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Nuts & Bolts: Elizabeth Bear
August 18, 2008

This week's Nuts & Bolts interviewee is Elizabeth Bear, who just won a Hugo Award for her short story "Tideline". I asked her about the Stratford Man novels, Ink and Steel (July 2008) and Hell and Earth (August 2008), which are set in the same alternate universe as Blood and Iron (July 2006) and Whiskey and Water (July 2007).

Genreville: Where did the idea of doing prequels to the other Promethean Age novels come from, and what attracted you to that idea?

Elizabeth Bear: Well, they're not so much prequels precisely as connected but independent books. The idea of the series is that each book or pair of books in it--while they share cosmology and continuity and may contain some of the same characters--will stand alone. I have plans to write other books in this setting, scattered all over the world and throughout the last six hundred years. Some of them will be historical and some will be contemporary.

The reason I'm attracted to the idea is that it allows me to exploit the richness of worldbuilding in a long series without being limited to a single set of characters or a single plot arc. Because I am so interested in character development--in changing people drastically--it's hard for me to write indefinitely about the same people. After a while, there's only so much more you can do with them.

GV: What challenges did you face when pitching, writing, and promoting the books?

EB: I actually wrote the books on spec--I was writing them--or possibly had just finished the first draft--at the time when I sold my first novel. The challenge of that was the length. The first draft, which was written as a single novel, was 1190 manuscript pages. It went to my agent in two manuscript boxes taped together. I felt, in writing it, that I had learned an entirely new form--the epic novel, which bears the same resemblance to a regular four hundred page novel as a four hundred page novel bears to a hundred and fifty page novella. It was intimidating and exciting and I enjoyed it a great deal.

Another challenge was the research. These are the most heavily researched books I've ever written. My writing partner, Sarah Monette, who is a Ph.D. in Renaissance English Lit, says in her opinion I did as much research on these books--including a three-week trip to England--as a doctoral candidate at work on a dissertation. There's a trick to using all that information to create verisimilitude without boring the spit out of the reader with endless infodumps, and I had to learn that trick.

Selling the book--it was initially one book, as I said--was also a challenge, because of the length. I had to find ways to divide it in two to make it financially feasible for a publisher to pick it up, and of course I wanted an intact narrative across both books while not making the second incomprehensible to people who had not read the first. The phrase "staggering technical challenges" would not be an overstatement.

GV: How did it inspire or discourage you? How is that experience affecting your current and future projects?

EB: Well, the sheer scope of it was both inspiring and discouraging in and of itself. Inspiring, because such a broad canvas is a lot of room to work in. Discouraging, because such a broad canvas is a lot of white space to cover.

Incredibly rewarding, however, because there's something astounding about standing back and looking at a tapestry like that when it's done.

Next week's Nuts & Bolts will feature agent Jennifer Jackson discussing C.E. Murphy's The Queen's Bastard (April 2008).

Posted by Rose Fox on August 18, 2008 | Comments (1)