember Nothing; and Scribble Scribble (which is expected to be reissued this fall).

 

Julia Glass on Mary Beth Keane How I Almost Missed Out on a New Favorite Author

I did not deliberately choose to read Mary Beth Keane's first novel, The Walking People. It came to me in a blizzard of books I read as one of three judges for a literary prize back in 2010. I took my responsibility seriously, even primly; one thing that worried me was how strongly my personal biases would influence my choices. 

Just then, I happened to be weary of immigrant stories in general, nor did it help that I had recently, belatedly, read the incomparable Angela's Ashes. 

But I had vowed to read at least 50 pages of every book I was to judge, so I took The Walking People with me on an overnight trip I made alone, to give a talk. That night, I went to bed without reading, exhausted; in the morning, I decided to hang out with the dreaded book until 9 a.m. or so, just to avoid rush-hour traffic. Sighing, I opened it. When I next looked up at the clock, it was 11:15, past checkout time. I had lost not only my connection to real time but very nearly an extra night in hotel fees.

I drove home, stashed my suitcase, and plunged back into the book. Every so often I'd flip to the end and look at the author's photo. How on earth did this fresh-faced young woman—from my middle-aged perspective, this girl—know so damn much about so many things? I'll skip all the exquisite historic and cultural details of that novel. What Mary Beth Keane knows best, and most remarkably, is how the human heart grows, changes, and endures. She seems to know intimately every stage of life, from childhood through sexual awakening, through long marriages and parenthood, through working lives filled with compromise, through the mental dwindlings of old age.

Out of more than a hundred accomplished books, I and my fellow judges named The Walking People one of the top five contenders for the PEN/Hemingway Prize. At the ceremony, I met Mary Beth, and I asked what her next act would be. Later, I paused to wonder: Wait. Did she really say, "A novel about Typhoid Mary"? (Okay, so maybe my hearing is starting to go. The room was awfully crowded.)

Last year, finally, I read Fever. And you might say I read it in a fever -- the fever of emotional suspense that makes all the best books so essential. Does it involve Irish immigrants? Yes. Did I give a hoot? No. Mary Mallon is a show-stopping, strong-willed, heartbreaking heroine, and the New York in which she lived a hundred years ago comes stunningly alive as the backdrop for the story of her long and rich but star-crossed life.

Here's something I know firsthand: second novels that follow prizewinning firsts are tough. They're tough to write, tough to send out into the world. But Fever is even more ambitious, beguiling, and moving than The Walking People. Mary Beth has outdone herself. And now, of course, I have to find out what in the world she'll conjure up next. This time I'll trust my hearing. Already I can't wait to read it.

Why Zombies? A Defense of the Z Word

When it comes to zombies, I will not apologize.

In darker, future times, that statement might take on a different, more ominous meaning. For now I simply mean that I won't apologize for my cultural obsession with zombies, the stacks of books and movies about them that clutter my home, that this is my third time in three months writing on the subject here, or that this probably won't be the last time I do so. Allow me to explain why.

Vampires vs. Zombies - or How the Zombie (Fan) is Misunderstood

Beyond the built-in genre-based bias from which all horror typically suffers, zombies have developed a reductive reputation –- one from which their horror cousins, vampires, seem immune.

To state the obvious, vampires historically have been portrayed as cunning, mysterious, sexy creatures. They're cold-blooded killers, yet from the works of Polidori and Bram Stoker to Ann Rice and Stephanie Meyer, bloodsuckers have made the ladies' swoon.

Zombies, by comparison, are typically portrayed as grunting, ravenous, simple creatures. That's fair. But those who don't watch these kinds of films or read these kinds of books seem to apply the creatures' traits to their fans. And that's not fair. "You've made a plan for the zombie apocalypse? How [eyeroll] cute." (We'll get back to that.) Non-fans merely see a barrage of violence resulting in lots and lots of splatter repeated from one story to the next. But to see no more than the gore is to miss what's really going on, on many levels.

First and foremost, unlike vampires, zombies typically are not characters. They're part of the setting; they're often creatively concocted and masterfully manufactured (particularly in the visual sense), but they're nonetheless mere catalysts whose sole narrative purpose is to propel the real characters and the real plot. Once one accepts that basic but crucial premise, the value of the rest of the story can click.

What Zombie Stories are Really About

Credit where it's due, the modern zombie is actually a direct descendant of the vampire. Just as Bram Stoker is considered the godfather of the modern vampire, so film director George Romero established our basic understanding of and generally accepted "rules" for zombies. Romero, by his own admission, ripped off Richard Matheson's vampire novel I Am Legend. It always comes back to books!

So what are these "rules"? There's the general stuff: how zombies are made, how they move, how to stop them. But again, it's not really about the zombies. Romero released the movie Night of the Living Dead in 1968, during the Vietnam War. In a way, every zombie story since has been, to some extent, a guiltless war story. Amid the zombie hordes, we follow the everyman hero as he faces an enemy that is beyond human and therefore beyond reason or redemption. Likewise these stories have been, like some of the greatest literature, social commentary -- a vehicle by which to confront our own ethics and morals. Just beyond the immediacy of a zombie attack lies the real threat: mankind. Even the more lighthearted and increasingly popular field of zombie romance forces us to consider: "When civilization as we know it ends, how do we hold onto our very humanity?"

But those are just the narrative novels. Among the most popular (not to mention clever) zombie books on the market today are field guides and how-to manuals. Often these books are tagged as parody and are purchased as gag gifts. There's nothing wrong with having a laugh, but there's more to these books than you'd expect, as well.

The Government is Ready: Are You?

Valar Dohaeris: An Interview With George R.R. Martin

The epic fantasy television series Game of Thrones, which returns for its third season at the end of March, has been a magnificent hit, winning award after award and attracting larger and increasingly mainstream audiences with each season. It's been such a boon for HBO that the network announced last month a new two-year development deal with the man behind the books that launched the series, George R.R. Martin. "Valar Dohaeris," as they say. (Translated from the fictional GOT language High Valyrian, this means "All Men Must Serve," and it's also the title of the season's first episode.) In this case, Martin must serve the many facets of his inner muse and take advantage of an opportunity to reach a massive audience with more of his ideas.

Still, this (like many of his beyond-the-books projects) comes as bittersweet news to some of Martin's die-hard fans who, with rabid anticipation, await his next novel. Though it's been only two years since A Dance With Dragons (Book 5 in the Song of Ice and Fire series) was released, A Feast For Crows (Book 4) came out in 2005 and A Storm of Swords (Book 3, the first half of which is the source for this season on TV) came out in 2000. New projects, some worry, could mean even more time between releases for the final two books: The Winds of Winter and A Dream of Spring. And the books, after all, are what it's really all about, right?

Well, we can all relax and even rejoice. Amazon recently confirmed that Martin is not too distracted by these other endeavors and is, in fact, actively working on the new novel.

At the risk of exasperating fans further, we do admit that we waylaid Mr. Martin for a brief telephone conversation -- during which he discussed his history with television, how the show affects the pace of his writing, which actor’s portrayal he prefers to the character he wrote, and what’s really important when it comes to finding the right actor to portray his characters.

Warning: Mr. Martin does hint at a potential spoiler in the first two answers.

Robin A. Rothman: What about this season are you most excited to see translated from your written description to come to life on screen?

George R.R. Martin: [Potential Spoiler Alert] Well, excited and apprehensive is the Red Wedding. I don't know if you want to write about that without spoiling things. I think it will have more impact if it takes people unexpectedly, but certainly that's the scene that both myself and I think most of my hardcore fans are looking forward to with a mixture of anticipation and apprehension.

RAR: It's so graphic in the novel. You've probably seen it already. Do you feel it captures what you wrote? Were there any major changes to that?

GRRM: [Potential Spoiler Alert] I have not seen it. I've been very busy writing the new books and doing other projects this year, so I did not have a chance to visit the set. At one point I was looking at going over there when they were filming it and maybe even being one of the casualties, but I just couldn't find the time to get over to Belfast, so I haven't seen any of it. I've seen no footage this season.

RAR: So, do you watch the show in real time like fans do? Are you watching it having special screenings and parties with friends when it comes on air?

GRRM: It's a combination of both. I will be going out to L.A. in a couple weeks for the premiere; they'll be screening the show for an invited crowd at the Grauman's Chinese Theatre. That'll be only four or five days before the debut, though. In some cases they'll send me a screener or a disc of a rough cut to look at ahead of time, but in the majority of cases I'm seeing it just as the fans are when it comes on the air.

RAR: Your process when you're working with the television people... are you hands-on with it?

GRRM: Fortunately I was either very lucky or very smart to team up with David Benioff and Dan Weiss -- the showrunners and executive producers of the show who write most of the episodes -- and, you know, I have a great pair of partners there. They're doing a terrific job with the show and the show is their baby and the books are my baby. So, I'm gonna keep writing the books and keep ahead of these guys before they catch up with me.

RAR: You're known for working at a comfortable pace. You're working on a lot of projects, you take your time and you offer really dense, detailed volumes. Has the pace of the TV series actually put any pressure on you or changed your pace of writing?

Some Things You Might Not Know About Sheryl Sandberg...But Lucky Us, We Got the Chance to Ask

By any measure, Sheryl Sandberg is a big success. Smart, rich, powerful, the 43-year-old COO of Facebook, wife, mother-of-two "has it all," as they used to say. But Sandberg doesn't take her successes for granted -- hell, no! She worked hard for them -- and she's intent on helping other women learn to lead.

Her book, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, is out March 12, and has already garnered lots of passionate opinions. We chose her book as one of the Best of the Month and chatted with her a week or so before it went on sale.

Some things we learned:

Sandberg considers Lean In (the book) and Lean In (the foundation the book launches), to be unisex and ageless. Men and women need to work together to change the culture, she says. "I think this is everyone's issue," she says. She then tells me that even her 70-something mother was inspired by it -- and is now planning to have a Bat Mitzvah, an opportunity not available to her when she was 13.

She doesn't seem particularly surprised by the flack she's gotten in some corners of the press for "blaming" women instead of corporations and government. "I always knew this topic would incite strong debate. It's about us, about our passions."

Some critics also suggest Sandberg's opinions are mere clones of last century's feminism -- which, ironically, Sandberg admits to having undervalued at the time. "Looking back, it made no sense for my college friends and me to distance ourselves from the hard-won achievements of earlier feminists. We should have cheered their efforts."

Even this very privileged, super successful woman -- she has two Harvard degrees and has worked in the White House -- has self doubt. When I ask her how she got over the typical fears she elucidates in the book, she says, "The simple answer is I'm not sure I have. Like many women, I have a complicated relationship with leadership, with the word 'power.'"

Also, to those who think Sandberg must be "tough," she explains that she has, on occasion cried in the office and that she has come to understand that the occasional personal sharing can be conducive to a good working relationship. Example: Sandberg first turned down a job with her former professor, Larry Summers, for the most personal of reasons -- she wanted to get away from DC, where her ex-husband was living -- and declares that particular choice to have been the "best thing to do."

Real cultural change doesn't happen overnight -- "Social gains are never handed out. They must be seized," she writes -- but Sandberg evokes the night Obama was first elected President as an indicator of what can happen in just one generation. "I was standing behind my couch with my arms around my sister, crying [and watching the returns] and we said, 'You know what's the best thing about this?'" Answer: Her kids -- then one and three years old -- would grow up never knowing a time when it was unusual or special to have an African American president. So maybe the generation being born now will grow up free of gender stereotypes.

Two of the strongest chapters in the book -- the ones that resonated in our offices, which employ many brilliant women in the early stages of their careers -- are 1) Don't Leave Before You Leave (i.e. Don't be like the woman Sandberg cites who discusses her child-rearing plans with an employer when she was not only not pregnant... "but she didn't even have a boyfriend.") And 2) Are You My Mentor? (which takes its name from the popular children's book about ducklings: Are You My Mother?). Women need mentors, sure, but those mentors have to be earned, the relationship has to grow organically, and -- guess what? -- a woman is even allowed to have a male mentor.

She doesn't seem to care how she will be remembered. When I ask her what search terms on Google (her former employer) would bring up her name, she pauses. "I don't know," she says. I suggest "feminist leader," or "visionary," or "troublemaker" and she doesn't bite. "You know, it really doesn't matter," she says. "This is not about me. What matters is that we're having the conversation."

YA Wednesday: Amazon Asks Lauren Oliver

Lauren Oliver become a YA favorite with Before I Fall, her novel of a teenage mean girl who is killed in a car crash but then wakes up to re-live her last day again and again over the course of a week.  A book embraced by so many can be a tough act to follow, but Oliver gave us Delirium and we loved her all the more.  Fans of the trilogy have been waiting in bittersweet anticipation for the last book and yesterday Requiem was finally released.  Oliver does a fantastic job of keeping the action and romance going to the very end (we thought it was best of the month good), and I think readers are going to come away happy with the end but a little sad that the trilogy is over.

If you haven't started the Delirium books but you like Ally Condie's Matched series, The Hunger Games trilogy, or Lois Lowry's The Giver, I think you'll feel instantly connected to this story of a rigorously controlled society where love is a sickness to be cured at age 18, but not everyone thinks that's truly living. 

I met Oliver a couple of years ago when she wrote her first middle grade novel, Liesel & Po, and found her funny, interesting, and full of ideas. We wanted to see what she's up to these days so we sent her some "Amazon Asks":

Describe Requiem---or the Delirium trilogy--in one sentence?
LO: The Delirium trilogy is about a world in which love is viewed as a contagious disease; scientists have figured out how to cure it.

What's on your nightstand/bedside table/Kindle?
LO: The Age of Miracles, by Karen Thompson Walker, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, by Brian Selznick; The Family Fang, by Kevin Wilson, Why Does the World Exist? by Jim Holt.

Top 3-5 favorite books of all time?
LO: Love in The Time of Cholera, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez; The Virgin Suicides, by Jeffrey Eugenides; Matilda, by Roald Dahl; The American, by Henry James; To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee.

Book that changed your life?
LO: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, by Jonathan Safran Foer. After I read it, I became convinced that I wanted to be a novelist. I was twenty at the time, and I began seriously working on my first novel. It was never published (thankfully), but it set me on the course of my present career.

What are you obsessed with now?
LO: I just had my kitchen redone, and I now have a beautiful breakfast-bar area where I can do my writing and be within arms-reach of the coffee pot. It is amazing. I'm totally, totally obsessed. I never want to leave my house now, or even my chair.

What are you stressed about now?
LO: Right now, at this very second, I'm stressed about two things: whether there will be an epic blizzard in New York that will prevent me from going to see my sister in St. Louis, and why my agent seemed unconvinced by the pitch I gave him for my newest book idea. Actually, I'm pretty stressed about my newest book idea.

What's your most prized/treasured possession?
LO: It's so sad, but probably my phone. I'm pretty obsessed with my phone. I have a strange, troubled, intimate relationship with it. And it's the only possession I have that I feel I couldn't live without.
 
What do you collect?
LO: Art! I love hunting around for prints. I also have a large collection of children's book illustrations. Some people might say I also collect shoes.

Best piece of fan mail you ever got?
LO: I'm not sure that this qualifies as the "best," but it is certainly the oddest: a girl wrote me to ask what my feelings were about biting people. That was it, her whole query. I responded that I feel good about biting people if they are attacking you.

What's next for you?
LO: Next year, I'm releasing a new standalone YA title called Panic. It's realistic and gritty and very different from Delirium. And I also have my very first adult title coming out next year. It's a novel called Rooms, and it's told at least in part from the perspective of ghosts who inhabit the walls of a very old house.

R.A. Salvatore Looks Back Before "The Last Threshold"

At six hundred pounds of black fur and muscle, the panther Guenhwyvar is a fearsome fighter and one of Drizzt Do'Urden's most important allies. At the end of Charon's Claw, the third book in R.A. Salvatore's Neverwinter Saga, readers were left wondering what her future may hold. As we await the final book in the Neverwinter Saga, The Last Threshold, due March 5, R.A. Salvatore muses on the identity -- and unintentional identity crisis -- of Drizzt's beloved sidekick.

 

Guenhwyvar, ah Guen...

She started out as a dog, a moorhound, actually, named Canthus. When I wrote a sample chapter to audition for the second book ever published in the Forgotten Realms setting, way back in the summer of 1987, I thought the Realms were the tiny Moonshae Isles and that TSR (the original publisher of the Forgotten Realms setting) was looking for someone to write a direct follow-up to Doug Niles's Darkwalker on Moonshae. I didn't want to use Doug's characters in any meaningful way—they're wonderful characters, but I don't like sharing protagonists! -- so I grabbed one, a sly fellow named Daryth and his moorhound named Canthus, to introduce the hero of my story, Wulfgar of Icewind Dale.

Quite a bit changed during that audition period, starting with me discovering the size of the Forgotten Realms, and learning, to my great relief, that my editor didn't want me anywhere near Doug's work, since he was writing sequels to his book. So I set my book, The Crystal Shard, far away in Icewind Dale and added a character named Drizzt Do'Urden who soon took over the book. One thing I did keep from Doug's example, however: the animal sidekick.

Why? Any pet lover already knows the answer to that question. Drizzt was created as the classic, misunderstood outcast, a bit of a loner, and often driven by circumstance to his own devices. Has anyone gone through junior high school or high school who can't relate to this?

I certainly can. And in those times when I found myself confused and feeling very alone, I had a savior, a dog named Cocoa and then a dog named Yuma. They listened, without judgment, and using them as sounding boards often got me through the tough and lonely days.

So Drizzt needed a friend like that, I figured, and Guenhwyvar was born.

Let me clear this up, once and for all: Guenhwyvar is a female panther! I know, I know, don't point out the problem with that argument, please. You see, when you're a professional writer, working on deadlines and working with a team of editors/artists/designers and the like, you come to learn certain things about the process. In the case of Guenhwyvar, for some reason I never figured out, I was told that the panther had to be gender neutral. I argued about this policy, but to no avail. Guenhwyvar was a magic item, so I was told, and so Guen was an "it," not a "she" or a "he."

The cat remained a "she" in my mind, certainly, but I painstakingly went through the manuscript of The Crystal Shard and removed all of the gender-specific pronouns. In some places, the use of "it" sounded quite awkward ; when you name a character, then use "it," well, try to do it and you'll see what I mean. Nevertheless, I had my orders.

Soon after The Crystal Shard hit the shelves, I discovered, to my chagrin, that the copyeditor had apparently spotted the awkwardness of the gender-neutral pronoun, too, and so he/she (it?) had smoothed out the prose ... by replacing "it" with "he" and "him"! But no, Guenhwyvar is a female panther!

I got the name from those magnificent Mary Stewart books about King Arthur, where "Guenhwyvar" is the spelling of Arthur's Queen, and, according to Stewart, the name meant "Shadow." Perfect for Drizzt, I figured, coming from the shadows and needing a shadow. Wherever would Drizzt have been without her? Indeed, where will he be without her going forward?

Read The Last Threshold to know more.

 

 

2013 Nebula Awards Announced

The 2013 Nebula Award finalists have been announced by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. The nominees in the novel category are:

Throne of the Crescent Moon, Saladin Ahmed (DAW; Gollancz '13)
Ironskin, Tina Connolly (Tor)
The Killing Moon, N.K. Jemisin (Orbit US; Orbit UK)
The Drowning Girl, Caitlín R. Kiernan (Roc)
Glamour in Glass, Mary Robinette Kowal (Tor)
2312, Kim Stanley Robinson (Orbit US; Orbit UK)

All of the novel nominees are by U.S. authors. N.K. Jemisin returns to the Nebula list with a strong novel in The Killing Moon, while Mary Robinette Kowal's Austen-ish Glamour in Glass built on the entertainments of its predecessor, Shades of Milk and Honey. Ironskin by Tina Connolly, which alas I haven't yet had a chance to read, is about an alternate-history, magical England.

First-time novelist Saladin Ahmed was profiled here on Omnivoracious last year. In that interview, he said Throne of the Crescent Moon "took about three and a half years to write, mostly part-time, with some entire months off at a couple of points. The world, characters, etc., stayed pretty consistent, but the shape of the thing changed greatly" during the drafting process. He has been a Nebula nominee before, for his short fiction.

We also featured Caitlin R. Kiernan's The Drowning Girl last year, about which she told us, "In this novel I knew that I wanted to examine the nature of hauntings. Not ghosts rattling chains in an attic. Not what most readers expect when they hear a novel involves the paranormal. But what it actually means to be haunted ... As Imp says in the novel, how hauntings are memes, pernicious thought contagions. And, as has often been the case in my work, I wanted to offer up a narrator who's honest about being unreliable."

Followed closely by The Drowning Girl, Kim Stanley Robinson's 2312 was my favorite novel from last year. When I reviewed it for the LA Times, I wrote, "2312 is a treasured gift to fans of passionate storytelling" that contains several jaw-dropping moments and one of the greatest central relationships in science fiction's history. My opinion hasn't changed with a re-read. The novel is remarkable in many ways."

The winners will be announced at the Forty-Eighth Nebula Awards Weekend, May 16-19, 2013, in San Jose, California, at the San Jose Hilton. Visit the SFWA site for more about the awards, including past winners.

How I Wrote It: Amity Gaige, on Libraries, Tea, and Kerouac on Benzedrine

Amity Gaige's new novel, Schroder, is the story of a flawed but loving father, a man of secrets and lies who kidnaps his daughter to escape a custoody battle--and his own mysterious past. Selected as one of our Best Books of the Month for February, Schroder "limns the limits of self-made American identity, while paying tribute to the irrational exuberance of parental love," said our reviewer, Mari Malcolm.

OPENING LINE

“What follows is a record of where Meadow and I have been since our disappearance.”

This line came to me early on in the writing process. It was one of my first inklings of what would happen and why. The book is, literally, “written” by a man in prison--Eric Kennedy (aka Schroder). He is writing to his ex-wife to explain how and why he ran off with their daughter during a parental visit. Immediately after this line, he explains how the whole book/letter was written at the suggestion of his lawyer, to possibly help mitigate the charges against him. But Eric can’t really stick to the task of representing himself in a positive or flattering way. He confesses things he shouldn’t, and betrays his own lack of awareness and his messy emotions. But I hope the effect on the reader is one in which we wincingly sympathize with his need to confess and to reach out. He cares very much about his daughter and his ex-wife, and his separation from them fills him with real loss. This line comes back into the book much later, by the way, in one of the final scenes where his first lawyer suggests that any mother separated from her child would “want to know everything” about the days they were apart. Schroder is also Eric’s attempt to give his ex-wife back those stolen days.

SPACE

Lately I’ve written out of the house, mostly in libraries, because I like the sort of carry-in carry-out aspect of it, that there’s nothing to identify me or distract me, and I leave no trace. But I have a beautiful desk at home, which I bought at a craft show after selling my first novel. It’s made out of a barn door. The things that are on my desk or near it are very significant. They are too many to name, but here’s a sampler: my late Latvian grandmother’s pincushion, an image the Hindu God Ganesh (the Creator and Remover of Obstacles), an image of an early 20^th century boxer, photos of my husband and children, including the first ultrasound of my baby daughter. I have many things taped to the wall, mostly notes from loved ones, alive and gone. I have several quotes from writers, and I’ll just share this one, from Mario Vargas Llosa: “That is what authenticity or sincerity is for the novelist: the acceptance of his own demons and the decision to serve them as well as possible.”