Rob Queen: Melinda Snodgrass and I have something in common: horses. Both of us have spent a good deal of time working with the horses in the professional scene; the Grand Prix level. Whereas my experience encompasses the Hunter/Jumper world, Ms. Snodgrass shows Dressage. Technically, it is all horses going around a ring under the watchful eye of a judge, but at its heart the two fields are as different as Science Fiction and Fantasy. Same, same, but different. Just as we both have extensive experience with horses, we also share a love for Science Fiction. At the World Fantasy Convention, I had the opportunity to sit down and discuss a little of the former with Ms. Snodgrass, and a lot of the latter, covering such exciting topics as the Wild Cardsseries that she is editing with another New Mexican, George R. R. Martin.
Optimutt: So tell me a little more about the Wild Cards series.
Melinda Snodgrass: We did 17 books in the series, then there was a small attempt to bring it back, one volume where it was just stories that we wrote called Deuces about the Deuces of our Wildcard universe. Most stories were about Aces who have super powers and Jokers who are hideously deformed mockeries of men. Then there are people with piddly little powers like the human skunk, puddle man, and those are called Deuces.
O: How did this relaunch of the series come about?
MS: After our most recent publisher, Ibooks, collapsed, we approached Tor to say we’d been rethinking how we would launch this thing. Tor said please don’t bring back any of your old characters; give us something new and fresh, we want young people in their teens and twenties. So George [R. R. Martin] and I recruited a lot of new young writers to rethink the series.
We took the approach of passing off all that baggage of 17 volumes; it’ll be young kids who, in the immortal words of one character: a blogger who’s commenting on the world situation, opens his very first blog-post with “Who the f*** was Jetboy?” Jetboy had all this fame [in the original stories], and the kids don’t care.
O: What are the goals of this newest vision? Do they have a common goal?
MS: We wanted it to be much more international in flavor and we wanted to play with the idea of people actually using their powers to make a change in the world, so that’s where we’re going. We’ve got a 3 book deal with Tor. Book 1 will be out in January. George and I are just about done with the final draft on Book Two. I have to finish my interstitial because I’m the mortar between the bricks on it. And then we’ll deliver it, and then we’ll be logging out the third book and if Tor is happy, then we’ll do 3 more. And so on and so on. And George and I already have an idea of what the next triad is about.
O: It’s like a generation next. In the DC Universe, during the Silver Age of comics of the 1930’s and 1940’s, we had the Justice Society, who were the founders of the Superhero world. Following in their wake came the Justice League. The Justice League knows and remembers the Justice Society, but they are more of a developmental jump, a Generation Next version of the pioneers. Am I wrong in making this comparison with what you’re doing with Wildcards?
MS: No, that’s exactly what we’re doing. When we pitched it to Tor, we wrote a big proposal and we even hired Mike Millar to do the cover art for the proposal, and it says: “Do you know what your kids are doing? They’re taking over the world.” You know, we did it kind of Hollywood because George and I have worked with Hollywood, and we pushed it, and Tor bought it, and we’re having a lot of fun.
O: What can you tell us about its actual launching?
MS: It will be out in January, 2008. The cover art, interviews with the authors, kind of a history and a bit about the characters, ancient history, stories that never saw the light of day for various reasons, all can be found here:http://www.wildcardsbooks.com
O: You mentioned that you have experience with Hollywood and television. Could you tell me what some of those projects have been?
MS: Well, I was a book writer, then George went to Hollywood to work on the new Twilight Zone and he called and told me, “You know, I bet you’d be really good at this Hollywood thing. If you wanted to try it and if you were to write a spec script, I’d show it to my agent.” So I looked around and I wrote a spec for Star Trek: The Next Generation script and his agent looked at it and sent it to Star Trek and they bought the script and after the bought the script, they hired me and I worked on the show for half the second season and all of the third season.
That launched my Hollywood career. I’m known as a sci-fi writer, even in Hollywood, but the vast bulk of my work has actually been with cop and lawyer shows. After Star Trek, I went to a show called Reasonable Doubt which was about lawyers, and then on to “The Profiler,” which was a serial killer show. [Laughs] Let me rephrase that: There are cops who chase serial killers. Then I wrote a number of pilots and I wrote freelance for a number of years, although, I guess what really gave me the title of Science Fiction writer in Hollywood was my adaptation of George’s Sand Kings story into a 2 hourOuter Limits movie, for its relaunch a couple years ago. So I’ve worked in both realms.
O: Do you have a preference between Hollywood and books?
MS: It depends on my mood at any given moment. The money in Hollywood is fabulous and there’s something so viscerally exciting about it because you write something and three days later, they’ve built the set that is your vision. And you go to the set and the actors say your dialogue and there really is nothing higher… it’s the highest high I’ve ever had.
On the other hand, Hollywood is such a completely collaborative environment that there are a lot of who people interfere with, change and affect your work. The executive producer, the studio – if you’re doing a movie – the director, all these people have a strong input; the actors say “I can’t say these lines,” and things change. So you have to not be terribly protective of your work.
In the books, it’s all yours. You work with an editor, who you can argue with, and ultimately no editor will force you to change anything. In Hollywood, if you don’t like it, you say no, they say tough, they take it away from you and rewrite it. Anyway, they can’t do that in books. Now, they may refuse to publish it but that becomes entirely your choice. So I love them both and I’m back in books. I’ve got two books in a series coming out from Tor. The first of which will be coming out in May of next year called The Edge of Reason.
O: What is The Edge of Reason?
MS: It is a book about the tensions and the battle between science and rationality [on one side] and religion and superstition on the other side. It’s the story of a young man who discovers this hidden world just under the surface of the real one where this eons-old battle has been going on between every dark myth and god that you can name, who are really alien creatures invading from alternate dimensions. He is recruited by a very mysterious creature who has had many names throughout history: He’s been Prometheus, he’s been Loki, he’s been Lucifer. So that’s the story I’m writing. I’ll probably be killed by religious fundamentalists for it.
O: How many books will the Edge series become?
MS: I know what the third book will be. My editor and I envision it as a fairly open-ended series but I do know what the final scene of the final story will be. If that book is 8 books from now or two books, I know what the final accomplishment or victory will be. I would never do something where I have no idea where I’m going. I know what that final scene is and where it leads my hero, who is unable – unlike Moses – to make the journey to this place. So I know where I’m going. I’d love to spend a lot of time there. I have a bunch of short stories planned because Prometheus has been recruiting all sorts of people throughout history and I want to answer the questions of how did Zeus die; that old one who entered the world, how is he killed? How did that happen? So I’ve got a story idea or two to fill in the chinks. Tor is calling this an occult thriller, so we’ll see how that one goes.
O: You raised a very interesting point in that you know the ending of your story, which is great. I know that some people do not take that approach, and let the story unfold itself to them as they write. When you are writing, do you always know the beginning and the end and it’s a matter of filling in the space? What kind of specific approach do you take to your writing?
MS: I literally have an outline. They have something in Hollywood called Breaking the Story. You have 3×5 cards and a corkboard and you literally break it down. Teaser; Act 1, Act 2, bum bum bum… A feature film is roughly 47 scenes in a 3 Act structure. And you just start putting in what those scenes are going to be. I basically do the same thing with my books. I have what I call Tent Pole Scenes which are big moments that I’m writing to. Obviously, your opening and your end are two major tent poles. Another way to put it is the Second Stage Block; which is what happens midway through your book or script that propels it in a new direction, ups the stakes or brings the reader along or keeps the viewer watching. So I have the first and the last parts of the story and then I start filling in the tent poles. I’ll have ideas of scenes in between. And a book is obviously a lot longer than a screenplay, so I don’t have every single little thing plotted out, and it’s subject to change. Oh this didn’t work, or I’ll put something else here.
Sometimes I need help, so I call in the troops of my book writer’s group – I’d call in the group mind – and say I’m collecting plot briefs and we start to work. We’ve done it with my books, we’ve done it with Daniel’s [Abraham], we’ve done with with Ian’s [Tregillis]. Everyone takes a turn and we’ve done some remarkable things because we create books where the writer knows where they’re going and they’re not just slowly stumbling. I know some people feel they need to have things revealed to them, but I know an awful lot of writers who write 60 pages and realize that that doesn’t work at all, and they’ve lost 60 pages. And I don’t have the patience for that. I need to know where I’m going.
O: On to the horses, which was inevitable for two Equine lovers such as ourselves, have you ever considered putting your knowledge of the Grand Prix dressage shows into a story, whether it is Sci-Fi or Fantasy? And if so, has it been done?
MS: I see a lot of I squeezed it with my thigh and weeeeeelllll… not exactly. People think the reins are exclusively meant to stop the horse, and the other contact points have nothing to do with steering or control. But no, it’s the withers! The withers go where a horse goes is supposed to go, those kinds of things, I try to help out with when I can. Like George Martin says “I’ve got some horsey stuff for you,” so I edit it for him. Or Steve Sterling will run it by me for his big Eyes of the Fire series.
Coincidently enough, in Book Three of [my] Edge [series], technology isn’t working because people are forgetting how to make technology work. They’re walking away from it, thinking angels will keep airplanes in the air, and they don’t actually have to be gassed or serviced. So my people are fighting, they have stockpiled gasoline but don’t want to waste what they have and are falling back on horses. In Book Two, what I’ve set up is that a former Olympic dressage rider is hired to train my heroes to ride. So I just go and take everything that I’ve learned [riding dressage] and put it in my books in a way that I don’t think anybody’s really done. So I think I’m going to have fun with this.
