jpskewedthrone | New Books!

There are a few book releases that might be of interest to you guys today.

First up is Deader Still by Anton Strout (aka Anton's Trout . . . which brings up an image I don't really want to think about).

Go check it out!

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Also hitting the shelves today is Palimpsest by Catherynne Valente.

Here's an interview with Catherynne Valente where she talks about her book, writing, etc. Hope you enjoy!

What was your inspiration for writing Palimpsest?

A couple of years ago, Ekaterina Sedia was putting together this anthology
called Paper Cities. It was an anthology of urban fantasy, not exactly the
kind that has a woman in leather pants on the cover, or exactly the kind
Charles DeLint might write, but decadent, bizarre urban landscapes. She
asked me to make her a city. I was a bit burned out on making up fantasy
cities, as there are a number of them in my last novel, In the Cities of
Coin and Spice. So I started taking apart the idea of a city in my head,
what a city is, what it contains. And ultimately, all a city is is people.
So I began to plan a city that lived as a virus, a memetic virus and a
physical one, that would manifest as a mark on human skin, something that
looked like a streetmap. From there it was a short jump to the idea that
such a virus could be sexually transmitted--cities are also complex networks
of connections between people, and to turn that around, to have a city
created by complex connections rather than creating them, was fascinating to
me. Hence, Palimpsest was born.

Who are your favorite authors and books now and when you were growing up?

Growing up I loved fairy tales and folktales of all kinds. My mother bought
me endless collections, and read to me from really weirdly diverse sources:
Plato, Beckett, Apollinaire--and me not 10 years old. This is why I am the
way I am, in a nutshell. I still love folktales and seek them out--these
days I love John Crowley, Maurren McHugh, Christopher Barzak, Theodora Goss,
Jeff Vandermeer, Milorad Pavic, Borges...I'm trying to read more translated
work from outside US/UK/Canada/Australia.

What is it about fantasy/science fiction that attracts you?

I am a lapsed classicist, so it took me a long time to even understand the
idea of realist literature. To me, writing about vengeful gods, oracles,
magic, half-human monsters and fell machines was just what you wrote about,
if you wrote at all. To the ancient Greeks, that was just plain old
literature. So fantasy and science fiction are just natural to me--that's
what literature is. The rest is a poor simulacra of real life, and that just
doesn't hold the power of creating a world from whole cloth, pinning it to
our own, and showing where the two become interchangeable. I love the color
and beauty of fantasy, the possibility of doing *anything*. To me, it's not
a genre. Everything else is just a subset.

What (besides writing) do you do for fun?

I've recently learned to knit and become quite passionate about it--it's a
kind of zen activity for me, it calms the mind and makes room for writing. I
also cook all manner of mad things, blow glass, and make jewelry. I live on
an island in Maine and we have a small sailboat called Persephone--so I
sail, fish, and snorkel. I'm also a big gamer, both console and tabletop.

What sort of research did you do to write this book?/What kind of preparation do you do when you are writing?

Palimpsest was far less research-intensive than The Orphan's Tales, but I
spent a lot of time in New York--I'm not a city girl, so I wanted to feel
what that kind of urban world was like. I also researched urban planning and
political psychology quite a bit, trying to create a city that felt real,
even as it was magical and surreal.

What are you writing now?

I'm working on a retelling of a Russian folktale set in the Stalinist era
called Deathless and an epic fantasy trilogy concerning the kingdom of
Prester John from medieval myth.

What does a typical writing day look like for you? How long do you write, that sort of thing?

I usually walk down to the cafe near the ferry dock--I live on a small
island of about 800 people and we only have one cafe--at around 8 or 9 am
and write until they close at 2. then I'll come home and work on admin
things, returning emails, interviews, and such, and any other freelance
projects that I have on my plate. I find writing for 5 hours straight every
day lets me get a lot done with a good amount of daylight left to me.

What is easiest/hardest for you as a writer?

Language is probably the thing that comes most naturally--I love rich,
decadent language and my brain wants to make words like that all the time.
It takes concentration and discipline to do otherwise. The hardest thing for
me is keeping a linear plot going. I'm working on getting better at that--I
do with every book, I think. But I always want to mess with traditional plot
structures and take them apart, like a kid taking apart a remote to see how
it works. I don't always know how to put it back together again, but damned
if I don't end up with a sweet pile of melted electronics.

This isn't your first book; tell us a little bit about what else is out there?

My series The Orphan's Tales, novels of interconnected fairy tales, won the
Tiptree Award and the Mythopoeic Award. I've also written three other
novels: The Labyrinth, The Book of Dreams, and The Grass-Cutting Sword, as
well as five collections of poetry. The newest of those is A Guide to
Folktales in Fragile Dialects.

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And now the links to Amazon.com! If you were thinking of ordering these books from Amazon (or any other books at all), just click through the link. I use the "kickback" from Amazon to help fund the free books I give away here and over at