Elizabeth Bear — The Hugo Award winning author of Ancestral Night and other books — sat down for a wide ranging interview about Rockapella, DOOM mods, RPGs, and death or glory stands to defend this run.
Elizabeth won the 2005 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, the 2008 Hugo Award for Best Short Story for “Tideline“, and the 2009 Hugo Award for Best Novelette for “Shoggoths in Bloom“. She is one of a small number of writers who have gone on to win multiple Hugo Awards for fiction after winning the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. See her full bibliography here.
We have many great interviews slated for this year, so make sure you’re signed up to receive them:
Lancelot Schaubert — So when was the first time you imagined something fantastic or speculative that wasn’t physically present?
Elizabeth Bear — Probably long before I remember! Kids, especially small children, have a real connection to the imaginative realm. I certainly remember playing spaceship when I was very small.
Lancelot Schaubert — Did you have any props?
Elizabeth Bear — I had a cardboard box and a branch off a Christmas tree and probably some other stuff. I imagine there were stuffed animals involved. I was probably four years old. I had Buck Rogers and Star Trek to work from.
Lancelot Schaubert — Favorite Buck Rogers and Star Trek episodes?
Elizabeth Bear — Oh man, I’m not sure I really have favorites per se.
Lancelot Schaubert — What other influences were early?
Elizabeth Bear — Depends what you mean by early—I definitely read Watership Down at an unreasonably young age (five or six—I was a precocious reader) and it’s stuck with me as one of my favorite books. Other than that the usual panoply of kids books about horses and dogs and girl/boy detectives, but then by the time I was seven or eight I had the run of my mom’s SFF collection and the local library.
Lancelot Schaubert — What resonated about Watership Down?
Elizabeth Bear — Plucky band of misfits escape tragedy, have adventures, and eventually create a found-family situation and home. Also the prose is gorgeous! I was a big aficionado of castaway stories like My Side of the Mountain, too.
Lancelot Schaubert — Oh my word. I love My Side of the Mountain. So so so much.
Elizabeth Bear — (I love My Side of the Mountain too! I gave my husband an annotated copy when we were dating.)
Lancelot Schaubert — “Here read this to understand me.” Haha.
Elizabeth Bear — hee yes
Lancelot Schaubert — Did you ever do roleplaying or anything related to books / spec fic culture, but wasn’t directly reading?
Elizabeth Bear — Oh yeah, I discovered roleplaying games in 6th grade and was fascinated by them (Red Box D&D), but being one of the weird kids I didn’t manage to find anybody to actually play with until I was in high school. Then I founded my high school’s Gaming Club, and was its first president, and it’s still going on today, 36 years later.
Lancelot Schaubert — Awww man that’s rough with no one to play with. The club’s still going at the school? Any favorite campaigns?
Elizabeth Bear — The club is still going at the school I used to attend. Right now I’m in three games, two monthly and one every two months and I love them all. I played heavily all through college and my twenties, had a bit of a hiatus for a while except for one Pathfinder game, and now I’m back. I used to run a lot, mostly Call of Cthulhu 3rd edition and AD&D 1st edition, but these days I just don’t have time to learn new rules sets in depth and also I find that running a game uses the same muscle that writing does. My monthly Pathfinder game is actually in half an hour on Discord.
Lancelot Schaubert — That’s awesome. Have you ever wanted to stream one?
Elizabeth Bear — I’ve done charity D&D games but I’ve never wanted TTRPG to be a performance for me. It’s essentially a way to relax with friends, and I don’t want pressure to be interesting beyond that in my recreation.
Lancelot Schaubert — I think the improv comedy side of me would love to do it with some actual voice actors.
Elizabeth Bear — I did have friends try to talk me into streaming games twice and just no.
Lancelot Schaubert — Hahaha.
Elizabeth Bear — I joke that gender is a performance and I did technical theatre for a reason. I think that applies to TTRPGs too.
Lancelot Schaubert — Hahahahahaha. I don’t know about you, but the funny thing is, fame terrifies me in general. Like I like having an audience in the moment, I like working a crowd, but as a HUGE introvert if I could do any of this anonymously and get the same financial or emotional result, I totally would. Like the “yes, and” of that space is fun for me, the banter, but I actually keep an extremely tight circle inside the wide group of acquaintances I hold. I have seven folks who know everything about me, for instance, and none of them are immediate family (other than my wife) or colleagues. Is that similar for you?
Elizabeth Bear — I think I’ve had to learn to manage a public persona, which is what an old friend of mine used to call Me Lite — it’s me, just not ALL of me — the Me you take to work, I guess. Since being in public is part of my work — cons, social media etc. But I am totally an introvert and I prefer small group dynamics where I can just hang out and relax for recreation. Like I would never make a twitch streamer for example.
Lancelot Schaubert — Yeah Scalzi wrote a bit about this recently:
I don’t agree with all of the fine details. (I do believe, for instance, heroic virtue exists in the world in a handful of human souls as surely as villainous vice does in a handful of human souls, otherwise there would be no gradation of improvement or degradation and therefore no way to call a given act “evil” compared to another one), but I thought his riff on the Me Lite stuff was spot on.
Elizabeth Bear — (Whups, my people have started showing up. check in later.)
Lancelot Schaubert — Have fun, hi Pathfinder game! I used to jump into my buddy’s game as the same worldhopping character I write about in my worlds. Just sort of jump in as an “NPC” and comment on a few things, flash with crazy magic, and hop out. Let me know when you finish and I’m going to ask you EXACTLY the question my mother (who didn’t understand how DND worked) would ask me after every session.
Elizabeth Bear — And hah okay, we should be done around 5 pm.
Elizabeth Bear — We ended early.
Lancelot Schaubert — And now my mom would ask, “Did you win?”
Elizabeth Bear — Your mom’s a troll.
Lancelot Schaubert — She means well. Or I maybe should’ve been rolling for initiative every night when I came home. Did you ever do video games too or no?
Elizabeth Bear — We weren’t the kind of household that could afford a video game console in the 80s.
Lancelot Schaubert — For sure. Us neither until way, way later. Like Playstation late, then, by then, a cheap reused SNES.
Elizabeth Bear — I played some Pools of Radiance and Carmen Sandiego at friends’s houses in middle school and high school.
Lancelot Schaubert — Carmen Sandiego is what’s up.
Elizabeth Bear — I know right?
Lancelot Schaubert — I would watch a Carmen Sandiego streaming series right now. Like The Blacklist, but finding her and whatever shenanigans she tried this time.
Elizabeth Bear — I was addicted to the PBS game show too.
Lancelot Schaubert — Wait, what? Do you have a link to that? Also: I know nothing of Pools of Radiance. What was that?
Elizabeth Bear — Oh it was a D&D game, you built an adventuring party and went out and killed monsters. In college I played some text adventures but not heavily, and a little Doom and Lemmings. And Tetris, of course.
Lancelot Schaubert — I’m down. Bits of bullets, bits of the populi, bits of blocks.
Elizabeth Bear — 8-bit graphics IIRC. I use to be pretty good at a couple of arcade games, Joust and Centipede. And I was a decent pinball player for a while when I was in junior high before the reflexes went.
Lancelot Schaubert — Found a Carmen Sandiego play through:
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/W-J21Og1YN0?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0
Holy smokes I found the PBS gameshow. This is bonkers:
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/KlLr7BVSmUc?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0
This is amazing I didn’t know this existed.
Going back to Doom, did you see that recent Doom mod that riffed on House of Leaves?
Elizabeth Bear — I did not!
Lancelot Schaubert — You will need almost two hours to watch this play through, it’s the fastest way to experience it, but it riffs on House of Leaves and almost the entirety of internet creepypasta. They remade Doom entirely into a surrealist horror story and it’s incredible.
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/5wAo54DHDY0?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0
It is wild.
Elizabeth Bear — The best thing about the game show was Rockapella doing the music
Lancelot Schaubert — Hahahaha. I’m super excited about this.
Elizabeth Bear — Check this out:
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/rMqfD2vInLo?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0
I will probably not be watching the playthrough, I am afraid, I rarely have two hours unspoken for. I don’t really do horror — Scott is the horror fan in the house. For some reason the genres that rely on producing a specific emotional response in the reader — horror and romance — don’t really work for me.
Lancelot Schaubert — No big. The link’s there as much for the curious reader later on as it is in case future you wants a spooky riff on Doom. That rockapella is amazing. Dude, that guy’s hair.
Man, watching that Rockapella video… That is the greatest mullet of all mullets. Mullet of Mullets has to be an honorific in some religion somewhere…
Elizabeth Bear — I know right? The intersection of the 80s and the 90s. Party in the front, rave in the back.
Lancelot Schaubert — That guy woke up one day and said, “What if I went with a dwarven mullet?” Does the bass guy have a braided rat tail?
Elizabeth Bear — I think so, yeah.
Lancelot Schaubert — YES HE DOES. Oh my gosh. This. Is. Gold.
Elizabeth Bear — hee.
Lancelot Schaubert — It’s like the Gaithers and New Kids had three-way baby with a Packard Bell. What is happening. That’s amazing.
Elizabeth Bear — Rockapella apparently still exists, I just googled.
Lancelot Schaubert — Oh we should make a Spotify playlist if there isn’t one already….
Let’s see here…
An internet always pays its debts:
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1DZ06evO0STM6A?si=85984f25bd45456f
Elizabeth Bear — Well that will get me through my copyedits this morning
Lancelot Schaubert — When did you start submitting stories?
Elizabeth Bear — I started submitting a few things when I was in junior high. Sold some poetry to kids’s magazines and I think I collected a rejection from Asimov’s when I was sixteen or so. Everything typed on this old royal portable typewriter. I made a serious run at publication when I was in my early 20s, but I wasn’t good enough yet.
Then I had a fallow period, and in my early 30’s fell in with the gang at the old Del Rey Online Writing Workshop, who inspired me to make a more serious push and helped me improve my craft. So I started selling pro in about 2003.
Lancelot Schaubert — Do you have your old rejections or junked them?
Elizabeth Bear — I had threatened to paper a bathroom with them, but instead I donated them to the archive at NIU, which has my papers, or at least some of them.
I still get plenty of rejections.
Lancelot Schaubert — Oh that’s wonderful. I had a lot of my paper rejections in Joplin, but decided to junk them in moving to NYC for space. If anything ever comes of this in a significant way, there’s probably an archivist out there who will want to kill me for how much I’ve junked. But I like your wallpaper idea. I’ve also thought about sending edited manuscripts to an abstract painter friend and letting him modge podge them into canvas that he then paints over selectively or something. I enjoy found art like that if it’s really carefully thought out and constructed. Re: rejection — On Writing and Failure said, “There’s a reason it will always be called submission.”
Any of those early stories make you really proud?
Elizabeth Bear — No.
Lancelot Schaubert — What about early themes that have returned?
Elizabeth Bear — Oh sure, I think most writers have one or two ur-themes that they return to over and over again, it’s a kind of resonance with experience and temperament.
Lancelot Schaubert — For sure. What are those for you? Ones you might recognize early on? Or were there early worlds you revisited?
Elizabeth Bear — I think most people’s juvenilia probably shouldn’t be too heavily revisited. It’s juvenilia, after all, and getting through it was part of the process of developing my craft. There were definitely characters that stuck with me and got repurposed.
Thematically, well, I have my theories but that’s also probably a critic’s job.
I definitely love me a death-or-glory stand and an ethical conundrum.
Lancelot Schaubert — So you think Stephen King was wrong to stick with the Dark Tower, whose primary theme was his age: 19?
Elizabeth Bear — Well, it worked out for him. I think it’s more common for artists to get stuck reworking the same piece and never move on to work that could be better.
Which isn’t something you could ever say of King, he’s got range.
Lancelot Schaubert — Death-or-glory. What appeals to you about that? And what are some of your own examples that come to mind?
Elizabeth Bear — A death-or-glory stand is the courage personified, I think. You do it because you have to, not because you want to, and because it has to be done. My canonical example is from Watership Down and it’s Bigwig holding the run against General Woundwort. “My Chief Rabbit has told me to stay and defend this run.” is kind of code around our house.
As for my own work, I think I’m the wrong person to say if I ever pulled it off successfully.
Lancelot Schaubert — Lewis said that courage isn’t a virtue, but every virtue at the testing point. Do you think that’s the case?
Elizabeth Bear — I mean it certainly sounds good, right? That’s the whole battle with an epigram. Make it sound good and it doesn’t matter if it’s right.
Lancelot Schaubert — So you don’t think it’s right? Or you’re just saying you’d need to read the context? Or just simply “well put” ?
Elizabeth Bear — I’m saying it’s a clever turn of phrase and Lewis was good at those, but does it mean anything?
Lancelot Schaubert — Ah, yes, that’s what I thought you were saying. I suppose we’ll have to suss it out with the author’s intended meaning in the full context of the passage. The comes from the Screwtape Letters. The full quote (from the demon) is:
“This, indeed, is probably one of the Enemy’s motives for creating a dangerous world—a world in which moral issues really come to the point. He sees as well as you do that courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality. A chastity or honesty, or mercy, which yields to danger will be chaste or honest or merciful only on conditions. Pilate was merciful till it became risky.”
So again the “have to” nature of these testing points. I mean, for some power is an expedient thing that — as we’ve seen in recent events — can be less risky to seize than it is to stand up to. Or even just to cede ground unto. So too with avarice. Addiction. These sorts of things. I suppose in that case, “virtue at the testing point” might mean the moments that put the “heroic” in “heroic virtue.” Not simply, for instance, hope. But hope in the teeth of darkest despair. Not merely temperance, but temperance in the teeth of a cult taking lethal overdoses of drugs during some end times prophecy. Not merely prudence, but prudence when the whole world chases folly. To do the “ought” in the midst of the naught, I suppose. As you said, “My Chief Rabbit has told me to stay and defend this run.”
Elizabeth Bear — I tend to find any exclusive or categorical definition unsatisfying, I guess, because there’s always the edge case and reality is a spectrum rather than a series of categories. That said, not every cultural tradition is going to agree that hope, temperance, chastity, or prudence are virtues per se.
But I like your framing of heroism as the antithesis of nihilism nonetheless.
Lancelot Schaubert — Well it seems to me the opposite of nothing is Being, so it sort of fits as a curb to nihilism. Can you talk a little about your vision of creativity? What’s it for? How does it help? Why must we foster it and fund it?
Elizabeth Bear — As for creativity, well, in the grand scheme of things, nothing is for anything. It exists, for now, is all. But on a personal level, creation helps us pretend the universe isn’t vastly indifferent, and it gives us comfort and connection to one another, and it seems to be a natural outgrowth of human existence — people have been creative as long as there have been people, as far as we know.
We foster and fund it because it reduces suffering, allows us to comment on the world we find ourselves confronted with, and helps us understand and heal ourselves and each other, I guess.
I do think cultural relativism is useful, but that’s my thirty-year-old training in anthropology.
Lancelot Schaubert — I do agree that it’s useful to some extent, though I doubt the efficacy of its explanatory power for the unity of sheer existence. I didn’t know you were an anthropologist! Where did you study? What was your focus?
Elizabeth Bear — Oh, just undergrad, University of Connecticut.
Lancelot Schaubert — Oh cool! Did you focus or find yourself insatiably curious about any specific culture, time, or narratives?
Elizabeth Bear — I wanted to be a forensic anthropologist, actually, but (a) there aren’t that many jobs and (b) I ran out of money for school/didn’t have support at home. So I wound up doing admin work instead, until I broke into SF.
Lancelot Schaubert — I literally have never heard of that field until right now, but of course that’s a thing. What can you teach me about that field in a 40,000 foot view?
Elizabeth Bear — Yeah, I was more interested in dead people than living ones
Lancelot Schaubert — Hey it worked out okay for Bruce Willis and Jack Skellington.
Elizabeth Bear — I mean, anything I know is more than thirty years out of date.
Lancelot Schaubert — Upside of career experience with dead people is they’re still dead.
I’m just curious about it because I had never heard of it until right now. But I can do some basic wiki digging if nothing comes to mind — have you used it at all in your work?
Elizabeth Bear — Yeah. Basically, forensic anthropologists do work on gravesites. The most “glamorous” part of the profession is some work they do at the Smithsonian that helps catch serial killers and identify very decomposed human remains.
But forensic anthropologists also worked on, for example, the mass graves at Little Bighorn and in Bosnia. It’s important work.
There were about twenty top-tier jobs in the world though and the only way to get one was to be the obvious person in line when the previous tenant of the position retired or died.
Lancelot Schaubert — Oh mercy yeah. So I’ll bet you could get into really old digs too. That sounds wild.
Elizabeth Bear — Yeah, though that’s mostly archaeology. Which is anthropology! But a different specialty. They overlap though.
Lancelot Schaubert — Should have been more specific: where it intersects with murder? Like… I mean…. situations like the holocaust? Or the 20,000 found buried in the pauper’s grave in NYC?
Elizabeth Bear — Oh yeah.
Lancelot Schaubert — Mercy.
Elizabeth Bear — Sorry, you say really old and I think stone age.
Lancelot Schaubert — Oh I meant that too. That’s what I meant originally, but I suppose solving a 2,000 year old murder may not be… as… useful to investigators.
Elizabeth Bear — lol
Lancelot Schaubert — hahaha. Though perhaps theologically useful. (Okay, sorry, dumb joke).
Elizabeth Bear — Often it is useful though — the oldest murder I think we know about from direct evidence is Otzi.
Lancelot Schaubert — Oh tell me more
Elizabeth Bear — Found in a glacier in… Italy I think? Mummified, shot in the back with an arrow. Otzi is a nickname obviously.
Lancelot Schaubert — First instance of an analog drive-by. It’s probably easier to catch a perp trying to escape by woolly mammoth, but then again, if he’s still long dead…
Elizabeth Bear — Something like 5000 years ago somebody murdered this guy and he was found by hikers in 1991. Anyway he has taught us a lot about neolithic diet, etc.
Lancelot Schaubert — Imagine if he prophesied that while dying. “I WILL HAVE MY REVENGE MAXIMUS! FIVE MILLENNIA HENCE HIPSTERS SHALL RETRIEVE MY DESICCATED CORPSE AND THENCE I SHALL RETURN!”
That’s wild.
Elizabeth Bear — lol.
Lancelot Schaubert — I wonder if someone has tried to replicate the diet, considering all of the scavenge-to-table restaurants and dishes like mansaf منسف that are several millennia old.
Any forensic anthropologist characters in your work? Or just the knowledge in descriptions?
Elizabeth Bear — Don’t think I’ve written one. I have written a couple of forensic pathologists.
Lancelot Schaubert — I had a buddy who was one and he had so much PTSD he quit and does library science now. He’s a really great librarian, musician, etc. I can’t imagine what horrors he saw.
What conversations, vocations, hobbies, philosophies, mythologies, etc. aren’t being explored enough in speculative fiction? What would you like to see in the future of the genre?
Elizabeth Bear — It’s my considered opinion that whenever somebody says “There’s not enough X in the genre,” what they’re really revealing is that they don’t read widely enough.
Anyway, as for the future of the genre, what I hope to see is a continued explosion of diversity and reach.
Lancelot Schaubert — I agree, generally. I do think there are, however, dead ends. Or sometimes specialists who have read all of the X and because there’s no more, or none that did what they wanted, or too many instances of it being done poorly, or a bias towards a specific tonal move in their era, they set out to do that thing in a specific way, for better or worse.
But yes often, the answer is just, “Oh, have you read X?” So generally the better first question is, “Is there anymore X in the genre?” and see what answers come in.
I know what you mean by diversity. How are you using “reach” here?
Elizabeth Bear — By reach what I mean is a wider audience, which in turn fosters more diversity on the authorial end.
Lancelot Schaubert — Okay cool that’s what I assumed but wasn’t sure. If you had a list of must-reads of classic works in the genre, what sorts of things make the list in no particular order?
Elizabeth Bear — I think must-read lists are inevitably dated, especially when the genre has changed so much in the past hundred years. However, that said, I do think there’s value in reading the older works even when they may not be absolutely up to the minute in their social construction.
I can list a few of my favorites that have fallen off the radar, for certain — Octavia Butler’s KINDRED; Roger Zelazny’s NINE PRINCES IN AMBER; Vonda McIntyre’s DREAMSNAKE; John M. Ford’s THE LAST HOT TIME. In general, I find that female and NB authors have a tougher row to hoe in terms of people recommending their work over decades than male authors do.
Lancelot Schaubert — What would that value of reading older works be?
Elizabeth Bear — Well, I was trying to come up with an answer deeper than what seems to me obvious, but having failed that, here’s the obvious answer:
The value, to me, lies in having a rich and deep foundation in the lore of what’s already been done so that one can do new and interesting things — to start out farther along the rhetorical and creative paths. Older works can serve as a sort of base camp for the climb, so you don’t have to start over from first principles.
Of course, sometimes starting from first principles gets you a novel result, especially if you’re coming from a new perspective.
Lancelot Schaubert — Yeah, there was an old intro to a 4th century text that basically said modern books have yet to be tested by the ruthless filter of time. In that respect, I guess I was thinking too of Sappho’s poetry and Catherine Moore’s short stories, of Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World and Joan of Arc’s visions, of the myths of the Galli eunuchs, or of Origen (the Egyptian eunuch’s) De Principii speculations on extra terrestrial life.
There are more, of course, but those (and others) in mind, I do think that some classics are classics precisely because they read so easily. I feel like if more people just saw the Apology of Socrates performed they’d be less intimidated reading it. Difficult versions are almost always bad or old translations, etc.
I started Les Miserables for the first time alongside some modern stuff this holiday break and I am shocked at how easy it is to read. There are 20th century popular works of English fiction that require far more of a slog. So yeah, I agree. I do think too there’s a value in seeing how works of a given era agree in error when compared to the unified voice of our own in harmony with all other eras, while also disagreeing with our own in a united voice with other works of other eras. Said differently: they’re just as helpful for finding out how we’ve grown as they are for finding, easily, our modern biases. Classics are the democracy of the dead and I hope, in any diversity study, the dead get a vote.
Regarding first principles: I suppose that’s what a magic system is for.
Are there any sacred cows of colleagues you have liked or would like to cow tip?
Elizabeth Bear — I don’t really worry that much about other people’s work. Eyes on my own paper, and you can find my arguments in my fiction.
Lancelot Schaubert — Haha, I love that. Very stoic of you (in the good way, not in the way it’s been co-opted in recent years).
Wasn’t trying to stir drama, by the way, I just know that some authors are a little more like dualists than others, so I was curious if you had something like sparring partners.
Shaw and Chesterton come to mind, others.
Elizabeth Bear — I mean there are definitely popular productivity memes and Your Must Do X To Be A Writer memes that I find problematic.
Lancelot Schaubert — Hahahahah.
Elizabeth Bear — You Must Write 2000 Words Every Day or whatever
Lancelot Schaubert — Oh go to town on those. Not even Stephen King said precisely that in On Writing. Not in context anyways.
Elizabeth Bear — It’s just toxic and it sets people up to burn out and fail.
Lancelot Schaubert — I feel like often these sorts of things come out of either (1) readers who are recommending a book without speaking to the question of the person who needs a book, (2) readers who misread something and created their own to-do list from a book that they then superimpose on others, (3) other basic textual interpretation issues.
That gets compounded when you have a really young or inexperienced person who doesn’t know how to glean from a text and discard what’s unhelpful, what’s a lie, and so forth.
Elizabeth Bear — If I think something is basically balderdash (like the Great Man theory of history, say) then whatever I wind up writing is going to demonstrate collective action as a means of moving the needle.
Well, people want the Magic Get Published Button. They want there to be a set of rules they can follow. And sadly there isn’t such a thing.
(afk)(lol)
Lancelot Schaubert — When you say collective action, who are your guiding lights?
Elizabeth Bear — I’m just a working class girl from Connecticut who was raised by radical lesbians and who hasn’t had anything to do with academia in 32 years. I never really thought about influences.
Lancelot Schaubert — That’s an influence too! Like I grew up poor, lived in a trailer park with dad at one point soon after he was homeless. He was extremely conservative but lived and died by the union: the union showed me collective bargaining early on since they kept us fed in the teeth of wicked corps. What did your moms teach you about collective action?
Elizabeth Bear — Well, that’s a complicated question. Only one mom—her partner was extremely physically and emotionally abusive to both of us. But I grew up in union households and spent a lot of time as a kid at things like women’s music festivals, which were large-scale volunteer efforts.
Lancelot Schaubert — Oh jeez, I’m sorry. That had to have been hard.
Elizabeth Bear — Oh yeah, years of therapy and various cPTSD interventions since then.
Lancelot Schaubert — My comfort for your loss on that front. Glad you got the help you need.
Yeah, those are exceedingly difficult to pull off well. I’m often always shocked that something like WorldCon happens every year with the ever changing shape of the various dramas that unfold. The music scene, especially depending on genre, can be similarly difficult. I was always surprised when a hardcore festival didn’t suddenly erupt in flames in Southern Illinois.
In fact, sometimes a little bit of fire helped, like the one time my buddy literally played and screamed so loud the speaker spontaneously combusted and they had to shut down the whole stage for an afternoon.
The age old question: how do you organize artists without having them destroy the organization they’re building?
Elizabeth Bear — LOL that’s an excellent question that I will have to come back to…
Actually, I’ve considered that and decided that it’s above my pay grade.
Fortunately organizing artists isn’t my job
Lancelot Schaubert — Hahaha. I don’t have the answer either. I just notice a pattern, I suppose.
There are other questions I could ask but I do wonder if there are other arenas of your life that affect your writing or imagination that I wouldn’t (or perhaps couldn’t) know to ask about?
Elizabeth Bear — I think pretty much everything affects one’s imagination, right? It’s all grist for the mill. I lead a pretty boring life though, although perhaps a little too full of quotidiana.
I feel like the most important part of creativity is giving yourself space to breathe and get bored.
Bio: Elizabeth Bear was born on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, but in a different year. She is the Hugo, Sturgeon, Locus, and Astounding Award winning author of over 30 novels and more than a hundred short stories.
www.elizabethbear.com
Thanks for reading Lancelot of Little Egypt! This post is public so feel free to share it.
If you’d like to refer another speculative fiction author or creator, have them email me at lanceschaubert (at) gmail (dot) com
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