Category: fiction

Writing What You Don’t Love

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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So I saw a post on social media about an unnamed but well-respected writer who has apparently suggested that, as a way of making a living in a world that doesn’t pay enough for their actual work, writers should use LLMs to write “romantasy.”

The poster – also a writer – made the important point that since one would have to edit the LLM work, the writer would end up incorporating some of that style into their own work. (The poster is also a writing instructor who discourages the use of LLMs by their students because of its effect on their writing and also because reading LLM prose is deeply boring.)

But what struck me was that the first writer, who otherwise does their own work and wants respect for that, must consider romantasy a trash genre. I doubt they read it and if they do, it is with contempt. I’m sure they wouldn’t publish it under their own name.

So I guess outsourcing writing of “commercial trash” to LLMs is the current version of “learn how to crank out something that’s easy to write” to pay the bills.

Many years ago, when I was just setting out in the world and looking for a way to make a living that wasn’t too stressful so that I could explore my own writing and other passions, I checked a book out of the library on how to write romance.

I mean, romance is notoriously formulaic. I have been told repeatedly by people who write it and read it that there are basic rules you cannot break. It should be easy to write. Right?

Yeah, well no. Because what dawned on me then was that I couldn’t write romance because I don’t read it. I mean, I occasionally read it, and I don’t object to a good love story, but on the whole I’m not interested in stories in which the plot revolves around the characters falling in love and living happily ever after.

An occasional romantic comedy, sure. Jane Austen, of course – but then Jane Austen wrote horror, not romance. (I get cold shudders every time I think of a world that bars Elinor Dashwood from well-paid and useful occupation.)

I came around to the understanding that you can’t write fiction you don’t read and you really can’t write fiction you don’t like. I somehow doubt anyone who’s making money writing romance hates the genre.

As a result, I don’t write romance. Or tie-in novels. Or literary fiction about young editorial assistants having affairs with senior editors. (Especially that last one.) Continue reading “Writing What You Don’t Love”…

Baycon 2026 report

personby Deborah J. Ross
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I don’t attend many science-fiction/fantasy conventions these days. Pre-pandemic, I often attended conventions on the West Coast, including Orycon in Portland, Oregon. I’d add a day or two on each end of the convention dates to get in a visit with my best friend from college and a dear writer friend. Ditto going south to Loscon in Los Angeles or Condor in San Diego, or larger conventions like World Fantasy or SFWA’s Nebula Awards weekend when they’re held on the West Coast. Sadly, both friends have died, so even before the pandemic, I found it harder to fly north. Orycon has closed, and I believe that Condo has, too. Nevertheless, I always try to make it to my local con, Baycon/Westercon. It’s within driving distance, although a bit far to commute, and it’s a vibrant, diverse community.

When I attend a convention, I do so as a professional author, so I almost always appear on panels, readings, and autographing sessions. Some conventions request that potential guests submit proposals for events. If panel topics are accepted, the guest then moderates them. This was the case for 3 of the 6 panels I appeared on (* = I proposed and moderated this panel). Here are descriptions, with a few notes on how the discussions unfolded. With only one exception, I have avoided using the names of panelists and audience members. All the opinions are my own!

 

The Reality of Fiction. We normally think of fiction as unreal, but quite a few authors talk regularly with their fictional characters about the story and where it should head. How does this work? How can knowing some of the psychology involved give us a livelier relationship with fictional characters? What wisdom for life might they impart when listened to?

I arrived a bit early, as is my custom, to find the panelists wondering who the moderator was and expressing their unwillingness to do it. “Okay,” sez I, “I’ll do it.” Therein followed a fascinating divergence between the tired, perennial question, “What to do when your characters won’t behave the way you want them to?” and how much your characters reflect yourself—is this a good thing or a bad thing?–versus my personal focus, “Where is the energy in the story? Character (Hamlet), plot (thrillers), ideas (mysteries)…and how difficulties with characters arise from mismatches between different elements.

 

*Writing our Nightmares. What horror, dark fantasy, and related genres can teach us about surviving personal and political catastrophes.

The idea for this panel arose from two incidents: Octavia Butler told me that she took the things that really scared her and put them on paper; in a horror panel many years ago, when I said I had enough nightmares in my life, the other panelists showed me how horror can shine a light in the darkest places. As writers, we have agency; as readers, we trust that the protagonist, no matter how vulnerable, has or gains power over their fate.

We talked about having lost many traditional methods of dealing with trauma, so horror as a genre offers catharsis via the story journey; the end is different from the setup. “Horror is safer than memories.”

Finally, the zinger trope: “Play nice or I’ll put you in my novel” (and you won’t come out unscathed)!

 

*Finding Our Tribe. Writers, readers, and fans share how storytelling creates communities of understanding, acceptance, and celebration of differences. From fandom as family to writing as a way of healing, stories transcend the fear and prejudice of our times.

My thought in proposing it was to celebrate how the science fiction/fandom community welcomes and celebrates those who feel they don’t fit in anywhere else. This could be folks “on the spectrum” (of autism), sexual and gender minorities, racial and ethnic minorities, geeks of all flavors, and so forth. Everyone in the room had a version of a “finding my home here” story.

The second aspect was ethnic or ancestral communities. I was fortunate to run into one of my favorite co-panelists, an Indigenous elder, and invite him to participate in the panel. He brought the perspective of tribal membership being integral to identity, the history of near-extermination, and the separation he experiences between his role as elder and teacher, and his love for science fiction not shared with fellow members of his tribe. He helped us to understand the difference between tribal and tribalism. Tribal affiliation nourishes community and deep understanding of collective history. Tribalism creates a distinct “in-group” (those we identify with) and an “out-group” (everyone else).

Three of us were Jewish, and the only thing we agreed on was that we don’t agree on anything except being Jewish (“two Jews, three opinions,” more like “twenty-five opinions with footnotes and appendices spanning 2,000 years of commentary.” You can join if you’re willing to study hard for a year and pass a board examination. Otherwise, “Are you nuts?”) Much laughter ensued.

 

*Escapism is Not a Dirty Word! Panelists and participants share their favorite comfort reading and how it informs, sustains, and gives us hope. Continue reading “Baycon 2026 report”…

The Importance of Fruit Cake

personby Gillian Polack
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I keep forgetting to introduce my books to you! Let me remedy this.

This week, someone (a very generous someone) posted about The Year of the Fruit Cake. They said lovely things about it and about my writing. While I ought to simply share the post, or at least repeat the words, this week I am terribly, terribly Australian. Just saying that someone said nice things is blowing my own trumpet in Oz. Tall poppy syndrome is one of our big cultural babies and so I cannot repeat things without feeling as if I need to be cut down. This is, of course, a really bad way of letting you know about my book.

The Year of the Fruit Cake won me a nice trophy and mentions in many places. I will never understand this, because it’s not that easy to read. It’s at the literary end of SF. I wanted to write about a difficult set of subjects (including perimenopause) and I wanted to do it with science fiction and I used so many of the things women experience at that time of life in Australia to shape the novel. Not just as the subjects dealt with in the novel, but in the storytelling itself.

When I went through perimenopause my body was unreliable, so the narrators are unreliable. Everything is personal.

My memory had blips, so my main character has major memory issues.

So many friendships had to be renegotiated, especially those with men and with younger women, who mostly had not idea of the magnitude of the changes and that hot flushes were not just an excuse to wield a pretty fan. Our society lacks story that explains these changes, so I turned one of my perimenoapusal women into an alien.

Eventually I discovered that one of the issues I and my cohort faced was gentle shifts along gender spectra. OK, not so gentle. Now I’m past it, my body doesn’t want to declare how very female it is one minute and that it’s increasing in testosterone the next. I have settled into being female, but not into being female in the same way I once was. The aliens in the novel with their twelve genders are closer to my physical reality than I like to admit. I gave them at least one shift that was delightful. I wish I could do the same for human women. Perimenopause was a nightmare for me, so I made those physical changes a nightmare for my alien-in-human-body.

Also, I wanted to write about othering. Australia is not good to older women, so I wrote about the process of becoming an older woman and having to find new ways of living in society. I had no idea the same thing (in a more extreme version) would apply to me right now as an Australian Jew. I had no idea that this year I would live in a year of Fruit Cake, with an uncertain future and a society I thought was stable turned chancy.

I entirely thought chocolate would remain important and I was totally correct about that, thankfully.

The novel is a slow read and I will never write one as difficult again… but I got some things far too right. I’m glad that one of them was chocolate.

Decisions, decisions

personby Gillian Polack
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It’s really hard to decide on what I should post about today. I have diversions.

The first is that I’m in the final throes of revising my thesis to meet the examiners’ comments. I thought it would be a much bigger task than it was. I’ve sent my revisions and comments to my supervisors and then I send the final in and, hopefully, by the end of the week it will be done and dusted save for graduation. I submitted the thesis over a year ago – even for Australia this is slow. I don’t know why it was so slow, but career-wise it doesn’t matter to me (this is not my first PhD and I’m in my sixties) so it’s better the admin slowness doesn’t apply to young students than it does apply to me. Also, between submission and graduation, my first PhD took 3 years. It was not my fault, but it cost me my first career. By me a drink and I’ll tell you the story.

It’s rather nice that lateness doesn’t always carry such costs.

The second is that the submission period for the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion closed yesterday. Many of us are a bit overwhelmed. On 4 June (10 days before submissions closed) there were over 14,000 submissions, which was a record for Royal Commissions. No-one knows the final number yet.

The staff serving the Royal Commissioner is obligated to read every single one of them. And those of us keeping track are wondering what this means. That Jewish Australia matters? That haters have put in many thoughts? We know that haters have oput in some thoughts. We also know that Palestinian Australia put in a 259 page submission. I’ve seen the outline and need to read it because I cannot make sense of it. Or rather, I can make sense of it in and of itself, but not how it helps Australia handle antisemitism. It seems to be arguing that we’re making things up. This is why I have to check. I’ve been told by quite a few people this last week that antisemitism is fictional, but there are so many incidents right now that this is not a claim so much as a misdirection. I need to know why APAN feels the need to spend 259 pages backing that misdirection if that is, indeed what they’re doing.

What I’m supposed to be doing is writing fiction. I lay in bed last night working out things that needed working out, but today have only written a couple of hundred words. We’re in a weather trap and my bones hurt and I keep procrastinating and worrying about Jewish Australia and other groups being confined by wagon trains circling hate.

Let me leave you and go back to my big writing decision for this week: Lincoln or London in the twelfth century for a section of the novel. I want both, but I don’t think both will fit. I also want Cologne and Speyer. Both! Actually, writing this out has made me think: people travelled in the Middle Ages. Why don’t I have someone travelling to Cologne from Speyer? That would give me the words for Lincoln and London. I just need to check concepts and characters and plot and… all the things… except the history. I have most of the research for that at my fingertips because of the non-fiction I was working on recently and that still has no home. All this research pays.

What Novels Can Be

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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A sailboat on a blue sea. The cover of the book The Curve of the World.Some years ago I took a workshop with Kim Stanley Robinson in which he pointed out – referencing criticisms of his books for being too expository – that one of the things a novel does is give you room to put all those details in.

Short stories are best when they leave out everything that isn’t essential. Flash fiction is the most extreme version of this. But novels can be expansive.

In keeping with this, I remember a concept that I believe I first heard from Vonda N. McIntyre: there are rules for writing a novel but no one knows what they are.

Of course, Vonda didn’t ever write the same book twice. Neither, by the way, does Karen Joy Fowler, but I’m thinking about Vonda today because her last book, The Curve of the World, just came out from Aqueduct Press.

It’s a fabulous book, but it doesn’t fit easily into people’s preconceptions about what a novel ought to be.

Vonda always described herself as a science fiction writer, even when some people persisted in calling The Moon and the Sun “fantasy.” In the chat on the online launch of The Curve of the World last Saturday, John Berry observed that Vonda didn’t consider the book to be alternative history.

I’d call it speculative history, but I’m pretty sure Vonda thought of it as science fiction set in the past – speculation about what those cultures and lives might be.

As someone who has read David Graeber and David Wengrew’s The Dawn of Everything, I think Vonda’s speculation about the past is, at its core, as true to what might have happened as it can be for a time about which we have little information. Things could have happened the way Vonda imagined them. Continue reading “What Novels Can Be”…

Pocket universes and super heroes

personby Gillian Polack
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Eight years ago I spent ten days in Amiens. I had great aims and ambitions. I wanted to explore how World War I changed the people and the landscape. I did a lot of research in Australia early on, which was just as well, because my body was beginning to ache at the seams and I could only do half the research. I did that half, and I also did the related research for a novel. That novel is timely now, for all the wrong reasons.

It’s about the Green Children. There are medieval tales of the Green Children of Woolwich, and they are oddly consistent. I wanted to add a pocket universe to the story and turn it into fantasy with a little bit of scientific underlay. The best place to do this wasn’t in England, where the story came from. It was in the Zone Rouge in France.

I wanted to understand how Jewish superheroes would create themselves if they weren’t strangers in a world full of hate, but refugees in a tiny universe where they were the majority. I wanted to see the stupidity that comes with confidence and being the centre of things, and to put a non-Jewish superhero at the heart of the story, showing how she saw the world around her and how she dealt with some really bad cards. In other words, I wanted to reverse some of our assumptions.

Part of this was asking, “What would our world be like with magic?” I’m an historian and for me there is not one simple type of magic, but complex systems that interact and that change over time. In my novel I used some historical systems and some less historical, and added a couple that only belong in that other world. If there are many systems and if they’re not simplified for ease of tale-telling then they leave more chaos in their wake when they’re abused. Also, how would magic be regulated? I used the UK for the regulation of magic, because I could bring important and old families into the story. Also because it means I could play in the wonderful sandpit of alternate history in London. Imagine a history of England where Jews were brought back in the 15th century? I wrote a short story to explain a part of this, and it was a finalist in the Sidewise Awards, which means… it’s Alternate History, even though it has magic. I rather like this. The story is in Other Covenants.

I lived in London and I lived in Paris for a little, many years ago, and, historically, London is a lot more fun for the type of story I wanted to tell. Pop-up history, small churches with pits to hell… I needed to know that terrain. I know the church in question (and its history) and I know the streets in question. This is not just due to having lived there for a little, many years ago.  It’s because I used to teach students about medieval London at the Australian National University, and because I spent a whole day walking the whole of Cheapside because the maps of it showing it in the Middle Ages did not fit the modern maps. I took photos that document how and why Cheapside changed and can explain what this means to the wider City of London. I looked at the difference between Old Jewry, the newer Jewry where my family came from, and Golders’ Green. I walked all these places an took pictures, at various times.

A small US imprint published my novel as their first book. I never got to do a slide show of all the places and explain how the Somme and how London and Paris came together and how I used my historian-self to furnish the novel. Before the novel came out, I talked with a writers’ group about the layers of history in landscape and how war changed everything, using the Somme as a case study. Then COVID hit. Most novels published in the first two years of COVID are lesser-known. This doesn’t change the fact that my world-building for The Green Children Help Out was amazing fun.

What book should I introduce next week? Time-travel, magic in Canberra, non-fiction? I’m open to suggestions.

Introducing my books: Wizardry

personby Gillian Polack
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I promised to introduce my work, then got bowled over by my own urgent need to understand one small aspect of our current world. That aspect has changed my life in some important ways, and I suddenly realise that not many people know much about everyday life in Jewish Australia. This is not the first time I have suddenly realised this thing. Last time, I wrote a novel with magic and feminism and much discovery of lost culture and foodways. It also contains prophecy. In fact, I wrote The Wizardry of Jewish Women.

There are three different sets of Jewish life in the novel.

One is like quite a few friends in my Jewish circles, with a mild religious sensitivity and a vast desire for community and understanding and service. Belinda in Canberra could easily have been part of my Jewish community, twenty years ago, before I was too ill to do everything. I asked permission from a friend to use her garden in the novel. She had a spectacular garden. We knew each other through dancing and through a women’s group, mainly. Belinda has the gardening and the cooking and the care. She’s someone everyone should meet.

The second drew on the knowledge and experience of a group of Jewish (but not practising) friends who I did women’s stuff with. Judith in Sydney is my readers’ favourite character. Her politics and the deep wish to improve the world were core to my life 25 years ago, though she’s a bit more left than I was. I can’t do these things now because, simply, most of the women who used to love working with me have dumped me for being too Jewish.

It’s all post October 7. They would have dumped Judith, too. She would have failed their purity test by being too Jewish. Judith would have waxed delightfully sarcastic and been very upset. She would have been especially upset because no-one would have asked her what her views were. She would simply have been left out of everything. Now is not then, and Judith is way political in Wizardry.

The third is what happens to an Australian with Jewish ancestry who has retained key aspects of the culture but not the religion or the family. What does Rhonda share with me? She’s an historian.

Each of the three women inherit something that was considered very standard for Jewish women in medieval France: magic. Each of them does quite different things with this inheritance. I wrote their stories because I wanted to meet them. I still do.

Misogyny on Steroids

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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We regularly see whining about why the world imagined by science fiction writers of the so-called Golden Age (i.e., mostly the 1950s) hasn’t come to pass. Where are the flying cars and jet packs? Why don’t we have settlements on the Moon?

And then, of course, we get all the hype around LLMs, as if it is going to become the artificial intelligence we were promised. (Pro tip: it’s not.)

The problem is, I think, that people have focused too much on the wrong science fiction, the technocentric and technophilic stuff that is convinced that computer tech is going to save the world.

Right now, the science fiction writer whose visions are closest to reality is Octavia Butler, particularly the world she wrote about in Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents. While that world is certainly not as much fun to contemplate as living on the Moon, it does have a great deal to recommend it in terms of how things might happen.

I’m fairly sure she meant it as a warning (or perhaps saw it all too clearly); certainly nobody except a few of the grifters currently in power wanted to see it.

Recently the creepy guy who leads the Groypers (and no, I don’t know what that means nor do I want to know) got on a podcast and said that all women – and that includes white ones and maybe even the Kristi Noems and Pam Bondis – should be rounded up and put into gulags, with the ones who would be good breeders (I assume he means the white ones, since he’s an extreme racist as well as misogynist) moved to a birthing gulag.

And that got me to thinking about another science fiction writer: Suzy McKee Charnas.

I mean, you’d almost think he’d read her four-book series, The Holdfast Chronicles, which takes place in a world that does just that with women and includes the racism as well.

I haven’t read those books in a long time, but I’ve just started to re-read them now because they are, in fact, relevant. In fact, I suspect they are even more relevant than The Handmaid’s Tale. Though I hope they aren’t quite as close to reality as Parable of the Sower.

I’m currently reading the first book, Walk to the End of the World, and I have to say that the male world she depicts is the kind of toxic masculinity on steroids that such men seem to want. I recall thinking it was too extreme when I first read it, but given current events, I’m no longer sure about that.

I wish Suzy was still with us to discuss that point. Continue reading “Misogyny on Steroids”…

Baggage

personby Gillian Polack
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I’m about to embark on a big essay. As a prequel to it, however, I want to introduce you to a book.

A-many years ago, when I was young and charming, I edited an Australian anthology called Baggage. It’s still in print, published by Wildside in the US. The Australian original was taken out of print when the collapse of Borders in Australia imploded the publisher. Every piece Eneit Press published was special (maybe excepting my novel – I cannot judge my own writing) and the loss of the press shut many doors for readers.

Why is Baggage so important to me today? I asked writers for stories of science fiction or fantasy that discussed the cultural baggage we all carry. I had an initial list of the perfect people to make the best anthology. It had two parts, since I couldn’t ask everyone at once. I emailed the writers on the first part of my initial first (obviously) and all but one of them agreed. The rest of the wonderful authors I had on my list don’t even know they were on my list, which I find sad. I still want to read stories by them. Every single story I was given by those writers is a treasure and thought-provoking and none of them overlap and they created such a fine anthology that I’ve been nervous about trying another.

These are not Jewish stories. For those most part, these are not Jewish writers. Yet the collection is one that will help anyone trying to understand about the current wave of antisemitism. How? It demonstrates, through story, some of the massive differences in the cultural baggage we each bear. What we carry, how we carry it, how much of a burden it can be and how different people see it quite, quite differently. It achieves all this through very well told story. Which means, if you don’t want to jump straight into theory and definitions and cultural analysis, you don’t have to. You can read some of the best short stories I’ve ever edited.

Then I’ll bring in the heavy stuff, either here or on my own blog. In this difficult few years, however, we don’t always need to confront. Sometimes we can simply read and enjoy and find our own paths from what we read. This is why I’m giving you a prologue, which is Baggage.

 

Things Happen

personby Gillian Polack
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I’m late!

This is because Australia is antisemitism central again and I’ve been dealing. You don’t need yet another post on Australia’s problems, so let me tell you the story of a book.

Some years ago, I wrote a novel. A publisher signed it up but said “This should be a duology.” I rewrote the first book and added the sequel. Then they went bust.

Shortly after, another publisher fell in love with the duology but said, “I want the rest of the story.” I did the rewrite and the last volume and it became a trilogy. The COVID hit and the publisher ran into so much trouble. I’m still with them for other books, but we agreed I should find a new publisher for the trilogy.

A US publisher has taken on the first volume. If it sells well, then the trilogy will finally emerge. I so hope it sells well. I’ve been quiet about it because this book was having so much bad luck. Not as much bad luck as my cursed novel, but still, much bad luck.

However, we are finally in a “Watch this space” moment. The cover artist has Ideas and the editor is getting back to me very soon.

When there is an official announcement, I promise to share it. In the meantime, it’s about time I talked about my other published work. I might do a series of posts, to remind myself of novels written and books published.

That gives you two reasons to watch this space.