Book Review: The Dragon Has Some Complaints, by John Wiswell

A multi-headed allegory that rewards multiple readings

It’s tricky to attempt to pin down in a few paragraphs all the things that The Dragon Has Some Complaints is trying to say, because it operates on several layers of meaning at the same time. Its tale of a grumpy, battle-weary dragon who infiltrates a city of dragon riders to get free food while he quietly plots his revenge on humans is both hilarious and heart-wrenching, and the points it has to make about pain, kindness, hubris, cruelty, loyalty and resilience get richer the more one reflects on them.

The first and most obvious level of analysis has to do with disability and chronic pain. When we meet the protagonist, the fierce dragon Garrodigh, he’s badly injured and traumatized. In one of the frequent and interminable wars between human kingdoms, a cannon shot knocked him down from the sky, leaving him with the bones of one leg shattered, his wings torn to shreds, his four heads reduced to three, and his memory partially erased. Other dragons shun him because of an alleged closeness to humans he can’t remember. He can barely hunt his food, much less defend himself. If hunger doesn’t kill him soon, a stray cannon ball will. By the time the book starts, he already has nothing to lose.

Author John Wiswell has spoken openly and at length about his own experience with disability and chronic pain, and he uses that personal perspective to great effect in the book. Because the nature of dragonkind is all explosive fire and brimstone, Wiswell employs the imagery of water and ice whenever he needs to refer to things that harm dragons. The pain in Garrodigh’s broken bones is described as a freezing sensation, like being stabbed with needles of ice. To a dragon’s mind, the nearness of death feels cold. And in a fascinating bit of worldbuilding, dragons in this universe can’t swim. A dragon’s fire can’t survive immersion in water.

The reader will find such allusions repeatedly, because once Garrodigh sneaks his way into a dragon-friendly human city, the book takes its time to very gradually depict his recovery. These humans have an entire arsenal of techniques to rehabilitate injured dragons, but even after he has laboriously regained his full mobility, an echo of the pain still lingers. There’s no perfect cure, and a body that has taken that kind of beating will never not carry its old wounds. For a book that has dragons, this is a strikingly realistic representation of physical therapy in both its benefits and its limitations.

How the narration treats Garrodigh’s inner life is another point of interest. This dragon has three remaining heads, but the book is told exclusively from the perspective of Centerhead, who seems more in touch with reality than the perpetually hungry Bottomhead, who has no interest in complicated ideas and prefers to follow more animalistic urges, and the delusional Upperhead, who is horrified at dragon behavior and is convinced that he’s a human trapped in a bad dream. The constant disagreements between Garrodigh’s heads, with Centerhead almost always taking the role of the mediating and decision-making personality, can be read as a creative reinterpretation of the Freudian trinity of Id/Ego/Superego, with the missing four head serving as Garrodigh’s life-defining trauma, the symbolic castration in reference to which everything else is framed.

(Another possible reading of Garrodigh’s heads would view them as representing the fractured self that emerges in cases of dissociative disorders, with Bottomhead’s and Upperhead’s maladaptive coping mechanisms, as well as their selective amnesia, having developed to protect the primary identity from its life-defining trauma.)

(YET another possible reading of Garrodigh’s personality would use a Lacanian lens. The primordial Lack of the fourth head is what drives Garrodigh’s every goal and choice, and his inner conflict isn’t resolved until a later chapter where he crosses an ocean, facing the thing that can kill him. Here I should be careful not to spoil too much, but the turning point in this part of his journey is that he recovers a lost Archetypal Mother at the same time as he helps humans recover a lost Archetypal Father, an encounter that reconciles Garrodigh with both the order of nature and the order of society.)

Interestingly, with all the details the book provides on Garrodigh’s mind, it never mentions how dragons experience (or not) desire. This omission stands out because the narration goes out of its way to make a recurring joke about Centerhead’s bafflement at human sexual habits, and these moments showcase how humans can look outright alien when viewed at a distance. The human Rania, Garrodigh’s self-appointed rider, caretaker and confidant, has a head-spinningly convoluted love life that the reader only gets to see as filtered through the dragon’s inevitably inaccurate perception.

On the human side, things are no less complicated. Rania is an immigrant in the dragon rider city, a native of another kingdom with which her new home is at war. Some of her superiors expect her to simply fulfill her duty and fight, but others mistrust her by default and question the truthfulness of her sworn loyalty. These questions about belonging and acceptance mirror Garrodigh’s own dilemma regarding his place among humans: he hates them and wants to eat them all, but he’s unexpectedly met a human community where dragons are valued and cared for. Neither Rania nor Garrodigh see any reason to expect they’ll end up being loved, and finding exactly that will be the final test of their respective characters.

The Dragon Has Some Complaints continues Wiswell’s literary exploration of what we mean by the category “monster” and what we do to beings that label is applied to. Sometimes prejudice makes us eschew any attempt at communication, and sometimes we wish nothing more than to open up to each other, but never learned what to do if such connection succeeds. If you’ve ever felt it’s dangerous to open your mouth, imagine having three.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

Reference: Wiswell, John. The Dragon Has Some Complaints [DAW, 2026].

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Book Review: Wearing the Lion by John Wiswell

Bringing a new found family perspective to the story of the greatest Greco-Roman mythology superhero.

When I wrote my review of Stephen Fry’s Troy in 2022, I had imagined it to be an endpoint to a boomlet of books interpreting and reinterpreting Greek mythology from a variety of perspectives. Little did I know that Fry himself has a new book in his series, but more importantly, and germane to this review, John Wiswell (Someone You Can Build a Nest In) would step up to the plate of tackling and interpreting Greek mythology. And, what's more, take the biggest of swings to the most famous hero of Greek mythology in the process.

And so we come to his second novel, Wearing the Lion.

If you are at all familiar with anyone in Greek mythology, you probably know something about Heracles (or, if you want to go Roman, Hercules). Having a TV series devoted to him in the 1990’s certainly helped. His labors come up (even if why he had to do the labors sometimes is fuzzy in the minds of many people). His prodigious strength, certainly is the stuff of legend. He is really is the OG superhero of Classical western literature.

 
And then there is of course the monsters in Heracles' story, where Wiswell comes in.

In many stories of his even before his breakout novel, John Wiswell has been writing and thinking about monsters¹. Monsters are one of his core themes and ideas and exploring monsters, from the inside as well as out, is one of his strongest power chords. And Heracles’ story, let’s face it, is positively littered with monsters. Nearly all of his labors are capturing or killing something monstrous. Probably, the most famous of these is the Nemean Lion, the one whose hide is impenetrable to weapons. How do you defeat a monstrous carnivore you can’t hurt with a spear or a sword? In the main line of the myth, Heracles wrestles it to defeat, uses its own claws and teeth to cut the hide, and then wears it for the rest of his life as some rather good light armor.

 
Wiswell comes up with a rather different idea, and hence the book’s title and the throughline for the book. Why would Heracles, himself a monster in some ways, not seek to befriend monsters rather than to slay them? And what does that do to his myth and story? The Nemean Lion is the first, but far from the only monster that Heracles meets and befriends in the course of the narrative. Heracles is not afraid of a fight, or of war, but this is a Heracles that would rather make a friend. Again, and again. Wearing the Lion is not an act of violence... it is an act of love.

The book alternates point of view between Heracles and Hera. You might be familiar that in most myths, Hera hates Heracles and from birth tries to kill or weaken him². Wiswell plays on the fact that while Hera hates Heracles (for being a bastard son of her philandering husband Zeus), Heracles himself is for most of the book absolutely and positively devoted to “Auntie Hera”. He takes the “Hera’s Glory” of his name (that is what his name means) and hits that theme again and again. This imbalance between a Heracles who is always trying to live up to his divine stepmother and be worthy of her, not knowing she is seeking his downfall, drives a lot of the plot, and some of the more mordant humor of the book. There is the damoclean sword hanging over the narrative--what happens when Heracles finds out what Hera really thinks of him?

 
But the book begins lightly and sprightly enough, in a style that I’ve come to associate with Wiswell’s writing. It almost, I think, strays over to being twee. The conversational tone of the chapters contributes to this, as we often have Heracles, or Hera, talking to (or even more often addressing ) another character in the chapter. The second person point of view gets a workout in this novel and uses it frequently

For all of that rather light tone at the beginning, though, Wiswell is willing to go dark, and in fact to tell his story has to go dark.. I should not have been entirely surprised given his short fiction but there is definitely a gear shift in this book, before and after the death of his children. I had wondered, being relatively familiar with the Heracles story, how Wiswell was going to go there, since he changes a lot of the rest of his labors and background. But indeed, Heracles does in fact kill his three children thanks to a bout of divine madness. What had started as a relatively light Heracles and the monsters story shifts into a more serious and somber tone with less humor and more drama. Heracles of course wants to know why this happened, convinced some god must have done this, and so the rest of his narrative shifts to the quest to find that out.

There is also good work on the theme of identity and who you are. The fact that one of Heracles’ early names Alcides is used again and again, and Heracles reverts to that name when he feels no longer worthy of the name Heracles. This reminds me of Doctor Who’s The War Doctor, stripping himself of the title Doctor, and having in his own mind to re-earn and regain the right to use that name. Lots of Wiswell’s characters at some point have crises or have to come to terms with who they are and their nature. His take on Heracles is another in that spirit and mode.

Meantime, on the other side, Hera has reconsiderations of the fallout of what she has done. A strong beat Wiswell hits again and again is that Hera is Goddess of the Family. Families, especially pregnant mothers but all families in general, are her divine mandate. And instead of killing Heracles with the madness, she wound up killing his family instead³. Coming to terms with all that and what happens next, along with Heracles’ own quests, makes up the back portion of the book. And as Heracles befriends more monsters and completes more quests, the eventual conflict of Hera’s plans and Heracles’ own quest head toward inexorable conflict.

 
So the novel is really in the end about Heracles and his found family of monsters and how they intersect with Hera and her family of gods and goddesses. There is a lot of lovely bits set on Olympus with Hera and the parts of the Olympian pantheon we see--in particular Ares and Athena, although a couple of others come in as well. A criticism I might have for the book is that a few opportunities were definitely missed on this side of the equation, especially with Hera given the divine mandate of motherhood and family being an important theme of the novel. Demeter and Persephone for instance, aren’t even named. The wrangling between the deities we do get and see, however is gold, and their squabbling never gets old⁴. The novel really is, from Hera’s perspective, the slow realization that Heracles’ group of monsters with him are, in fact, a family. Heracles’ story is the slow realization of his own nature, what he did, and coming to terms with himself. And, not to bury the lede, learning to actually accept his family for and what they are.

 
Wearing the Lion shows off John Wiswell’s talents for humanizing and making monsters into people and again, like his first novel, showing that people can often be the real monsters of society. This book doesn’t quite hit that theme as hard as Someone You Can Build a Nest In, this novel though is much more about building and creating a found family...and accepting them and accepting them and their love into you, as much as you loving them. Heracles gets the latter part right off... but he (and Hera) need to learn the first half of that equation matters, too.

--

Highlights:

• Interesting take on the Heracles myth exploring his relationship with Hera in a new way
• Strong theme of found family of monsters
• At turns funny, mordant, and without warning, will tear your heart out (a John Wiswell book in other words)

Reference: Wiswell, John, Wearing the Lion, [DAW 2025]

¹Dream conversation at a con or literary event ? Get John Wiswell to talk to Surekha Davies (author of Humans A Monstrous History) about monsters. That’s box office gold. 

²As Fry notes in his books, though, there are a multiplicity of varieties and variants to Greek mythology. Heracles' story is no exception and in fact, he was enormously popular across the Mediterranean. Heracles is actually Hera’s chosen champion in Etruscan mythology and we get none of the “try and kill him” business.

³In this version of the myth, Hercules kills his children but not his wife, who remains loyal to him and important to his redemption. Is that “correct” to the myth? See footnote 2.

⁴Allow me once again to lament the cancellation of KAOS, with Greek Gods set in the Modern Day. 

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin

Interview with John Wiswell

The Locus and Nebula winner spoke with Nerds of a Feather about his writing process, the varieties of horror, and why some monsters just want to be friends

Arturo Serrano: You seem to have created a solid niche for yourself as the writer who sympathizes with the monsters. Do you apply the same approach to classic monster stories? Do you look for an angle to empathize with Dracula or the xenomorphs?

John Wiswell: One of the things that compels me to write Fantasy and Science Fiction is finding the unexplored angles in worlds. We love rigorous worldbuilding that thoroughly explains what it is to live as a special hero or an average person in a fantastical world. But whose stories aren't told? Whose perspective is erased? This certainly extends to classic monster stories. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein's creature is infamously sympathetic. But what is the life of a wraith trapped at a summer camp forever? The locals say that the shapeshifting lump at the bottom of the well is out to kill all humanity, but what is its point of view? How do we look through different eyes? That's fundamentally compelling to me, especially as someone who has spent most of his life feeling barely human. It's an invitation to care. And that is a great place for a story to begin.

AS: Do you generally come up with the plot first and then the monster, or the monster first and then the plot?

JW: The funny thing about monsters is I usually conceive them with contexts. Without a context, a dragon is just a dragon. Smaug has to have stolen the dwarves' home mountain and terrorized the lake men to be a monster. So when I created someone like Shesheshen for Someone You Can Build A Nest In, I immediately conceived of her as a shapeshifting creature trying not to blow her shot at a relationship with a wholesome nerd. When I created 133 Poisonwood Avenue for "Open House on Haunted Hill," it was simultaneously a haunted house, and a lonely one that was willing to be gentle and caring if a family would stay in it. The context of the creature tends to be part of its essence, for me. Their claws and fangs are just as important as their insecurities.

AS: As someone who'd rather hug the monsters than slay them, what do you actually find scary?

JW: The U.S. healthcare system.

AS: Your stories tend to have elaborate, poetic titles. Do you have a process for choosing titles?

JW: My approach is pretty simple! I'll open a text document, or live out the cliche of turning over an envelope to make a list. And then I will simply keep writing down title ideas, no matter how bad they are. The goal is to keep going. Do permutations on the same idea. Swap a blander or spicier verb in. Flip the syntax. If a wild idea comes up, write it down. Sometimes the very first title is perfect (Someone You Can Build A Nest In was the first title I had in mind for my book, and I never wanted to change it). Other times I'll have a screen full of titles that I think are all terrible, and only upon rereading it will I realize the thirteenth is the lucky one (this happened with "For Lack of a Bed" and "I'll Miss Myself"). The process works because it makes me get out of my own way, by forcing me to accept anything my internal critic might normally block.

AS: What is your process, as an aromantic writer, for putting yourself in the mental space of a character who is in love?

JW: I don't mean to disparage my alloromantic friends, but it is not hard to pick up on how romance works because it's ubiquitous. Sexuality and romance dominate this culture. It's in so many books, the subject of so many albums, so many advice columns, so many podcasts, so many weepy diatribes on stoops, so many embarrassing arguments people have on speaker phones in the dairy aisle... So if you're aromantic like me? You've probably heard about love already. And many aromantic writers still find romance interesting on one level or another, because it matters to people we care about, or because of some narrative hook. You know, some of my best friends are alloromantic! [Laughs] For me, a character's love arc comes from them organically. Many of my short stories have no love plots. My next novel has a little romance to it, but it's not central. Whereas in this book, for who Shesheshen was, how self-reliant she was, for how alone she was in the world and who she'd meet, for the toxic ideas of romance she was carrying and the growth that would require from her, it was purely natural that a huge part of her book would be a love story. I entered that mental space the same way she did: wary, confused, afraid she'd be hurt, and unable to not hope for the best. Because I cared about this character for all the other reasons in her life, I could go on that journey. And similarly I could go on that journey because of what it said about the need for companionship. What is said in a story can be as important as the characters. Sometimes you find yourself just wanting to write a supportive, loving married couple because you see so few of them in media and want to balance things out. Sometimes you want to capture how we change internally in relation to how we change with other people. I don't have to fall in love to understand change. I just have to care for all the people in my life who do. If I didn't care for those real people in my life, then I couldn't write anything.

AS: Last time we interviewed you, you described your creative process as "I eat darkness, and then spit out rainbows." Could you describe how that metabolism works?

JW: Ha! I love that way of posing this question. And it's a fair question. So I have a copy of Tananarive Due's The Reformatory. I'm excited to read it. I don't know what it's about, because Due is a great writer and I just trust her to deliver something that is good on its own terms. When I have the free time to read something that big, I'll take it off my shelf, and just read it, and discover its characters and premise and twists. I've heard it's in the region of Horror, if not a pure Horror novel, so I'll be ready for that sort of experience. And if it works on me, I'll enjoy the parts that work. The tone, the atmosphere, the character psychology, the social ramifications, the weird creeping things in the walls—whatever is there. But I'll also find myself wishing I could help the characters. Perhaps in mediating their fights. Perhaps in being able to stop by the side of the road when their car breaks down. Some things meant to be scary will inevitably be funny, because I'm not the one experiencing them. Some will be so shocking that they'll have a funny dimension, because shock and humor are similarly electric impulses. Things will spark. Some parts will be so grim that I'll ponder how light would change our understanding. Inevitably, I'll turn the story around in my mind, to look at it from imagined angles. Maybe that will mean I'll sympathize with a ghost or a werewolf, who to me reads as misunderstood. Or maybe it will mean I'll consider how some people taking responsibility rather than shunning it would change things, or imagine how different people's contexts would change the series of events. How could life bend towards justice? Towards empathy? Towards another end? None of this will diminish the book. Again, this is presuming the book is good, but when isn't a Due book good? They've all rocked so far. But if the book is good, considering it from angles that it doesn't consider will help me appreciate its structure and what it achieves. Meanwhile I'll carry a charge of inspiration, for how other worlds could treat people. I'll be pondering, and probably cackling, and reaching to read the next book on my list after The Reformatory. And then the next book, and the next. After enough books, and short stories, and movies, all of that fictional darkness will be counterpointed by enough light from my other angles that refraction is inevitable. And then I'll be writing something wholly different, while loving what everyone else made. That is the metabolism.

AS: You've sometimes shared details with the public about your lifelong experience with chronic pain. How does your day-to-day negotiation with your body inform your writing about characters with nonconventional anatomies?

JW: It's predisposed me for that, for sure! I have to be mindful of my body in ways other people aren't, and I've normalized awful pain, and exhaustion, and having conversations when I have brain fog. My body has turned on me in so many ways over my lifetime. I think that's also why I call some of my work Fantasy where other people see it as Body Horror. They see it from the outside, whereas to me, it's something more routine. It's a fun schism to discuss with readers.

AS: You've also spoken about the ways books saved your life. What do you hope your books will do for young readers today?

JW: It would be too much to ask that my stories save their lives, too, right? [Laughs] But my stories have already started to do what I hoped. A couple years ago I spoke on a panel about how being asexual makes some of us feel monstrous because we don't give people what they want, and afterward a young reader came up to me in tears because hearing me say that made her feel less alone. Since then I've seen an uptick in comments and emails from readers who have been in terrible times, and who felt companionship with my characters that helped them through their burdens. If a story can be there for someone when things are terrible? If it can make them feel less alone, even for an hour? Then I haven't just given someone a gift. They've given me a gift, by hanging in there, reading and fighting. I couldn't ask for more.

AS: Horror still has an ableism problem. What ways of symbolizing evil that don't fall back on the demonization of bodily deformities would you like to see in horror stories?

Beauty, handsomeness, and attractiveness are so underrated as villain traits. Historically they're tapped into for conveying a disliked group (gay-coded sexy vampires) or as a facade (Patrick Bateman looks put together, but is yet another evil "crazy" guy). I think depicting more antagonists as the beautiful, not as lust objects, but as people who feel they are above normal people physically, who wear the most expensive clothing, whose presentation drips of class that is unattainable by their victims, could do some powerful things. More damage is done to our world by people in designer suits than people in hockey masks.

AS: You take monsters and turn them into cuddly lovable characters. How do you feel about the ongoing trend of taking cuddly lovable characters (e.g. Winnie the Pooh) and turning them into monsters?

I feel like Horror has been turning lovable things into scary things for far longer than I've been turning a few monsters sympathetic. How many classic and pop songs do we have to hear slowed down and turned creepy before that becomes funny? How many children's toys have been smeared with blood, from Chucky to Annabelle to M3GAN? Clowns, who dedicate their lives to inspiring mirth, are the stuff of nightmares thanks to Pennywise and the Joker. Horror in particular has always sought to subvert what we're comfortable with in order to explore discomfort, and inequity, and the vulnerability of taking anything for granted. One of my favorite movies is Jaws, which is really just a great way to ruin the hobby of swimming for yourself. [Laughs] I love this stuff when it's done well, so long as we mind our biases. For instance, again I enjoy Jaws, but I deplore how it's inspired shark fishing. In Humans Vs. Sharks, we are decidedly the actual monsters.

AS: For your own reading, do you prefer science fiction that warns "let's not do this" or that offers "here's what we could do"?

"Let's not do this" is the standard formula for SciFi Horror, and I won't say I haven't read and watched plenty of that. Give me another techno-monster hunting its own engineers and I'll probably read it. Whereas "here's what we could do" inspires resistance and rebellion against tyranny. I thought it was so funny when YA Dystopias took off, and some of the old guard said they'd ruined dystopian fiction by giving the protagonists the opportunity of winning. But isn't that what we've needed? Stories of warning us against authoritarianism can't fully inoculate us against it ever happening. So we have stories of possibility in conflict, and of encouragement to not lie down and submit. In this way, I don't see the two flavors as in competition, so much as they both encourage kinds of vigilance.

AS: What stories have you read or watched that you think have done monsters right?

Well, there are many ways to get monsters right. John Ajvide Lindqvist's Let the Right One In is one of my favorite Horror novels, and Eli is one of my favorite vampires. There is such powerful loneliness on display throughout that book, and the yearning for connection. But I wouldn't say Eli is the only way to write a vampire. The film 30 Days of Night is pretty darned intense and fun in its own way. John Fawcett's film Ginger Snaps does werewolves in a gruesome and fun way, although you could balance that with Mamoru Hosoda's Wolf Children, which is both charming and aching in its depiction of two werewolf cubs growing up with a human mother struggling to keep them safe. It's all about the angle of the story. John Gardner's Grendel is a crackling fun read that humanizes the monster from Beowulf, and makes his story not just tragic, but funny. And I'll never turn down a chance to rewatch Tremors.

AS: What are you reading these days?

JW: I'm halfway into Park Seolyeon's A Magical Girl Retires, which is a chewy little book about a heroine struggling with the desire to step away from the adventuring life. It riffs on the conventions of the Magical Girl genre, which I have a big soft spot for after watching so much Sailor Moon and Card Captor Sakura when I was younger. Before that, I just finished Vajra Chandrasekera's The Saint of Bright Doors, which you already know is one heck of a book. And I just got my copy of Arkady Martine's novel Rose/House, which I'm terrifically excited to start. Martine is such a splendid writer that I am sure she'll have a sparkling take on haunted houses in the era of smart homes. That is probably next!

Thank you, John, for taking the time for this interview.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Review: Someone You Can Build a Nest In by John Wiswell

A "who is the real monster?" story that dodges the complexity of its own premise

(Note: there is a fairly significant (though not plot-revealing) spoiler in this review - read on at your own risk!)

Opening confession: before reading Someone You Can Build a Nest In, I didn't rate John Wiswell's work very much. Clearly, his writing is doing a lot of things right for a lot of people, since you don't get to be Hugo and Nebula nominated without folks thinking you're great at what you do. But beyond the cute ideas, I don't find a lot in Wiswell stories to sink my teeth into. On a technical level, the prose tends towards the same basic voice regardless of the type of story being told, and on a thematic level, there's a lot of narrative "flattening" to make stories about dark, monstrous themes resolve with a relatively small number of people carving out a safe space and calling it a happy ending. Short fiction might not have much space for complex characters or worldbuilding, but it provides plenty of space for moral complexity, and I find it weird to set up complex premises only to ignore their complexity. Maybe there's something radically cosy in that that I'm just too curmudgeonly to appreciate, or maybe I'm just not picking up on complexity that everyone else sees. Who knows.

Despite not loving the author's prior work and also having a finite amount of precious reading time, I read Someone You Can Build a Nest In for two reasons. First, Hugo and Nebula nominated short fiction authors have a very non-zero chance of landing on a Best Novel ballot, and I like to read things for award purposes. Second, I really wanted this book to give me the experience that it gives people who love Wiswell's writing, because if something different is going to happen for me, it's probably going to happen at a different length, right?

Alas, it didn't happen.

Someone You Can Build a Nest In is the story of Shesheshen, an amorphous shapeshifting monster who eats people and repurposes their organs in order to survive. Shesheshen is content in her isolated, people-eating lifestyle, although she misses her mother - also a people eating shapeshifter, tragically killed by a monster hunter - and reminisces fondly about the father who she and her siblings ate from the inside out after he gestated them, as part of the people eating shapeshifter life cycle. She's also not much of a talker, and the whole book is told in her "voice": which means plenty of simple, unpolished prose. So I guess I'm not having my expectations of the author challenged on that front!

Anyway, when Shesheshen is rudely awoken from hibernation by some monster hunters (led by a posh asshole, so you know you're supposed to root for the people eating monster and not the hunters trying to put an end to all the people eating), it puts her out of her regular people eating schedule and she has no choice but to go into town to find some people to eat immediately (target: another posh and kinda sleazy asshole, also fine to root against). When that doesn't work, she falls off a cliff and is tended to a kind, fat, practical young woman called Homily, who is hunting monsters in the ravine. Shesheshen is delayed from eating Homily for long enough to fall in love with her, Homily is selectively dense enough not to realise the person who survived a fall off a cliff and has no recognisable human organ structures might actually be a monster, and thus begins a beautiful relationship.

Complicating factor number one in Homily and Shesheshen's relationship: for Shesheshen, "falling in love" coincides with getting a strong urge to lay eggs in Homily and have them eat her from the inside out. For me, this aspect of the story actually delivered what I wanted from it to a large extent, albeit without a huge emphasis on the actual wanting to build a nest in her girlfriend bit (you'd have thought... but no). I'd really like to read more stories where "alien" biological urges are things that sentient creatures can exert control and choice over, and while things work out rather conveniently in terms of Shesheshen eradicating those urges, she goes through an interesting process to re-examine what she assumed being in love with someone would look like versus what she actually wants with, and from, Homily. That she has to do this without guidance from a parental figure is both thematically relevant and also kind of interesting, and it makes Shesheshen's convenient discoveries about herself less annoying - maybe she's not the first people eating shapeshifter to do certain things, but she's never had any fellow shapeshifters to learn from. It's heavily implied, though not literally stated, that Homily is asexual ("enby" is a word in people's vocabulary in this queernorm setting, so it's perhaps a bit odd that "ace" isn't, but I digress) so Shesheshen doesn't have any human sexual preferences to figure out how she fits with, aside from an easily discovered mutual enjoyment of cuddling. Good for them, and a win for alien monster protagonist portrayal.

Complicating factor number two is, unfortunately, where things go off the rails. See, Homily isn't just some random monster hunter hunting some random offscreen monster: she's the daughter of the land's war hero leader, and her mother and siblings (one of whom was the posh asshole from earlier! Who already got eaten, oops) are back from the exile which Shesheshen's mother imposed on them by "cursing" the family if they stayed. Homily's family are abusive towards her, and Homily has adapted to this abuse by trying to make herself as "useful" as possible in any given situation, even when it hurts her to do so. Now that Shesheshen has avoided detection as a people eating shapeshifter, she gets roped into the expedition to hunt herself, and to try and help Homily with a toxic family reunion, while also throwing the monster hunting off her own scent.

To fully contextualise why I hated this plot, I have to give that one significant spoiler mentioned above: none of Homily's immediate family survive this book. That means her mother, her adult younger sister Epithet, and her child sister Ode (and her posh asshole brother, but he's gone and we've already mostly forgotten about him, except when Shesheshen uses his teeth to smile at her girlfriend) all meet their ends in ways that are apparently intended to provide context or even catharsis about the familial abuse. This is some morally grey shit right here, especially since one sister was a child eight years younger than Homily while most of her part in the abuse was taking place, and the other is still an actual child. That's not to say that children can't cause real physical and emotional damage to their siblings, even much older ones, but it's surely an open question to what extent the culpability lies with the child and not with the adults who had a duty of care to both siblings? Someone You Can Build A Nest In doesn't seem to care about that question. Instead, we get "straightforward" lessons, in 21st century therapist vocabulary, about how terrible abuse is, and therefore aren't abusers the real monsters here? If the text is nudging us towards answers more sophisticated than "yes", it's laying down clues too subtle for my reading skills, so I'm left assuming that "yes" is the desired answer, and I don't like it.

Ode's death is particularly egregious: having been a bratty bit of comic relief in the narrative, her death is mourned on page by nobody except her mother, whose grief is called out as toxic and wrong. Meanwhile, Homily learns the valuable life lesson that she didn't have to risk her own life trying to save her sister, she's still a good person and nobody should judge her for not trying a bit harder to rescue a child from a grim death. I'm glad we got that lesson sorted out and now you don't have to have any complicated feelings about your role in that situation, Homily! While the other family deaths are treated with a bit more weight, the whole familial comeuppance sits poorly, particularly because it was an authorial choice to make two of Homily's most prominent abusive family members children, set up what should have been a complicated moral situation, and then just... sidestep that complexity, because the story you want to tell is about how abusers are the real monsters, and not the people eating girlfriend. Also relevant: Shesheshen has conveniently gone the whole story without eating anyone who hadn't broken the law or been a posh asshole first, because having to grapple with the ethics of eating people to live is apparently also beyond this story's interests. Textual moral greyness averted again!

So no, I do not get anything cathartic or heartwarming out of Shesheshen and Homily's story. To find those things would require me to narrow down my curiosity and my empathy to the tiny number of characters that the story wants me to believe are worthy of it, and it did not succeed in convincing me of its judgements (was it the people eating? maybe...). In different hands, the messiness inherent in this story could have been kind of amazing. While reading, I drew comparisons to The Book Eaters, which also features obligate people eating and is fully aware of how bleak and antithetical to a heartwarming familial ending that diet is, even as it tries to bring that ending about. I also thought about Light From Uncommon Stars, which portrays an escape from abuse and into the loving orbit of an objectively fucked up person who needs to be convinced not to sacrifice the protagonist to the devil, and which tells that story in a way which acknowledges both the love and the irredeemable mess. But unless I'm missing something huge, that's not the story Wiswell wanted to tell, so I'm left with another question: is there a version of this kind of story, where all we are meant to care about is the comfort of the main characters regardless of what they do to others, that is uncomplicatedly cosy and heartwarming? I don't know, but I'm going to go back to seeking out the messy, fucked up monster stories, and the radical empathy they often demand, rather than putting myself through this sort of book too often.

6 Books with John Wiswell

John Wiswell is a disabled writer who lives where New York keeps all its trees. He has won the Nebula Award for Best Short Story for "Open House on Haunted Hill," and the Locus Award for Best Novelette for "That Story Isn't The Story." His fiction has been translated into ten languages, and has appeared in venues such as Tordotcom, the LeVar Burton Reads podcast, and Uncanny Magazine. His debut novel, Someone You Can Build a Nest In, is forthcoming from DAW Books in the U.S. and Jo Fletcher Books in the U.K. on April 2nd. You can find more from him through his Linktree:  https://linktr.ee/johnwiswell

Today he tells us about his Six Books:

1. What book are you currently reading?

One of the books readers recommended to me most across 2023 was Hannah Kaner’s Godkiller. It starts out as basically The Witcher but for gods. Gods behave badly, so human hunters --the godkillers-- go around hunting them and liberating people from tyranny. Kissen lost her family to a fire god in her youth, so she’s a particularly angry godkiller. Now, Fantasy heroes fighting gods is nothing new, but what hooked me was her getting stuck on a buddy journey with Skedi, the God of White Lies. It seems mysterious assassins are after both Skedi and Kissen, so now the hunter is the hunted, and she’s got to rely on this weak god to survive. Don’t you love unexpected bonds? It’s bloody and fun, and just keeps getting more interesting as it goes.

2. What upcoming book are you really excited about?

I came up through writing short stories, and Kelly Link is one of the gold standards in the field for me. Few short story writers have ever wielded her power, and no one entwines the mundane and the unreal like her. How many collections of hers have I chewed through? Stuff like “The Monster” and “Magic For Beginners” are always close to my mind. After so long I thought she’d only ever write shorts. But here we have it: a Kelly Link novel! What story of such length finally captivated her enough to put it onto the page? What sustained her to make such a particularly long book, too? Here’s a confession: I don’t know what it’s about. I’m literally refusing to learn anything about The Book of Love until my copy is in my hands. I want it fresh in my wriggling mind.

3. Is there a book you’re currently itching to re-read?

Can I cheat and say The Iliad? Because I’ve read it several times. Each time I usually pick a new translator. Last year the great Emily Wilson released her translation, which I’m eager to gobble up. Wilson made waves with her gorgeous translation of The Odyssey, blending poetry and contemporary language, and gave the epic an identity it had never had before. She did for The Odyssey what Seamus Heaney did for Beowulf. In fact, just her Foreword on the minutia of her choices, and of the political history of other translators’ previous choices, was one of my favorite things I read in the last decade. That’s an energy I’ve got to see applied to The Iliad, which is basically The Infinity War of Greek heroes. It’s the biggest crossover, with the biggest brawls and moves and tragedies. The Iliad was one of those books that opened up literature to me as a kid. So this new translation is gnawing at me. I just need the time!

4. How about a book you’ve changed your mind about – either positively or negatively?

John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men is a book where my feelings are the same and my thoughts are utterly different. As a young teen, I hated how the book treated Lennie. My instinct was to write what would today be called fix-it fic; to give Lennie and George a better world with lots of rabbits. But that’s what the book wants, too. It was only as I grew older and met more disabled people that I appreciated the novel criticizing how our world exploits and harms us. That the book was asking me to fight harder. It’s challenging to grow up and realize that you’re as angry at a book as that book is angry at the real world, and to realize that in your disagreement, the book was right. We all deserve better. To get it, we have to do that work together.

5. What’s one piece of fiction, which you read as a child or a young adult, that has had a lasting influence on your writing?

Ray Bradbury’s short story “Zero Hour” lived rent free in my head for years. It’s a great short to introduce kids to Science Fiction because it’s about kids secretly being right. It’s told from the POV of a mom while the neighborhood kids play increasingly disturbing games about extraterrestrials being about to invade. But the kids really are collaborating with our future overlords. So it validates children’s make-believe in a twisted way, but it also uses POV so well. Because the mom is wrong. Our whole lens of the story is unreliable, but it’s unreliable for relatable reasons: we, too, would dismiss kids saying UFOs will land at zero hour. So we’re almost complicit in the unreliability. Unreliable narrators often make us prickle or pushback; we question them and feel superior that we could access truth they couldn’t. “Zero Hour” does something else. It sympathizes with her and with us. That’s what makes it chilling and memorable. I think for the rest of my life I’ve been in love with fiction’s ability to give us relatable unreliable characters. People with sympathize with because we say, “Oh yes, I’d also be doomed.”

6. And speaking of that, what’s your latest book, and why is it awesome?

My debut novel is Someone You Can Build A Nest In. Do you like monsters with feelings? Lots of feelings? Because Shesheshen is a shapeshifting horror who lives in a lair, building her body out of whatever she can find, a bear trap for a mouth, and reusing the bones of hunters that have come after her. She just despises us humans. After some hunters manage to poison and nearly kill her, she’s rescued by Homily, a quirky, bookish lady who mistakes Shesheshen for a fellow human. Shesheshen is shocked when Homily nurses her back to health rather than killing her. And the more time they spend together, the closer they get. Could Shesheshen have actually found someone she can live with? Is this love? The emotions bubble up until Shesheshen absolutely has to confess that she’s not human. But right before she can confess, Homily tells her why she’s here: she’s hunting a shapeshifting horror. Has Shesheshen seen it anywhere?

 

Their story is for everyone who’s ever been made to feel like a monster.

Thank you, John!

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I'm just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

Adri and Joe Read the Hugos: Short Story

Adri: Our next Hugo category is short story! Four returning Hugo-favourite authors and two with their first (I think) nominations, stories ranging from heartwarming haunted houses to robot mentorship. How are you feeling about this year’s ballot?

Joe: I hate to admit it, but I’m just not up on my short fiction this year. If I’m being frank (and I’m not frank, I’m Joe), I haven’t been up on my short fiction for a couple of years now. I read a small handful of select anthologies and then the Nebula and Hugo Award finalists.

I mention this because I don’t have quite the breadth of knowledge of comparison to the rest of the field as I do with novels. Here, I’m coming in relatively cold and can only really talk about the stories in relation with each other and not also with the field. That’s the point, I suppose, but for a change I’m not internally bemoaning that story X was my favorite and didn’t make the ballot.

ANYWAY, I ramble because I care.

As a whole, I really like this year’s ballot. There’s one story that doesn’t quite work for me (and that story is just fine), but the other five are quite good.

Adri: I’m on the other side of things, where I did read a lot of short fiction again last year (although not as much as 2019) and that means that inevitably I have feelings about favourite stories that didn’t make it. Nothing from my nomination ballot is here; I’m not going to share those specific five stories, but they all make an appearance in our recommended reading list so I’ll let you extrapolate from there, dear reader.

But, objectively, this ballot is just as good as my favourite stories. There are such a wealth of good short stories that come out every year and if one spends a significant amount of time reading short fiction, then by definition one reads a lot of good individual stories. I read a couple of hundred stories a year and that barely dents the surface of what’s being published!

The other thing I want to note is how different the tone is between the novelette and short story ballots this year, which is not something I’ve ever noticed before! This short story list isn’t exactly fluffy, but it’s overall got more lightness and hope than the six stories in Best Novelette, many of which are… well, we’ll get to that. I don’t think it’s anything more than coincidence, but it’s an interesting one.

Joe: I think I’d like to start with “Badass Moms in the Zombie Apocalypse” because it’s a kick in the gut and it’s great and it is tonally unlike most of the stories on this ballot, which are otherwise quite charming.

Adri: Yes! Rae Carson’s story of childbirth and survival, set ten years into a zombie apocalypse (clue’s in the title) is excellent for how it turns the hypermasculine-hero survival narrative on its head, focusing on a fundamental aspect of human survival - childbirth - that becomes a nearly insurmountable task in the circumstances, and then putting a group of women at the centre of the story and (again, clue’s in the title) letting them be badasses, and mutually supportive badasses at that, even in the most dire of situations. Most importantly, it’s narrated from the perspective of Brit, the woman giving birth, making her the active centre of the experience, rather than a passive presence whose need for protection reduces her to immobilised, screaming victimhood. I like it.

Joe: Spoilers for the zombie apocalypse!

But - yeah, it’s a super cool story and it’s the sort of story I don’t see all that often and it’s absolutely fantastic.

Fantastic in a completely different way is John Wiswell’s “Open House on Haunted Hill”, a story which is, for lack of a better word, absolutely charming. That’s a word I want to use quite a bit in this category because that hint of lightness is all over the Short Story ballot and it’s frankly refreshing right now.

This is the story of a house that is on the market to be sold and doesn’t want to be alone. It wants a family. It wonders if it could haunt the glue on its own wallpaper to make itself more appealing to a potential buyer. “Open House on Haunted Hill” is just lovely and reads like a quiet exhale that blows the stress out of your body.

Adri: It’s definitely a story that brings a new meaning to the term “found family”! I love how it builds a sympathetic story around a set of people who don’t often get sympathetic portrayals, especially in this kind of genre: the sceptical podcaster trying to raise a boisterous kid, the estate agent (sorry, “realtor”), and of course the house itself would all be two dimensional villains or joke punchlines in another story, but here they’re people all trying to do their best.

The other story that made my cold heart melt is “A Guide for Working Breeds” by Vina Jie-Min Prasad, which continues Prasad’s track record of telling robot self-actualisation stories with wonderful wit and heart. It’s also told through a really great - if simple - text device, where the story is within a chat log between a newly freed robot and its automatically assigned mentor, so there’s lots of light-touch things going on in the “meta” text (e.g. screen names) that really adds to our understanding of the characters. I actually missed the anthology this was in, so I’m glad enough other readers saw it (the tor.com reprint can’t have hurt) and put it on their ballots so I could enjoy it.

Joe: Made to Order was a good anthology, but I tend do well with Jonathan Strahan’s anthologies even if I’m usually a couple of years behind when they are published (sorry, Book of Dragons).

We’ve definitely seen the story format for “A Guide for Working Breeds Before” and in some ways it reminds me of Naomi Kritzer’s “Cat Pictures Please”, though Prasad is doing something different here, but it’s another really pleasant story despite presence of a killer robot.

Speaking of Naomi Kritzer, I also enjoyed her story “Little Free Library” which is partially told through notes left in, well, little free libraries. I think we have all the story that we actually need in “Little Free Library” but I wanted just a bit more from it. There’s something so much bigger lurking around the outside and I have questions, but I suspect we have as much as we need for the story to work. But I have questions!

Adri: I really like “Little Free Library” but its the story that “sparks” the least for me out of these six, if that makes sense. It’s cute, watching a fae(?) revolution through scraps of documentation left for a girl in her Little Free Library box, but I don’t have much to say about it beyond “that was cute”. Cute is good, but cute plus thought provoking is my bar for Hugo cuteness.

The two stories we haven’t discussed yet are both spacefaring riffs on fairytales: The Little Mermaid for "The Mermaid Astronaut", and Hansel and Gretel for "Metal Like Blood in the Dark". Both end up pretty far from their sources in different ways: “The Mermaid Astronaut” removes the need for the mermaid to specifically yearn over a love interest (good), and in place of either the Disney or Andersen endings, creates a story where growth and change can involve coming full circle. Metal Like Blood in the Dark sticks in some ways to its original plot, but it shifts the moral weight of the story, making it about the sacrifices that Sister makes to keep her Brother safe in the outside world. By the way, they’re both robots.

Joe: I have a lot less to say about either of those stories. I liked “The Mermaid Astronaut” and appreciated what Yoon Ha Lee was doing in telling that story and the arc of the mermaid in question. The T. Kingfisher story didn’t work as well for me as the rest of the ballot did - which is unusual for me with a story from Kingfisher or Ursula Vernon, especially with how much I loved Kingfisher’s novel A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking - which we’ll talk about when we discuss the Lodestar finalists.

Adri: I feel similarly. For fairytale retellings particularly, I’m learning that what makes the overall Hugo audience excited for a new version of a story is… kinda different to what I want? Like, we will never run out of space for retellings, especially ones that come from the margins and re-examine our dominant tropes through that lens. But I want an outstanding retelling to smack me over the head with something - whether that’s bringing in a radical kindness or another perspective or something that makes it obvious what the original story was missing, or pushes a big contradiction to the fore, or whatever. “The Mermaid Astronaut” gets close to that, “Metal Like Blood in the Dark” goes off more in its own direction (and doesn’t do anything terribly interesting with that direction), and it’s all objectively good - and two authors that I love - but they don’t get to that magical nebulous “best story of 2020” point.

Anyway. Now that we’ve covered it all, what’s at the top of your list?

Joe: This would be a really good time to actually put together my ballot and vote, but I’d say I have a very solid top three of “Open House on Haunted Hill”, “Badass Moms in the Zombie Apocalypse” and “A Guide for Working Breeds”. I *think* that would be my ballot order but I could also change the order a dozen times between now and when I actually submit the ballot.

What does your ballot look like?

Adri: I’m still sad about Fandom for Robots not winning a couple of years ago, and “A Guide for Working Breeds” did similar mushy things to my heart, so it’s going to take top spot for me. We have the same top three overall, but I don’t know how I’ll go between Open House on Haunted Hill and Badass Moms in the Zombie Apocalypse. Coin flip, maybe? I’ll work something out.

Joe: Well, that’s a category and it’s another strong one. It’s been fun reading through the ballot this year.

Next up: Novelette!

Interview: Hugo nominee John Wiswell

 

It's been a great year for author John Wiswell.  A first-time nominee, his Hugo nominated short story "Open House on Haunted Hill" won the Nebula and is a Locus and World Fantasy Award finalist.  

The title of the short story makes you think you're going to get a haunted house story. And the house is, sort of haunted. More so, it's lonely. The house wants a family to love. And it wants to be loved by a family.  Having recently been in the housing market myself, I've walked through plenty of houses that were in need of love. But none of them called to me the the way 133 Poisonwood Ave calls to Ana and her dad.  Don't get me wrong, I love a haunted house story, but what I love more is stories like "Open House on Haunted Hill". I've read more than enough stores about families in search of a home, and stories about people who love things.  Give me more warn hearted stories about homes in search of a family, things who communicate their love in the only ways they have, and parents whose hearts go supernova and break at the same time as they watch their children.  

John Wiswell has been publishing short fiction and non fiction essays since 2015 and his work has appeared in Nature Magazine, Uncanny Magazine, Weird Tales, Fireside Magazine, Daily Science Fiction, Flash Fiction Online, Cast of Wonders, and elsewhere. To give you an ideal of his recent output, in 2020 he had over a dozen peices published and will have over a dozen pieces published in 2021.   You can learn more about Wiswell and his fiction at  his blog The Bathroom Monologues, or by following him on twitter where he is @Wisell. 

Have you read "Open House on Haunted Hill" yet?  if not, I'll see you back here in ten minutes for the interview.

NOAF: Congratulations on your Hugo nomination (and Nebula win!) for "Open House on Haunted Hill"! I love that this story is about a lonely house that's looking for a family. Where did you get the idea for this story?

John Wiswell: This story was actually originally hyperbole. I love Horror; I read it, watch it, and play it almost every week. But I seldom actually write it because my disposition and creative processes skew in other directions. I eat darkness, and then spit out rainbows. I was trying to explain this to some friends at the World Fantasy Convention in Baltimore, and gave the absurd example, "If I tried to write about a haunted house, it’d be a story about a haunted house that’s lonely and just wants someone to live in it."

My problem was that the writers around me loved this idea and begged me to write it. After enough of them encouraged me, I figured I’d try on the train ride home. Little did I know what it would turn into.

NOAF: As readers, we get to see just the edge of this beautiful relationship between boisterous Ana and her father. It's got to be tough for her dad, every time he looks at Ana I'm sure he sees her mother. What can you tell us about how you developed their characters – Dad with the podcast and Ana who is looking for ghosts?

JW: As soon as I realized my house would be courting a family, I knew there would be a dad. I feel there aren’t enough fathers who deeply care about parenting in SFF. We could use a hundred more Alan Grants, as it were. Luckily, the dad came with free character traits. Him being exhausted emotionally and physically were natural to his circumstance, and his skepticism felt equally natural as a counterpoint to the house. He was very obliging to me, as a character. He became what I needed almost as readily as he tried to become what Ana needed.

Meanwhile Ana was the wrecking ball. If she was going to challenge her father, then she was going to do it with energy. She was going to be funny, at least to us. She was going to love dinosaurs and the Hulk – destructive things. Which, the reader could take as standard kid stuff, or as an outlet for the anxiety she feels having recently lost her mother. Before the end of the first draft, her behaviors counterpointed her father the same way her father counterpointed the house. I liked playing with the three of them that way.

NOAF: “Open House on Haunted Hill” won the Nebula for best short story. What went through your mind when you learned you had won the Nebula?

JW: I learned the moment that the host read the title and my name. I’m grateful that I had a few seconds off-camera before they put me on the stream, because my eyes were bugging out of my head. Stories revolving around this kind of warm heartedness can be tough to publish, and don’t often win awards. And the magazine that took the chance publishing "Open House on Haunted Hill," Diabolical Plots, had never had a story nominated for a Nebula before. So it all felt impossible to me until I had to give the speech and thank everyone. In those ensuing minutes, I felt I had touched the community in the way it had touched me. I needed to thank them for it. I hope that came across in the speech.

NOAF: How excited are you to be nominated for the Hugo?

JW: It was my first Nebula nomination, and it’s also my first Hugo nomination. So, it all feels pretty unreal. I keep thinking, "You’re not famous enough to be nominated for that." But the Hugo voters really cared about this house and this family. It warms my heart. It’s encouraged me to keep writing more stories like this and "Tank!" and "Silhouette Against Armageddon" and "8-Bit Free Will."

NOAF: When you're working on a short story, how do you know it's “done”? How do you know you're done tweaking the story and it's ready to be submitted to magazines for publication?

JW: It’s always at least two drafts. Sometimes it’s many more. But what tells me it doesn’t need another?

If I love reading the opening out loud, that’s the first check. It can make me laugh. Or it can convince me that, if I were reading it for the first time, I’d have to read on to find out more. But it has to elicit a strong reaction.

And when I sit down with the entire draft and read it through, if I feel it goes across a proper arc, that’s another check. It can be a story about a theme, or a personal growth arc, or something else, but the backbone of the arc has to be there. Nothing needs to get in the way of that arc. If it’s done, then I’ve cut everything that interrupts that. In my head, as I read, I can usually tell if it’s a smooth arc.

The final check is whether I love how it ends. I don’t have to love everything in the arc. But that ending better pay something off for me.

If it does all that, then it’s off to the markets! I’m finishing some new shorts as of this interview. Hopefully you’ll get to read them soon.

NOAF: You've published short fiction steadily since 2015. What have you learned along the way? Are there things you've learned about what editors are looking for or how to hone your craft in a specific way?

JW: The most important thing I learned about editors is they want different things. PodCastle is more likely to give a chance to a funny story. Strange Horizons is a good home for queer stories. You pick those sorts of things up by reading magazines for years. And I think that kind of reading is why I love writing – I love contributing to the body of stories out there. It lets you know what’s been done to death, or maybe even what’s popular but that you’d like to subvert around. SFF short fiction is partially conversations within communities. If you feel lost, you can reorient yourself by asking what you’d like to say to the community.

What else have I learned?

Well, rejection doesn’t matter that much. Your story can be rejected at any phase of submission for a thousand different reasons that are out of your control. What matters is if you’ll keep submitting your stories everywhere you can, and if you’ll keep writing new stories and honing your craft. That’s what you have control of.

If you have time to sit around refreshing your inbox waiting for a response to a story submission, then you have time to start writing a new one. I promise writing a new story is a better usage of your time.

Keeping a list of every story, character, and theme idea you have is wise. If you ever feel like you don’t have anything to write, dive into that list and build something.

Most importantly, build a group around yourself of people who will support you when you’re down. Family. Friends. Peers. People who can read a paragraph of your work and tell you it’s cool and keep going. People who can rewatch Galaxy Quest with you for the 900th time to cheer you up after rough news. You have to take care of yourself, and we have to take care of each other.

NOAF: What are some of your favorite themes and/or ideas to write about?

JW: The easiest way to make me care about fiction is to make your character care about somebody else. 133 Poisonwood Avenue wants people to love, and the father loves his daughter. Frodo or Samwise going alone to Mt. Doom would not be as compelling; you’re crying because they made it to that horrible place together. So I’m drawn to writing about what people can do for each other. Sometimes it’s about rescuing someone, but there are even more stories about how we support, uplift, and enable each other to grow.

Also I clearly have a thing for humanizing monsters. Blame it on my childhood of rooting for Skeletor, Captain Hook, and Jason Voorhees. At this point I’ve written about a sympathetic haunted house, an angry skeleton, a tentacle monster, a werewolf, an alien invader (*and* an alien robot), a demigod, an utahraptor, a civilization of body-warping parasites, videogame monsters, and a literal tank. Soon I’ll have a novelette in Uncanny Magazine, "That Story Isn’t The Story," from the point of view of a familiar. Some other time I should tell you about the monstrous novel I’m writing…!

Though you can also see those stories as various explorations of being othered. I’m disabled, and certainly "Tank!" has some allegories for disabled experiences in there. I’m also ace/aro, and looking at love in different ways definitely comes through in a lot of my work. It’s cathartic to take a character who is expected to act violently, or otherwise whose existence is viewed as undesirable, and twist them. To have those characters instead behave completely opposite to the dominant culture’s expectations. Or just to set them at an angle, and let them explore why the culture is trying to push them into a certain niche.

NOAF: Who are some of your favorite writers, and why is their work important to you?

JW: It’s hard to overstate the importance of people like Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, Rumiko Takahashi, Tom Holt, and Ursula Vernon in keeping humorous SFF vibrant. Oh, and God bless Rumiko Takahashi for doing so many dozens of weird riffs on love and how it malfunctions; I feel like she was a guiding light to me as I started sussing out how I felt about love myself. Inu Yasha, Ranma ½, and Urusei Yatsura all wound up very meaningful to me.

Related to that, authors like Martha Wells and Vina Jie-Min Prasad have been pillars of normalizing warmhearted fiction; their stories that aren’t necessarily about humor, but are about compassion and kindness feeding directly into their plots and themes. Murderbot is easily one of my favorite book series for just that reason. Prasad is also one of my favorite active short story writers, among Kelly Link, Ted Chiang, P.H. Lee, and Merc Fenn Wolfmoor. I could talk about great short stories all day.

I’m also a huge sucker for writers who do very deep dives into their characters’ lives and histories, and how their complicated contexts affect their unique roles in plots. Gillian Flynn, Stephen King, John Ajvide Lindqvist, and Caitlin Kiernan are some favorites. Oh, and everyone was shaken by R.F. Kuang’s The Poppy War, right?

NOAF: It's been like two years since I read The Poppy War and I am still recovering from that book! John, thank you so much for this interview. With what's all on the horizon for you, you are just. Getting. Started.

POSTED BY: Andrea Johnson lives in Michigan with her husband and too many books. She can be found on twitter, @redhead5318 , where she posts about books, food, and assorted nerdery.