Novella Project: Closing Post

And with that, our novella project is over. Or... well... is it? Is it really?

As with many things, the real work isn't actually in the big initial push, when it's exciting and current and easily quantifiable actions. The real work is continuing it in the day to day, in the after, if it's something you really care about working on.

So while this project was brought about in response to a current situation, where a single publisher is dominating the awards lists for novellas in so many awards, and with the hope that it might inspire you to have a think and an explore and to maybe mix up your nomination lists in 2024, there's a wider aim to it too. Certainly, for my part, I want to be more conscious with my reading, more deliberately seeking out the smaller presses, the less known, less marketed gems that need that little bit of hunting to uncover. This project has been great - I have spoken to wonderful authors and publishers, read and written reviews of books that I'm so glad to know about - but that was just for 2023 publications. And not even all of those. We are only a small team of people, with our own specific interests and focuses, and so will only ever be seeing and talking about a small slice of what we're even aware of. There's a whole big landscape out there of fascinating stories being told in the novella format, outside of the scope of the big publishers. And if I - if we - want to keep seeing those being published, we need to find them, we need to read them and discuss them, and nominate them for awards if we find ones that speak to us, that we love. Publishing is always precarious, but it seems now more than ever, with the threat of AI and the economic squeeze and changes in pressures and priorities that push big businesses to try to get the maximum money for minimum effort, input and care for their authors, let alone artistic investment.

So if you enjoyed what you've read here, if these novellas have inspired, excited or intrigued you, what you might take away as a secondary conclusion is this - to take that little bit of time, here and there, where you have it, to look a bit further afield. Seek that bit wider. Give your support to the places who do the good work, who make the good art. And then maybe talk about them with other people. Make sure those books are also part of the conversation, not just the ones who got jazzy press packages and adverts in train stations.

That's what I'll be doing, anyway. And I'd love for you to join me.

And, in case you missed any of our posts, or want to look back for ideas on presses, authors or stories to dig into, here's a round up of everything we've covered in this project:

Novellas

The Last Dragoners of Bowbazar by Indrapramit Das (Subterranean Press)
That We Maye With Free Heartes Accomplishe Those Thynges by Thomas M. Waldroon (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)
Ashes of the Ancestors by Andrew Knighton (Luna Press)
Virgin Land by Chloe Smith (Luna Press)
Another Life by Sarena Ulibarri (Stelliform Press)
They Shut Me Up by Tracy Fahey (PS Publishing)
Eynhallow by Tim McGregor (Raw Dog Screaming Press)
Between Blades by Filip Hajdar Drnovšek Zorko (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)
Green Fuse Burning by Tiffany Morris (Stelliform Press)
If Found Return to Hell by Em X. Liu (Rebellion Publishing)
A Necessary Chaos by Brent C. Lambert (Neon Hemlock)
The Past Trader by A. M. Donohoo (Ambuscade House)
To The Woman in the Pink Hat by LaToya Jordan (Aqueduct Press)

Publisher Interviews

Francesca Barbini
dave ring
Selena Middleton

Author Interviews

A Z Louise
Phoebe Wagner
Joan Tierney
Sarena Ulibarri
Iori Kusano
Filip Drnovšek Zorko
Tiffany Morris
Brent C. Lambert

I hope you enjoyed coming along with us for the ride.

POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroform_tea

Novella Project: To the Woman in the Pink Hat

A futuristic exploration of contemporary race and gender issues woven into a both disturbing and relatable tale. 

Set in a near future America, which feels futuristic as well as current, To the Woman in the Pink Hat is a story that challenges our views on morality and justice. Jada is a young, Black woman with a supportive family and a bright future ahead of her. But when Jada is convicted of a terrible crime (one which she fully admits to committing) she gets the option of an alternative sentence. Instead of spending her life in prison, she has the chance to live in a state of the art rehabilitation center designed to reform convicted young women of color into future leaders in society. Like many of the other program participants, Jada is both a victim of and a perpetrator of a horrific crime. All of the criminal inmates are referred to by the title “Leader” so the facility’s staff refer to Jada as “Leader Jada.” This is a brilliantly creepy way to open the story. Jada and her fellow inmates sarcastically compare the center to college. Young people of color sleep in dorms, eat at a dining hall, and attend classes on a range of subjects including politics, botany, and martial arts. They are constantly being evaluated to determine their aptitudes and their potential future “leadership” path in society.

The vibe of the facility feels like that of a dystopian version of an HBCU. But what is really going on in this rehabilitation center? Each title of respect and each exchange of therapeutic encouragement also carries an underlying threat. Some of the classes the inmates must take don’t align with leadership responsibilities. And most of all, it is clear that while the “leaders” have some elements of self-determination, they really have no true freedom.

The narrative begins with Jada in a counseling session with her AI therapist Ayana who wants Jada to come to terms with her crime and her victim. Ayana is an artificial intelligence originally designed to look like a graying, kindly, older Black woman. She is designed for Jada’s comfort since, due to the crime committed against her, Jada cannot abide a white therapist. However, because of new rules relating to AI transparency, Ayana has some of her physical features stripped so that she looks partly robotic in the therapy session. The visual of Ayana that Jada describes is jarring, and the initial scene grounds us in the dichotomy of truth versus fakeness that permeates the story. With this setup in the opening pages, we may think we know how this story is going to unfold. It feels like a classic dystopian institutional setting with an inevitable path to racism and oppression. But the tale takes an unexpected direction, particularly by the end, and circles back to the opening themes of justice versus retribution, self-determination versus manipulation, and accountability versus guilt. 

To the Woman in the Pink Hat efficiently weaves multiple layers of racial and gender social commentary through Jada’s lived experiences. Authentic connection, support, and beliefs are contrasted with artificial or superficial responses. The title of the story references the superficial, performative ally-ship symbolized by the knitted pink hat worn by someone who seemed to be an ally. Other reminders of falseness are quietly and deftly sewn into the story’s setting, including the unappetizing dining hall food called printloaf and the center’s artificial but life-like window scenery used to create a false sense of connection with the outside world. 

In contrast, the story shows us genuine family bonds through Jada’s relationship with her father, her younger sisters, and memories of her late mother. We also see the friendships Jada forms with the other inmates. However, the primary conflict in the story is the terrible racial and gender based crime perpetrated against Jada (and other women) as well as her equally terrible response which landed her in prison. Jada never denies her guilt and always expresses regret. The problematic inconsistency in the story is Jada herself. She is at times strong, resilient, and pragmatic, and at other times naïve and irrational, and at other times, cunningly rage-filled and vengeful. This frustrating contradiction in the main character ironically keeps us hooked because we genuinely don’t know what she will do or say next as each scene unfolds. 

  The twisty ending is powerful and unsettling, returning to the concept of self-determination versus manipulation, as well as grief and violence versus accountability. Overall, the story is a powerful allegory of well-intentioned but performative emptiness contrasted with the larger concept of the rage of a dream deferred. To the Woman in the Pink Hat is both brilliant and unsettling, leaving us with difficult questions to ponder and even more difficult answers to absorb.

 --

Highlights: Futuristic but relatable, contradictory protagonist, efficiently addresses multiple layers of racial and gender social commentary

 Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

Reference: Jordan, LaToya, To The Woman in the Pink Hat, [Aqueduct Press, 2023]

POSTED BY: Ann Michelle Harris – Multitasking, fiction writing Trekkie currently dreaming of her next beach vacation.  

Novella Project: Brent C. Lambert Interview

Today for the Novella Project, we're speaking to Brent C. Lambert:

Brent Lambert is a Black, queer man who heavily believes in the transformative power of speculative fiction across media formats. As a founding member of FIYAH Literary Magazine, he turned that belief into action and became part of a Hugo Award winning team. He resides in San Diego but spent a lot of time moving around as a military brat. His family roots are in the Cajun country of Louisiana. Currently, his novella A Necessary Chaos is out from Neon Hemlock and he is also part of cyberpunk/solarpunk anthology Fighting for the Future and Black horror anthology All These Sunken Souls. Ask him his favorite members of the X-Men and you’ll get different answers every time.

Adri reviewed A Necessary Chaos for the project yesterday, and you can read that review here.

For your recently published/forthcoming A Necessary Chaos, did you set out to write a novella, or was it something that happened as part of the process? How do you make that decision when you write?

So I was approached by dave ring about writing a novella and I pitched a few ideas at him. He gravitated towards the one that would eventually become A Necessary Chaos. It was my first time ever writing a novella and whewwww boy it was difficult. I'm grateful for the experience though because it helped me grow so much as a writer. I think in the future what will determine for me if a story is going to be a novella or not is how much I want to zoom in on a character's relationships.

To follow up on that answer - what was it about it being in a novella format that made it so difficult? And what differences did you find in the process of writing compared to your previous work?

I had never done it before and anyone who follows me for a while knows I am a huge worldbuilder. I like to create sprawling worlds and that was a bit counterintuitive to me working in this format—at first. But with some very helpful editing, I was able to navigate those uncharted waters. I tend to have idea vomit in my first drafts because I’m doing what I love and keeping it interesting for me as I write, but in revisions you have to figure out what’s narratively important to present.

On a personal note, writing it was hard because there was grief in the midst of writing it. I had lost someone who I cared about dearly. Derrick Ferguson was a writing mentor to me for years and he passed right as I was beginning the process. If I’m being honest with myself, I should have taken the proper time to process, but I was so determined to get things done I pushed through and wrote a draft anyway. I think I would have done myself a favor if I had taken the time to step aside and deal with it.

Differences in the process…well, I think it’s safe to say that thus far this is one of my most personal projects to date. I had to deal with more inner hurts, hopes and traumas than with any other piece before it. I was doing a lot of bleeding on the page. This novella required me to show up authentically. 

Picking up your point about worldbuilding there's an impressive amount of world in the story of A Necessary Chaos for a novella this size. Especially in the early parts you get us up to speed on a lot of politics of a lot of groups very quickly. Was it just a process of putting it all in the first draft and then cutting and cutting and cutting, or did you find some other way to strike that balance?

Definitely the latter. I say this a lot, but my drafts tend to be idea vomit. There’s just concept after concept and this historical tidbit and these nine characters and this listicle of poisons lmao. You get the idea, but yea I tend to just pour it all out in the first draft and then I need to pair it down as I revise. I tried to write something recently where I held back and I got bored with it before I even hit 10,000 words and I think I may need to just accept that this is my process. I have to feel like there’s a lot of going on to keep the words flowing.

As a separate question (which has been pretty much sat with me since I started the book) - One of the things I really appreciated about A Necessary Chaos is that sex is very present - in how the characters think about each other, as well as actually happening on page. I find it more unusual to see that for queer characters on page, compared to how present it is in books with primarily hetero love interests. Was that something you consciously thought about when you wrote it, or was this simply the story you wanted to tell, as you wanted to tell it?

Yes, it was a conscious thought, and it was one my editor dave helped to push me harder on. If anyone has listened to the podcast I’m a co-host on, Just Keep Writing, you will have heard me complain about the way that gay men are written in genre fiction. You rarely, if ever, see us talk about hooking up or having casual sex which is this omnipresent thing for many, many gay men. Just look on Twitter any time you see a cishetero person clutching their pearls about how many sex partners someone should have and the subsequent gay men reading them for filth in the comments about how boring and sad straight people are to put such restrictions on themselves.

And while I’m happy to see the gay romantic arcs where guys find their first love and stay with that love for years and years—that just ain’t the experience of a lot of gay men. We struggle with love and romance sometimes and a lot of that stems from the trauma of having to hide your fundamental self during your formative years. There’s a quote and I’m paraphrasing where it talks about Black boys who love Black boys need to be patient with each other because they don’t teach a love like this. And it’s so true! We don’t get to see what our kind of love looks like and so we sometime struggle. I think that’s important to show in fiction.

I just want us to have variety at the buffet. 

Accepting that genre is often a nebulous thing, would you consider A Necessary Chaos a romantasy/romance book, or an SFF book with a strong romance thread in it? What do you think goes into making it that genre/subgenre?

I wouldn’t consider it a romantasy/romance book if only because I think that would be dismissive of those genres. The people who work in those spaces are very skilled in the narrative norms of those genres and have a deep intentionality when writing them. I hate to see those stories get written off as fluff because I can see how much actual understanding of mechanics is needed to do them exceptionally. I guess what I’m saying is; I didn’t have that kind of intentionality of skill when writing this novella. I knew at the core it would have these two queer men in love and trying to find happiness, but I didn’t go into the writing with the intention of “oh this is romantasy” if that makes sense?

BUT (I’m a Libra so there’s always a but) I can’t control nor would I want to control how readers receive my work. So if people receive it as being a romantasy or romance then I’m not going to stop them. I think how authors perceive their work and how readers perceive that same work can be very different and both still be completely valid. I’m a huge proponent of multiple truths getting to exist at once.

Do you tend to read books with strong romantic arcs yourself, and are there any other books, whether pure romance, romantasy or other genre SFF with romantic throughlines that you recommend, or that particularly resonated with you, or that you drew inspiration from for your writing? What do you think makes a good one?

So I don’t necessarily seek out romance as a genre per se, but I am a deeply romantic guy at heart and romance plotlines will never turn me off to a story. I think for me, most of my romance wellsprings occur in other media besides books. Like music and movies tend to be where I find the romances that rip me asunder in the best way. Moonlight left me an inconsolable mess. Joe and Nicky from The Old Guard are my forever relationship goals. I hope there’s a version of me out there in the multiverse that gets to proclaim my love for my partner the way Joe did.

Bringing back to books though, I did recently finished Fractured Infinity by Nathan Tavares a few days ago and OH MY GOD would I go to war for the couple in that book (Hayes and Yusuf). I didn’t know my heart needed that kind of romance where it’s just based in two beautifully broken people colliding together. Such a good story. The hard fought love story in The Spear Cuts Through Water with Keema and Jun is another one I really love. Not a thing is earned easily between them. Another such hard fought romance is between Touraine and Luca in C.L. Clark’s The Magic of the Lost trilogy is another I love because there are no easy answers.

…and I’m starting to see a theme in what I like as I respond to this! Yea I like the romances that aren’t easy. The ones where the love doesn’t happen instantly and even if it does, it can’t come to fruition right away. I like the romances that tip toe right on the edge of tragedy.

Looping away a little bit from romance, you touched earlier on working with dave ring, but what was your general experience of publishing with a small press like? Is there anything that was particularly unexpected/good/anything you wish you'd known going in?

So working with a small press allowed me to feel a lot bolder in the choices I made with my story. dave was exceptional at pushing me to make things sexier, more detailed, more vicious. It’s like he knew that I needed that permission and gave it to me wholeheartedly. I’m not so sure I’d get that experience with a traditional publisher. At least not for a debut novella out the gate. It seems to me that the industry doesn’t let you really start pushing the envelope until you’re a few books deep. Obviously, many exceptions exist but that’s been my general observation.

I really enjoyed the little frills I got for the book that I’m pretty sure don’t happen as often in trad pub books. Like I got chapter illustrations which was so cool and I’m pretty sure I want to get one of them tatted on my arm actually.

Like all Neon Hemlock novellas, A Necessary Chaos has a really lovely cover. What was your involvement in the process of designing/choosing/sourcing that art?

This is another area where I think being with small press was fabulous. dave asked me who I wanted to do the cover art. I had been a fan of Cathy Kwan’s for so long and just couldn’t imagine a better artist for my boys. But, she’s really really good and talent deserves to charge for their skills ya know? So I wasn’t sure it could happen, but dave just took the reins and reached out to her. She liked the story enough and agreed to do it within a budget that worked for the press. I could not have been more thankful and still am honestly.

But in terms of design, I sent Cathy this big ass document describing the characters. I went a bit off the deep end, but apparently that was appreciated because clients tend to do the opposite and it doesn’t give the artist a clear direction. But yea, after that Cathy went to work and created the amazing cover that so many people have fallen in love with.

Do you read novellas yourself at all? If so, what draws you to them particularly?

Oh yea I definitely read novellas! As to what draws me to them—well on a practical level the more involved I get in having a writing career, the harder it becomes to carve out time to read. Novellas give me the satisfaction of a great novel without as much of a time investment. But beyond the practical, I admire the craft of novellas because they really do have some different considerations. Best way I describe them in my head is that they are the special 6-episode mini-series to a novel’s 12 episode season. The mini-series and thus the novella, has to work so much harder in my opinion to emotionally capture an audience and get them past the hump of “this isn’t going to last long so I’m not going to give too much of myself to it”. And that’s a huge barrier to be able to move a reader past and some novella writers do it with such exacting precision.

Are there any you love and would recommend?

The Border Keeper by Kerstin Hall! I feel like that book was written specifically for me and some specter of me from an alternate reality was haunting Kerstin the entire time it was being written. I loved it that much and cannot recommend it enough.

Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark! There just aren’t many people who can build worlds the way he can. And this novella is a love letter to Black resistance during Jim Crow while also being a takedown of Lovecraft’s worship at the altar of racism. Loved it!

The Murders of Molly Southbourne by Tade Thompson! Talk about a high concept story being told to perfection. It’s gritty, brutal, and the prose just keeps punching you. I need Hollywood to stop playing and make this a movie already. It’s so gripping.

A Ruin of Shadows by L.D. Lewis! L.D. does not get the recognition she deserves for her writing and I will keep screaming that until I feel satisfied she does. General Edo is the anti-hero rejecting her role in empire that we all need desperately right now. But there’s just a sheer badassness tinged with a small hum of tragedy that L.D. brings to Edo and it makes her such a memorable character.

As the penultimate question, having read your bio, I have to ask - what would be today's answer(s) for your favourite members of the X-Men? (Child-me loved Gambit, but I'm not sure adult me quite concurs)

Exodus! It’s funny now how much the Krakoan era of X-Men has expanded my choices. But yea he’s been in my thoughts lately. His radicalism married to a religious fanaticism is an interesting mix to watch.

And as the last one, can you tell us a little more about A Necessary Chaos, and any of your other work?

I don’t have a buy link for this yet, but I am going to be part of an anthology called I Want That Twink Obliterated and it’s basically taking a queer perspective to Pulp SFF style tales. The story I’m working on for it is heavily inspired by Conan and Vampire Hunter D. It’s been amazing getting to just be so lush with my worldbuilding as those stories tended to just go for more and more, leaving it to the reader to either catch up or give up.

I was also recently in an horror anthology titled All These Sunken Souls with a group of just brilliant Black writers. I felt so honored to be in company with them. My story there is basically about some temporal madness and what it means to be able to see far too many futures.

 

As for A Necessary Chaos, I hope readers find comfort in it. I wrote it to be an action fantasy full of fun, but hopefully managed to slide in something about the possibilities of a better world too. And I don’t think there are many books out with two gay Black men on the cover (especially smoldering that hard!) so if you support the book for no other reason, let it be so that presses can see there’s a market for guys like me to be front and center.

Thank you Brent!

POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroform_tea

Novella Project: The Past Trader by A. M. Donohoo

You think our stock market is heartless and destructive? You haven't seen anything yet

Financial investments are essentially bets. They're attempts to extract information from the future. Of course, being less that perfectly predictable, they offer equal measures of risk and reward. And it's the expectation of reward that can cause an investor to suspend their aversion to costs, including costs incurred nonconsensually by others. If an opportunity is identified that can double your wealth in Switzerland by investing in a business that will poison the water in Bolivia for generations, there is, regrettably, a type of human being who will happily push that button and watch millions suffer as they wait for the profit to materialize.

Ah, there's that pesky detail: waiting. So far, it's the only natural force that opposes human greed (there's also the material finitude of resources, but that hasn't stopped speculators yet). No matter your urgency, you must let time do its multiplying magic upon money. Finance relies on made-up numbers, but not even made-up numbers can cheat the rules of math.

But what if you could cheat? If all that your profit requires is time, why not put that time elsewhere so you can get your profit right now? In the world of A. M. Donohoo's novella The Past Trader, a method has been discovered to send capital to the past, changing the course of historical events so that the present is instantly changed to one where you're already richer. A new specialty in financial calculations has given rise to the profession of "lineweavers," experts who track the chains of consequences from possible interventions in the past.

The twist in this trick is that, even if you know every detail of the past, changing it produces a new series of events that you don't know, so the risk inherent to investment is not eliminated. Lineweavers are crucial to this business because there are potential butterfly effects in every alteration of history. While not perfect, their methods can discern which changes are probably riskier than others.

As often happens in the best science fiction, The Past Trader takes a real phenomenon and applies a magnifying lens to the truth that underlies it. In our real world, to modify nature in the name of human interests is already an aggressive assertion of control. To modify time would be an even more blatant instance of the same manipulation. If you agree that stepping in the way of the choices of past people, even to the point of replacing unknown numbers of human births, is an unjustifiable abuse of power, we have to ask: what justifies the regular way it's already being done all around us? Real-world finance already sacrifices future survivability for present gain; it's not too different to instead sacrifice the past. In the specific example used in the book, the protagonist has to weigh the chance to retroactively modify the recipe for napalm in order to make it more dangerous (with an astronomically lucrative payoff) against the cost in human misery that will result —or rather, would already have resulted— from a more lethal Vietnam War.

Real-world investors already use twisted mental gymnastics to avoid taking responsibility for the suffering they cause. It's got to be even more convenient for investors to offload that suffering onto the past, where they don't have to see it, where it's already done, where they can pretend there's nothing that can be done about it. If economic theory advises against caring about sunk costs, time travel adds a perverse incentive to take any cost you want to stop caring about and turn it into a sunk cost.

Unfortunately, The Past Trader doesn't give these ideas enough development. The plot is more complicated than it needs to be, adding numerous globe-trotting mini-quests that are there only so that the protagonist can finally have one key conversation with the lineweaver who calculated the true costs of the napalm trade opportunity. In these travels we meet a few minor characters of a more mystical disposition, who give the protagonist vague lessons on the immensity of time in Hinduism or the timeless realm of Australian Aboriginal religions. These concepts have deeply meaningful ties to the themes of the book, but they're merely namedropped, not given any additional thought in the course of the story. The fact that the lineweaver is apparently a believer in Islam, where human choice is viewed as always limited by divine will, could have been an interesting counterpoint that the author didn't take advantage of.

The space that the book doesn't dedicate to further exploration of its themes is instead given to a parallel plot about foreign soldiers fighting against the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a conflict that is briefly implied to change for the worse as a result of the protagonist's eventual choice to try for a better past. The addition of this secondary storyline lets the author illustrate the indirect repercussions of the hubris of past trading, but its resolution is left undercooked, and the chapters that precede it are inserted in between the main plot with little care for ease of pacing.

The Past Trader has a fascinating premise on its hands, but not enough space to use all its potential. A prose author needs to develop a good nose for which stories are a good fit for the novella format, and this one isn't. Either a short story focusing on the protagonist's ethical conundrum, minus the globe-trotting and the mystical notions of time that the author does nothing with anyway, or a full novel with extended discussion of world-spanning alterations and the outrageous ways time travel would help stock traders keep washing their hands off externalities, would have been a more satisfying read.

Despite these problems, The Past Trader is still sufficiently thought-provoking to merit your consideration. It's an effective allegory for the hunger for immediate gratification that has taken over our economy, the increasingly barefaced excuses invented to ignore the real suffering of real people, and the rottenness that can grow inside a well-intentioned person placed in the position to make that kind of choice.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

Reference: Donohoo, A. M. The Past Trader [Ambuscade House, 2023].

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

Novella Project: A Necessary Chaos by Brent Lambert

 A constantly expanding package of juicy worldbuilding, great characters and hot hot feelings

Vade thinks Althus is really, really hot. The two of them have been hooking up sporadically for years in various far-flung locations, but it's never gotten super serious between them... and it can't, because Vade is a magical assassin, and Althus is the amoral terrorist he's been contracted to tail and, eventually, to kill. It'll be a shame to lose out on all the mind-blowing sex once he's dead, but Vade's inner voice is saying that it's a great idea and surely it's just another job, right?

Althus thinks Vade is really, really hot. Sure, he's a killer working for the Amos-Morbine Compact, one of the three corporate political entities which has contracted with hellish alternate dimensions to bring magic to the world. And sure, as a member of the Phantom Dragons anarchist group, he's duty bound to kill him at some point. But really, it's hard to emphasise just how fine this man is. It'll be a shame when Althus has to kill him but every rebellion has a few casualties, and a remorseless assassin isn't a death to lose sleep over, surely?

Vade's superior, Desiree, says its time to make a move. Althus' superior, Karmola, thinks it's also time to make a move. Vade's inner voice is really quite interested in death and destruction and oh, huh, maybe it's not the regular type of inner voice? Seemingly nothing can get in the way of a murderous outcome, except... oh, what's this? Feelings? And the feelings say "screw mutually assured destruction, let's bring down the corrupt corporate government"?

Well then.

One of the hallmarks of novella storytelling is the balance of storytelling elements the author chooses to include within the constrained length. Because there aren't hundreds of pages to tell a story in, this often translates to few characters or shallower, archetypal characterisation, or less intricate worldbuilding, or less time for characters to process their emotions around the events of the story, lightening in some areas so that other elements can shine. These choices aren't bad - and as a reader, I've gotten better at not getting to the end of a novella and going "cool, but why didn't they just do everything" - but they're often quite visible and have an impact on how I as a reader enjoy a particular story. Somehow, however, those constraints don't apply to A Necessary Chaos, which manages to pack in everything it could possibly need into an accomplished tightly woven novella-length package.

First up, you've got Althus and Vade, and the book wastes no time in establishing both of them through the lens of their lust for one another. Althus and Vade do have quite similar "voices", a fact which is most obvious while their stories are mirroring each other, but their circumstances diverge plenty in the second act once Sides Are Taken, and I think the similarity in how each thinks about the other reinforces their connection rather than getting confusing or same-y. An interesting supporting cast soon follows - I particularly enjoyed Karmola, Althus' take-no-shit superior, and Sajime, his colleague and fellow magic wielder - and we get enough about their lives, and the unexpected connections between them, to make the stakes for everyone feel real as the plot progresses. 

Through the opening, we also learn about the politics and magic of this world, developed through contact with dimensions of torture, cancer and war, powers which tie in beautifully with the garbage corporations that wield them. Both Vade and Althus have the power of Two-Voice, as bestowed by the torture domain, and are able to secretly command and manipulate people around them while apparently speaking innocuous sentences. Said magic doesn't come into play a lot, but when it does it's pivotal and often quite creepy, underlining its provenance. The relationships between the magic and politics are effectively drawn without being oversimplified - magic is the provenance of corporations but an unaffiliated person like Althus can still wield it if he's already learned. Vade's politics, as the point of view character who starts on the wrong side of the imperialist divide, are pretty easily changed by a combination of cold hard facts and also learning a bit more about that pesky Inner Voice, and it lets him get an earned HEA with Althus at the end. There's a steep on-ramp to some of these worldbuilding elements but it never gets overwhelming, and the magical domains make for an unusual magic system whose fundamentals are easily grasped in the space of a novella.

And then there's the FEELINGS and. oh boy. If the idea of one character saying "I love you, you idiot" to their soulmate gets you fuzzy in the tummy, THIS IS THE BOOK FOR YOU. Vade and Althus are introduced to us through a steamy beach scene, and somehow both of them find the time in the midst of the constant happenings of this book to constantly check in internally on their feelings as they progress from lust to reluctant antagonism to genuine love and a desire to start over openly with each other.

This is a great novella, and I'm in awe of the technical accomplishment to make so many different pieces fit together. Come for the romance, stay for the magic - all of it.

Novella Project: If Found, Return to Hell

When life gives you call centers, try kindness

Institutions breed call centers, with the probability of hold music hell rising with every added service the institution offers. Such webs of bureaucracy are prone to snarls and tangles, and somebody’s got to put on a headset, pick up the comb, and try to make order of it all. Yes, even if there’s magic. 

Em X Liu’s kindhearted novella If Found Return to Hell focuses on one such somebody: you, the reader. Because I do not really hold with 2nd person narration (at least, not enough to engage with it in reviews), I shall refer to this viewpoint character as Reader. Reader is a journeyman wizard for One Wizard, a massive firm whose job is to provide magic-care—like an insurance company that you call in when your magic goes wrong and you need someone to unwrong it. Naturally such calls must be received and triaged—hence the call center, and hence Reader’s job answering phones and troubleshooting wrongnesses. One day a client calls in to report a problem, and Reader makes a rookie mistake: promising to provide help that goes beyond standard One Wizard operating procedures. Upon making an actual house call to the client—a young man named Shine—Reader discovers that Shine has become possessed by a demon from Hell. Except this isn't a bad possession, as it turns out. The demon’s name is Wang Ran, and he and Shine get on well--so well that after a (surprisingly) brief period of adjustment Shine seems open to the idea of having a second person living permanently in his head and sharing control of his body. But Hell wants Wang Ran back, and One Wizard really doesn’t have any reason to take on the inter-institutional headache of fighting against Hell to support a call center lackey who should never have gotten involved in the first place. And so the struggle for freedom and self-determination against vast bureaucratic force is on. 

For a book about demon possession, this is a very warm and gentle story, full of details of family, friendship, food, and people caring about each other. Families are found, dingy little cheap apartments are made warm and comfortable and welcoming, and a great deal of comfort food is eaten. It is the mundane details of human life that attract Wang Ran as much as the freedom from Hell. He dives into projects like frying an egg, shopping for clothes, eating the dumplings that Shine’s mother made with love for her boy. He’s also rather a selfish asshole—Shine is the first to say that—but he is endearing. At least, Reader and Shine find him so.  

This is the kind of novella that is doing one very specific thing, and so its success or failure depends on how much you enjoy that kind of thing. Do you want a sweet, endearing story about the value of simple comforts, friendship, and family? A story whose villains can be reasoned with, whose faceless bureaucracies still have real people manning the phones, people who are eager to help? A story that uses the same structures in its magical world as the ones we encounter daily in our own, but allows the little people to triumph? If so, you’ll like this book. Many people did. I’ve seen lots of praise for its gentleness all over social media. 

But I myself found that its approach fell a bit short. The combination of ideas—call centers, demons, possession, hell—felt like it could have combined to make quite incisive commentary about the ubiquity of capitalist infrastructure which can poison everything—even magic. But the warmth and humanity of the characters worked against such a tale, and in so doing either undermined its indictment of bureaucratic hell, or else undermined its own world-building. It tells a tale in which an effective way to combat faceless bureaucratic inertia is through the power of individual action, personal virtue, and speaking sensibly to the people in charge. And I don’t know how many faceless institutions you’ve dealt with recently, but if that’s all it takes to get a good outcome, then One Wizard and Hell itself are a pretty weaksauce pair of institutions. And if One Wizard is instead supposed to be as intractable as State Farm, as immovable as AllState, then the outcome of this book fails to convince. Wizards and demons are fine, but believing that kindness can be as effective as it is in this story requires more magical thinking than I can muster.  

But that is because I am a jaded, curmudgeonly old fart. I hope you are soft and warm enough in your heart for this book to reach you and persuade you of the sort of magic we might bring to our own world through kindness. 

——

Highlights

Nerd coefficient: 6/10: Still enjoyable, but the flaws are hard to ignore.

Highlights:

• Call centers
• Dumplings
• Demons
• Hell

References
Liu, Em X. If Found, Return to Hell [Rebellion Publishing, 2023].

——
CLARA COHEN lives in Scotland in a creaky old building with pipes for gas lighting still lurking under her floorboards. She is an experimental linguist by profession, and calligrapher and Islamic geometric artist by vocation. During figure skating season she does blather on a bit about figure skating. She is on Mastodon at wandering.shop/@ergative.

Novella Project: Selena Middleton Interview

 Today for the novella project, we're speaking to Selena Middleton:

Selena Middleton is a publisher, editor, writer, and educator with experience teaching both academic and creative writing. She earned a PhD in English focusing on feminist and Indigenous science fiction and interrelationality in the context of ecological collapse narratives. Branching off from this project, her current work—academic, creative, and in publishing—examines connections between the emotional and the ecological as part of a wider definition of ecology. Selena writes fiction under the name Eileen Gunnell Lee. Her work has been published at Selene Quarterly, Little Blue Marble, Reckoning, and Nightmare Magazine, among others.

How long have you been involved with Stelliform at this point? And what was your starting point with them?

I started Stelliform Press in 2020 after I finished a PhD in English which focused on feminist eco-fictions. The feminist sf writers of the 70s and 80s–like Ursula K. Le Guin and Octavia Butler–were addressing ecology in a more holistic way. From them my project blossomed to look at the speculative ecological perspectives of contemporary Indigenous writers (like Lee Maracle for example) and I knew that works like these, that were rarely categorised under the umbrella of "cli-fi," were crucial to understanding the climate change's impacts and its colonial origins. These writers helped me see the problem's ecological impacts in a web wherein ecology consisted of not just human bodies but human feeling and thought as well, along with the usual non-human life we think of as ecological. At the time I was also starting to publish my own fiction. Seeing how publishing works from a writer's perspective inspired me to start a press to create space for more of the kinds of stories I knew were out there but at that time were pretty hard to find.

Stelliform obviously means “star-shaped” – what was the significance of the name, and how did the press come to be called that?

I chose the star shape as an inspiration for the press because it is a shape that can be found in many realms and speaks to the connectedness between those realms. Stars are in space, but they are also on earth in the form of snowflakes and fungi and lots of other plants, animals, and geological features. The star is prevalent across mythologies and history. For me, “Stelliform” speaks to the expansive connectedness that we need to realize in order to live in an ecologically relational way.

What are the particular challenges of running a small press? Especially compared to some of the bigger publishers.

I’ve never worked for a bigger publisher, but I can imagine that having a bigger budget would make things a whole lot easier. Unfortunately, so many of the decisions I make as a small press publisher are dictated by money. We’re very lucky in Canada to have some access to fairly robust arts funding, but accessing those funds requires a lengthy application process that is really difficult to manage as a one-woman press with a few volunteers and the occasional freelancer. You can spend months on an application and not be successful. The financial side of the operation feels like walking a tightrope sometimes.

What is your favourite thing about running a small press?

I love just about everything besides the financial challenges! I have always loved editing; it’s my favourite part of my own writing process and I’ve discovered that I really love editing others’ works and getting to have in depth conversations about the intentionality of certain aspects of a book. I love getting to have those conversations with brilliant folks who care about the world in similar ways as I do, and discovering, through them and their work, new ways to love this planet we’re all on. I’ve also been surprised by how much I love the other connections I get to make in this work: with artists, and book reviewers, and readers. Stories are powerful connectors and it turns out that seeps into just about every aspect of this business.

Every small press seems to have its particular unique flavour that goes into the works they publish and how they present to the world – what would you say is Stelliform’s?

I wanted to answer this with an actual flavour and I was going to say “spicy” but that has a pretty specific meaning on the book world! All of our books are working on multiple levels, so the flavour we’re looking for is complex, deep, with some bright notes scattered throughout and maybe to finish. If there is criticism of a Stelliform book it is usually “the author is cramming too much into this novella!” but we’re very careful in our editing process to make sure that all of the pieces of even our shortest books are attended to and connected. We love a meaty novella! And our awards record, I think, shows that this is working for most readers. To put this into literary language, though, we’re interested in complex narratives populated by complex characters, told in beautiful, purposeful prose and surprising structures.

You have a lot of experience of writing from a lot of angles, including from the academic side – how does this feed into your work at Stelliform, if at all?

My academic work is the reason I started Stelliform Press and on a broad level I like to keep up with academic literature in the environmental humanities by dipping into the ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment journal and a few others every once in a while. I particularly appreciate the interdiscipinary and international aspect of that publication as its important for me, in Canada, to seek out more awareness of others’ experiences and perspectives on environment and literatures about environment. Working in academia in the fractured, piecemeal way I have has also made me tolerant of the sometimes long timelines of publishing and the huge amount of work it takes to bring a book from the first accepted manuscript version to its final form. This is by no means a good thing because there is so much wrong with academic structures and the way the academy treats people, but academia has beaten me into a patient and flexible form that ultimately is pretty beneficial for operation in an industry in which little is certain and you don’t make much money even when people praise your work.

What goes into your process for finding new works? Do you think there’s a difference compared to the larger publishers?

I think one of the main differences between how we acquire new books compared to how a larger publisher does it is that we run open submissions periods during which unagented authors can submit their work. We have found some of our most successful books in the slush pile. I’m also very intersted in mentoring BIPOC authors and encourage queries from BIPOC authors even if they don’t have a completed manuscript.

How do you go about finding the artists for your covers, and is there much author involvement in the cover art process? How does that work? Do you have a particular guiding principle in what you want to see in your covers?

We’ve been very lucky to have some connections with artists who have come through with some beautiful, eye-catching covers. Rachel Yu Lobbenberg, who did the amazing cover for Octavia Cade’s The Impossible Resurrection of Grief and the award-winning cover for Rebecca Campbell’s Arboreality is a friend of mine from undergrad. I’ve also made some connections with artists who came up through the Ontario College of Art and Design. I try to work with Canadians and/or BIPOC artists when possible. If the book or author we’re designing the cover for comes from a particular culture that is important to the story I try to match that cover project with an artist of the same culture. That’s been difficult to accomplish in some cases, but it is a guiding principal. I do generally check in with authors about what they would not want on their cover and if they have any ideas they’d love to see, but ultimately the cover is a marketing tool so I try to stay aware of trends while also delivering covers that exude the indie Stelliform spirit.

You have a particularly interesting and well curated selection of novellas – why is this something you’ve chosen to highlight? Is there something about the novella form that appeals particularly?

I started publishing novellas primarily for a couple reasons: first, publishing something shorter than a novel seemed a good move to get my feet wet in publishing; second, I’d been really impressed by a few Tor novellas since their marketing machine was making those shorter books more visible to the SFFH readership. It seemed like people really wanted to read shorter books, and a few of the Tor novellas were really inspirational for the risks they took. I’m thinking specifically of Brooke Bolander’s The Only Harmless Great Thing which was the one that solidified this form as something that could be really successful for environmental books. Some of the topics I wanted to cover with Stelliform were quite heavy, as Bolander’s novella is, and I thought a shorter book could do that well, create a gut-punch effect and leave the reader wanting to know more within that emotional resonance. Another was Rivers Solomon’s The Deep from Saga. Feeling is an important part of shifting a culture and the novellas that inspired me did that very well.

What do you think makes a good novella more broadly?

Novellas are the perfect length for experimentation. Authors can take more risks at that length because the reader doesn’t have to buy in for an entire 400 page book. A good novella is doing some of the same work that a short story is doing in structural and language experiments and attention to language, but there is more room to spread out, approach themes from several different angles and make connections as a novel does.

Are there any misconceptions you think people have about novellas? Or about the ones published by small presses? And if so, what would you say in response to them?

Sometimes it’s frustrating when readers treat novellas as if they are short novels. I think it’s more accurate to say that a novella is a long short story rather than a short novel, but it really is a hybrid form in which structure and interconnections are so important. There are undoubtedly novellas in the world that are straight narrative, but I’m more interested in novellas that pack that space to the brim with nuanced characters, linguistic play, and evocative imagery, structured in some way that is unique and linked to the book’s themes. Even though Tor has re-popularized the SFFH novella recently, I think small presses are well positioned to publish weirder, more experiemental novellas. Stelliform treads a bit of a line there as I’m always interested in finding something new, something that challenges but doesn’t completely alienate readers. Because we are publishing stories that partially function as environmental cultural commentary for us even in the weirdest stories we publish there has to be something that readers can connect to.

Is there anything you’d like to see change in novellas in the near future, or something you think will change?

There are a couple culture and industry elements that I think might drive change. First, readers are going to continue looking for shorter books because our attention spans are so challenged while simultaneously some readers are seeking to keep up with online reading challenges and book clubs. I don’t see that changing until we have some kind of major cultural or technological shift (and admittedly that last point could happen at any time). Second, the monopoly of the Big 5 or whatever it is now is going to continue to drive the more experimental, less commercial writers to small presses. While I’m very cognizant of the limitations of reach that a small press offers, I think we will see some diversification as people continue to work outside of the increasingly restricted Big 5 spaces, into spaces that allow for more flexibility and risk taking. I hope that the bigger small presses will continue to encourage and accommodate those aspects of novellas and certainly as Stelliform grows we see it as a very positive thing to support.

Can you tell us about any upcoming novellas you’re excited to be publishing? Or a few works you’ve published in 2023 that you’re particularly proud of?

Our current 2024 schedule has no novella in it! But I am hoping to pull something from our recent submission call to fill that space. In 2023 we published some amazing novellas, all of which received Publishers Weekly starred reviews. Two of our 2023 novellas were chosen for some big lists: E.G. Condé’s Sordidez, a multilingual Indigenous futurist novella, was picked as a NPR Best Book; and Tiffany Morris’s Green Fuse Burning, an Indigenous swampcore horror novella, was chosen as a Tor Reviewer’s Choice Best Book of 2023.

Thank you, Selena!

POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroform_tea

Novella Project: Tiffany Morris Interview

Today for the novella project we're speaking to Tiffany Morris:

Tiffany Morris is an L'nu'skw (Mi'kmaw) writer from Nova Scotia. She is the author of the swampcore horror novella Green Fuse Burning (Stelliform Books, 2023) and the Elgin-nominated horror poetry collection Elegies of Rotting Stars (Nictitating Books, 2022). Her work has appeared in the Indigenous horror anthology Never Whistle At Night (Vintage Books), as well as in Nightmare Magazine, Uncanny Magazine, and Apex Magazine, among others. She has an MA in English from Acadia University with a focus on Indigenous Futurisms and apocalyptic literature. She can be found at tiffmorris.com or on twitter/bluesky @tiffmorris.

Green Fuse Burning was reviewed earlier this week by Phoebe, which you can read here.

For your recent book Green Fuse Burning, what made you decide to write it as a novella? Was it a particular attraction of the form, or something about this story that suited it?

While I explore a lot of the themes that are present in Green Fuse Burning in my poetry, I really wanted a more expansive form to express some of the interwoven complexities of grief - having an interior glimpse into the mind of a character and how they respond to the things that happen to them felt like the most immediate way for me to do it. But the brutality of how this character experiences grief wasn't something I wanted to expand into a novel, because it's already emotionally difficult subject matter.

That makes a lot of sense - and certainly seems true of a lot of novellas I've read. They're a great way to explore a particular theme without overburdening the reader, and occupy a useful transition point between short fiction and a full novel.

Picking up from that - do you find generally that the form you choose ends up being dictated by the content, or do you ever go in thinking "I am going to write a poem/short story/novella/etc." and then shape the content to mould to the form?

It's funny, my writing process always forms from fragments and seeds - my Notes app is full of images, random sentences, or story idea - and sometimes things jotted down devoid of context that I can't really turn into anything. Ideas that I intend to be novellas or novels will inevitably end up being short stories - or even poems, because my tendency is to pack everything down into dense sentences. I suppose what it becomes really depends on if I think a character needs to think through and experience the idea. 

Do you think that density in your writing comes from being a poet, as well as prose author?

Sort of - I think I have a tendency toward maximalism in pretty much everything, haha. Even when I was writing my master's thesis, my advisor would recommend I expand and simplify my ideas for greater clarity. It's part of why I love the revision process so much - looking at what needs to be pared down, and what needs to be left as-is.

How did you come to be working with Stelliform?

I've been a fan of Stelliform since the very beginning - I won a copy of Michael J Deluca's Night Roll through a twitter giveaway and have been hooked ever since. I'm behind on my reading now, but I think I've read about 75% of their catalog, so I'm thrilled to now have a book of my own in the mix. Selena and I were fans of each other's work, and she reached out to me about submitting; I'd had a few ideas that I pitched rolling around but kept coming back to the pond.

Are there any particular novellas in Stelliform's catalogue you'd recommend or think more people should read?

I think Stelliform has something for everybody! I'm partial to Night Roll by Michael J. DeLuca, Arboreality by Rebecca Campbell, The Impossible Resurrection of Grief by Octavia Cade, and House of Drought by Dennis Mombauer. I haven't had a chance to dive into Sordidez [Roseanna's note: Phoebe has a great review of this up here] by E.G. Condé yet, but I'm looking forward to it!

Do you have any thoughts about working with a small press generally? Things that work better, or are just different than you were expecting, or advice you'd give your past self about the process?

I love working with small presses! Both Elegies of Rotting Stars and Green Fuse Burning have been released through small press, and while each experience was unique to the press, both were great. Having a small editorial team focused on your work is such an honor - you get the sense that there is a deep investment in your work, and also in making it the best that it can be. 

Picking up on the focus on your work, did this include you having any input into the cover design at all? And was that something important to you and how you felt your book was presented to the world?

I did! Selena was very considerate of what I might like for the cover - we both wanted to prioritize having Indigenous art, or work from an artist of color, or a queer artist, in showing reflection and solidarity with my own work. We're both huge fans of Chippewa and Potawatomi artist Chief Lady Bird's work, so we were thrilled when we were given approval to use her piece for the cover. It resonated so well with the spooky, swampy themes of Green Fuse Burning.

It’s striking and haunting and I think it looks great!

After your experiences writing Green Fuse Burning, would you write another novella? And if yes, do you think there’s anything you’ve learnt from this one that you’d take forward in a future project?

Thanks so much! 

Yes, I'd love to do another novella - the form is so interesting to me because it's a great way to delve deeply into an idea while still having some focus, or a thesis. There isn't the need to be as expansive as with something like a novel, and that constraint opens up a lot of room for experimentation. 

Final question: can you tell us a little more about your book?

Green Fuse Burning is about an L’nu’skw (Mi’kmaw) landscape painter who is tricked into a residency at a remote pond by her girlfriend with whom she’s having issues. As she works through her residency she experiences increasingly strange and supernatural sights and sounds - is it a manifestation of her grief or something more sinister?

Thank you Tiffany!

POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroform_tea

Novella Project: Green Fuse Burning by Tiffany Morris

Get lost in the swampland in this short novella exploring grief, climate change anxiety, colonization, and mental health.

Note: Tiffany Morris includes the following content warnings at the beginning of the novella: parental death, suicidal ideation, animal death/gore, explicit sex.

Tiffany Morris’s eco-horror novella Green Fuse Burning keeps a tight focus on place, a large pond, while exploring major issues from grief, PTSD, climate change, colonization, and more. Rita Francis is a Mi’kmaw artist working in landscaping paintings. She goes on a week-long residency paid for by a grant that her white girlfriend, Molly, applied for in her name in hopes of igniting Rita’s artistic spark again. The cabin is on the shore of an isolated pond, and Rita goes early in the season since the warming climate has made the summers too hot and the winters shorter. 

The novella opens with Rita’s first night at the cabin when she’s woken up by what sounds like people dragging a body to the pond. She tries to watch through the window but decides not to go outside. Since she hardly has any cellphone signal at the isolated cabin, she resigns herself that there’s nothing she can do, and she’s not entirely sure what she might have seen was real. She reassures herself: “She’d sleepwalked as a kid, hallucinated all manner of things, found herself waking up on the porch some mornings with muddy feet and the imprint of grass on her arms, impressions of an unknown hour” (13). When she goes into town the next day to ask around, she’s met with the typical rude locals suspect of anyone new, particularly an Indigenous woman.

Rita only has a week at the pond to work on her paintings. Even if the pond seems to have some odd flora and fauna—including some loud and bloody crows—that’s no reason to run away and possibly strain her relationship with her girlfriend even further. But the longer she stays at the pond, the more things unravel. Her girlfriend leaves her a cryptic voicemail, her paintings are oozing, her will to live is fading, and there may or may not be something coming for her from the swamp.

This novella tackles a lot of themes in a tightly plotted story. One of my favorite parts was the meditation on what it means to be an artist. Rita’s livelihood influences her reaction to the weirdness of the pond as she processes it through her paintings. Beyond that, art influences this book, from the great cover, to the inside illustrations. Importantly, the story is structured as if the reader is walking through a gallery of Rita’s work, reading the descriptions of each painting. The following section of the story features some of the inspiration from that painting, and they grow weirder as Rita spirals into the swamp. I loved how the voice of the gallery descriptions differed from the voice of Rita and gave the reader such lines as: “In these paintings we see the murky, urgent depths of a woman’s spiritual journey into the swamplands of uncertainty” (7). Through these paintings and descriptions of Rita’s artistic process, Morris captures one branch of eco-anxiety not depicted as often as a general fear of the changing climate. For artists who work intimately with the land, that change is explored through art, which means a much more intense focus. It’s impossible for the artist to look away from the climate crisis if their chosen focus is landscape, such as Rita. 

While this novella is a fecund meditation on grief and its branching impacts, one of my favorite aspects was the descriptions throughout. Morris’s title comes from the Dylan Thomas poem “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower.” Thomas’s body of work is full of lush, wordy poems, so for Morris’s to draw inspiration from his work—and to quote from the titular poem as an epigraph to the novella—promises the reader an equally lush reading experience. She absolutely delivers, and I enjoyed the natural descriptions throughout, especially as they become weirder and more horrific. One of my favorites opens the second chapter: “As Rita made her way through the fog-wreathed world of the pond loop, she admired the vibrant greens around her with a morbid thrill. […] It invaded, pillaged, choked out everything else that breathed, leaving only a teeming verdant landscape in its wake” (31). Morris’s poetic power of description adds depth to the relatively simple—but effective—plot and makes for a rich reading experience. 

Without dipping into spoilers, the swampy weirdness comes fast and quick. While a more common critique of books is that the middle lagged, in this novella, I wish we had lingered in the middle and let the weirdness build a little more slowly. Morris tackles so many themes—which connect back to the central grief of the death of Rita’s father—but I wish more of these paths could have been explored more fully with a slightly longer novella. Then again, that’s the struggle with the novella form—it’s a snapshot in many ways. Much as Rita’s paintings cannot capture everything about the pond, I found myself wanting to spend a bit more time there in the middle of this novella. 

In her debut novella, Tiffany Morris comes out swinging. This short, tightly plotted novella lives up to the linguistic delight of Dylan Thomas’s work, which is referenced in the title Green Fuse Burning. It also brought to mind Annie Dillard’s foundational work Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974) with the connections to animals that don’t quite behave as we would expect. Morris’s meditation on grief, climate change, colonization, art, family, and more reminds the reader of the interconnectedness of life—even after death. In that realization is where I find the power and importance of eco-horror. This subgenre, much like horror in general, offers a way to overcome the fear of climate change and move toward an acceptance of this grotesquely changing world. With this acceptance opens up the possibility to live a fuller life, to keep living, even in the face of terrible loss.

--

Reference: Morris, Tiffany. Green Fuse Burning [Stelliform Press, 2023]

POSTED BY: Phoebe Wagner is an author, editor, and academic writing and living at the intersection of speculative fiction and climate change. 

Novella Project: dave ring Interview

Today for the Novella Project we're speaking to dave ring:

Photo by Farrah Skeiky

dave ring is a queer editor and writer of speculative fiction living in Washington, DC. His short fiction has been featured in numerous publications including Lackington’s, Podcastle, and Cossmass Infinities. His novella The Hidden Ones was published in fall 2021 by Rebel Satori Press.

He is the publisher and managing editor of Neon Hemlock Press, and the co-editor of Baffling Magazine. A frequent anthologist, dave edited the Shirley Jackson Award-winning Unfettered Hexes (2021) and the Lambda, Locus, and Ignyte Award-nominated Glitter + Ashes (2020).

dave was a Lambda Literary Fellow in 2013 and chair of the OutWrite LGBTQ Book Festival from 2015-2020. Find him at dave-ring.com or @slickhop on Twitter.

Roseanna speaks to him about his experience publishing novellas with a small press:

How long have you been involved with Neon Hemlock at this point? And what was your starting point with them?

I started Neon Hemlock in the fall of 2019 in order to publish the winning titles of the inaugural OutWrite Chapbook Competition. Shortly after navigating the logistics around printing those chapbooks, I conceived of an anthology idea that would eventually become Glitter + Ashes: Queer Tales of a World That Wouldn’t Die, and things escalated from there. 

What are the particular challenges of running a small press? Especially compared to some of the bigger publishers.

Both reader expectations and industry standards are based on the the bigger publishers. While there are those who enjoy when you defy expectations, there are many hard lines that are challenging to cross as a small press, and often those lines are invisible to the untrained eye. This manifests most prominently in marketing, sales, and distribution.

What is your favourite thing about running a small press?

It’s a great honor to be able to share great writing—electric, important writing—with an engaged audience of readers. There’s also a big endorphin rush whenever I ghetto commission original art. 

Every small press seems to have its particular unique flavour that goes into the works they publish and how they present to the world – what would you say is Neon Hemlock’s?

I expect that the answer to this question is much more interesting when answered by someone besides myself—I’m just one person who has the gall to think that other people might share my personal taste. But the works I think I tend to be drawn to are those written for “in-group” readers, rather than sanitized or clarified for “out-group” readers. I love feeling like I’ve been given a window into something real, rather than a theme park reproduction, and I seek out that feeling with potential submissions.

Neon Hemlock also does an interesting selection of sundry merchandise – I’m sad I can’t currently order all your candles (though it’s probably better for my bank balance this way). How does this fit into your conception of Neon Hemlock’s vibe?

I have the good fortune to be married to a chandler who will tolerate all sorts of foolish ideas when I propose them, which is how we’ve ended up putting out candles called things like “Haunted Cabin” and “Neon Coven.” I find literary accoutrement to be really compelling, so it takes very little encouragement for me to make them for my own titles, regardless of cost or feasibility. 

Does your experience as an author and editor feed into your work running Neon Hemlock? If so, how?

Becoming an editor has certainly improved my own craft, even if by extension I have less time for my own writing. I think the main way being a writer has informed the press is that I try to handle all aspects of the submission process thoughtfully and kindly. I’ve been on the receiving end of some dreadful rejections and I don’t want to create that experience for anyone else.

What goes into your process for finding new works? Do you think there’s a difference compared to the larger publishers?

Most of the work I put out is drawn from open submissions, aside from the occasional solicited novella or the authors I solicit for an anthology. So the delight of discovery is part of the process. I think my process is driven less by the market than larger publishers, so I might be more willing to try a theme or structure that is less proven or more avant-garde. 

So many of Neon Hemlock’s works have fantastic cover art – how do you go about finding the artists for that, and is there much author involvement in the cover art process? How does that work?

I find most illustrators through Twitter or Instagram, often via posts about opening for commissions or the ones that illustrators make for #PortfolioDay. I tend to involve authors in the cover process as much as possible, or as much as they want to be involved. I ask them for examples of covers they like within their genre, and share them when giving initial descriptions to the artist. And then I have them involved again at the thumbnail stage, when we are considering what direction the artist might go in.

You have a particularly interesting and well curated selection of novellas – why is this something you’ve chosen to highlight? Is there something about the novella form that appeals particularly?

Novellas are a really compelling length, and part of what got me reading again during the plague. There’s something very satisfying about a book that you can sink into and finish in a single afternoon, or maybe two if you savor it. 

What do you think makes a good novella more broadly?

Generally, I tend to think that there are two types of novellas: a streamlined novel or an expanded short story. And good novellas of both types have a keen sense of scope, knowing when to linger and when to elide. 

Are there any misconceptions you think people have about novellas? Or about the ones published by small presses? And if so, what would you say in response to them?

This is somewhat of an extension from my previous answer—some people find novellas dissatisfying because of the length, rather than their handling of scope, and critique them based on that dissatisfaction, which feels hardly fair. Readers and editors may disagree regarding the particulars of whether a particular novel succeeds in this area of course, but I think I would encourage such readers to try and enjoy them for what they are instead of wishing they were novels.

Is there anything you’d like to see change in novellas in the near future, or something you think will change?

In terms of publishing, I’d love to see more experimental novellas, and more hybrid forms. In terms of the larger landscape, I’d love to see readers, reviewers and award committees reading more broadly when considering novellas. There are a lot of great presses who are pushing the form right now, and it’d be great to see more names listed beside the books on year-end wrap ups and award ballots. 

Can you tell us about any upcoming novellas you’re excited to be publishing? Or a few works you’ve published in 2023 that you’re particularly proud of?

It’s very hard to pick just one or two to crow about! The book I’ve just sent to the printer is A.Z. Louise’s Off-Time Jive, an alternative history set in a Harlem Renaissance that plays off many of the tropes in both noir and urban fantasy. It has a great voice and beautiful character work too.

Thank you dave!

POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroform_tea

Novella Project: Filip Hajdar Drnovšek Zorko Interview

Today for the Novella Project, we're talking to Filip Hajdar Drnovšek Zorko:

Filip Hajdar Drnovšek Zorko is a Slovenian-born writer and translator. He grew up in Slovenia, Ireland, Australia, and the UK, and currently resides just outside Portland, Maine. He understands that his name is a bit confusing and would like you to know that “Drnovšek Zorko” is the surname. He attended Clarion West in 2019, and his work has previously appeared in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, and Lightspeed, among others. In his spare time he is a keen quizzer—British readers may recognise him from that one time he was on University Challenge. Follow him on Twitter and Bluesky @filiphdz.

What made you write Between Blades as a novella? Was it a conscious plan from the start, or something that naturally evolved through the process?

The main thing was finishing writing a novel and saying nope, not doing that again*. I wrote Between Blades years ago, before I knew I wanted to take writing more seriously - it was my first ever story submission of any kind! - and looking back, I'm surprised by how joyful the experience of writing it was. Writing a novel is daunting. I'm forever thinking about structure, which I hate. Short stories are hard in the other direction. I'm always worrying they'll spiral out of control. A novella is both at once: a long short story, or a short novel. There's something freeing about that - but strangely enough, I haven't written another one since. Maybe I'm worried the first time was a fluke. (I do have ideas for several, including both a prequel and a sequel to this one!)

*narrator voice: he did that again.

When you sit down to write a story, what's the thing you start with - worldbuilding, plot, characters, ideas, something else entirely? And how do you decide what comes next?

Usually a story accretes around the relationship between two characters; but usually, all the other elements have been bouncing around my head, looking for an outlet, so I'm not sure it's accurate to say I start there. It's more like, once I know I want to write a story about some characters, I rummage around to see if I've already got a world or a plot or a cool concept that would fit.

You've had a number of short stories published in various magazines - was there any difference in the process for this? Or anything you think you'd do differently if you did ever write another novella?

I'd say the biggest difference is I wrote my short stories with a much better understanding of the publishing industry! That's a pro and a con, and it probably ties into my wariness with writing more novellas. Short stories are (relatively) quick to write and there's a lot of markets for them. These days if I write a short I feel reasonably confident I can get it published. Novellas are different. Despite the popularity of the form (with readers AND writers!), novellas are paradoxically hard to get published. For unagented writers, there's a limited number of small presses and magazines that publish a handful of novellas a year, and it's a rare agent who'll take on a client on the strength of a novella alone. The same inbetween-ness that makes them a joy to write also makes them frustrating to find homes for. Don't get me wrong, I'm not out here minmaxing all my writing for optimal career advancement, but when I have lots of projects to work on, it's easy to defer the novella-sized ones until some nebulous future when the path to publishing them will be easier.

Given all that, how did Between Blades come to be published in Beneath Ceaseless Skies? Was it something you just sent for open submissions or something more directed?

It was the ol' "have a drink with the editor" that did it for me. I'd sold a few shorter stories to Scott but I didn't meet him in person until this year's Readercon, where I mentioned in passing I had this novella I was trying to place. He invited me to submit it to BCS, which was a pleasant surprise, because I actually hadn't realised he occasionally published novellas. Lest I feed the narrative that publishing is all about connections and bar-based networking, I think the real lesson here is to be enthusiastic about your work, even (especially) the unpublished stuff. Someone might be looking for just the story you've written, but they'll never know to ask if you don't talk about it!

Talk to people? Horrifying thought :P

Flipping back to novellas more generally, you talk about the joy of writing them, but what do you think are the strengths of the format from a reader's perspective?

They're the exact right length to read on a lazy weekend afternoon. They can linger like a novel but be focused like a short story. They're like Macbeth to a novel's Hamlet. I think these are all ways of saying the same thing.

I feel like there’s a whole essay in your thoughts about Macbeth and Hamlet there, but possibly not to the purpose of this discussion. We can take that offline, as the business people say.

Moving onto Between Blades more specifically, the setting draws on aspects of the Roman empire, both in the gladiatorial games as well as in the bureaucracy, as many stories have done before. Why did you choose to go there, and what do you think it's doing for the story?

Follow up question: I find it very interesting that you have two key figures in your story called Livia and Agrippa - were they specific choices, or conveniently Roman-sounding names, or something else/in between?

Part of it was the constraint of doing a lot of worldbuilding in a smallish space. I wasn't drawing on any one culture for Leshin and the archipelago in general, which is how I prefer my fantasy worldbuilding, but that does require a little more work. In the opening half, which is where all the archipelago scenes take place, the slower pace allowed for that depth to the worldbuilding. In the latter half, the plot and the character arcs are well in progress, so it was useful to have a setting that felt familiar - it let me focus on the details that really mattered to Leris while the reader sketched in the rest.

I went with Rome as my model because, I mean, yes, gladiators and bureaucracy, but once I started thinking about it, it felt right in other ways, too. I particularly wanted to evoke the sense of a large, complex, contradictory state - the sort of place where it's not entirely clear if everyone agrees they're part of the same empire. Emona and Traiti are at odds. Livia and Agrippa are at odds. There's strict class hierarchies, too, and a confusing religion. When Leris arrives, having only experienced the Empire as a looming, hegemonic presence in the archipelago, she's immediately put into friction with this reality. It was also a small opportunity to insert myself into the story! Fun fact time: Slovenia's only been an independent country slightly longer than I've been alive, which I think is responsible for a recurring contradiction in my writing, between belonging and not. Part of but not heart of, if you like. I knew right away that I wanted to take the story somewhere other than the heart of the Empire, and why not borrow the Roman name for Ljubljana, where I was born?

As for the characters - gosh, I can't pretend I remember exactly. Livia, I think, was a specific choice. I liked the idea of putting the first Roman Empress in her husband's place, and from there it made sense to borrow the name of one of his close friends for Livia's closest friend (slash enemy).

Incidentally, I was doing the edits for Between Blades right around the time the Roman Empire was making waves on social media. I can neither confirm nor deny the frequency with which I was thinking about the Roman Empire at that time.

Picking up on the belonging part of your answer - a lot of the centre of the narrative is about that, about fitting into boxes other people make for you. Or... well, not. As a story, it's extremely gender, in the best way possible. How do you go about writing something with that strong of a message at the heart without it overwhelming the rest of the story, or likewise being overwhelmed? Especially when you only have a novella length of time to fit it into?

I think of speculative fiction as a magnifying glass. Some people feel emotions very strongly and with great certainty, and maybe they don’t need a magnifying glass, but I do. Otherwise it’s like trying to sort sand with tweezers. I’ll know that there’s something in there, in that handful of sand, a feeling or an emotion, that’s worth writing a story about it. But I won’t really know what it is until I’ve teased it out and separated it from the rest, and for that I need a magnifying glass.

I don’t really think of those two things - the emotional core of the story and the fantastical elements that make up the plot - as being in opposition. Leris’s journey is my grain of sand. The rest is the magnifying glass. One can’t overwhelm the other because they do not compete for the same space but occupy it together, one laid over the other.

Speculative fiction is good at this because it is, by definition, larger than life.

In terms of that emotional core, are there any books or authors you think do it particularly well, or ones you draw inspiration from or look to when you're writing yourself? Bonus points if they're novellas.

They’re certainly not novellas, but I want to mention Arkady Martine’s Teixcalaan books and CL Clark’s Magic of the Lost, which are very different series but share a knack for anchoring large-scale concepts of empire and identity in the emotions and relationships of their protagonists. I do love bonus points, though, so I’d be remiss not to mention Kai Ashante Wilson’s A Taste of Honey - a solid contender for the best love story I’ve ever read, with the sort of speculative twist that gently rearranges your understanding of the story.

A Taste of Honey is a masterpiece. I finished it then immediately wanted to bite it because reading it with my eyes simply wasn't sufficient.

Thinking in terms of novellas specifically, are there any trends you think might come up in the next few years, or changes you'd like to see in the format?

I have an interesting answer and a boring answer and I'll let you decide which is which. First, I'd like to see more series of novellas. I like the current trend in SFF of standalone novels that feel like they would have been trilogies back in the day - The Priory of the Orange Tree, Some Desperate Glory, and their ilk - but what if we experimented with trilogies where each installment is much shorter? (Half-Life 2 fans, avert your eyes.) In terms of total word count they'd stack up about the same, I think, so I'd be curious to see what changes when you draw sharper divides between sections of the story. Second, I'd like to see some reappraisal of the word count limits for award categories. I'm in the weeds here, I know, but those word limits are the reason we care about words like "novelette" and "novella" to begin with. At present there's an artificial gap between about forty and sixty thousands words where stories are too long for many novella publishers but too short to be marketed as a novel, so by and large they don't get published. (One exception is In the Vanisher's Palace by Aliette de Bodard, which is one of my favourite novellas.) Novellas have always been a bridge between short fiction and books, so perhaps a level of falling-through-the-cracks is inevitable, but the publishing landscape has changed massively since those limits were set. It's a good time for a rethink.

And then last question - can you tell us a bit more about Between Blades? 

Between Blades (or ebook version) is a novella about gladiators who turn into weapons, the pervasive power of hegemony, and finding yourself in the spaces between cultures. It's about the friendship between the living embodiment of the term "spear queer" and a woman who mostly just wants to be left alone to chill with her twin brother. Ultimately, if you like stories where all the fight scenes are actually stand-ins for discussions of identity and belonging, this is for you.

Thank you Filip!

POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroform_tea