FAQ

Karen’s (Very Digressional) FAQ

Personal Questions:

I don’t have time to read your whole biography. I just want to know the salient facts of your life so I can write this report for school. Please help me out?

Well, sure, you said please.

Born: 1981, Whangarei, New Zealand
Lived: Whangarei, Otematata, Oamaru, Christchurch (New Zealand), Fuuchuu-shi (Japan), Melbourne (Australia)
Jobs I Have Had: Shopgirl, book shopgirl, shelf-filler, tutor, assistant teacher of English in Japan, and what’s called a tutor in the Antipodes and a TA in the United States.
Hobbies: Baking, World of Warcraft, reading, cocktail concoction, and watching movies about cheerleaders.
Favourite Foods: Apples, chocolate, pretty much anything I can bake.
Favourite Musicians: Aimee Mann, Amanda Palmer, Ani DiFranco, Bic Runga, Crowded House, Nesian Mystik, Vienna Teng.
Favourite Movies: Clueless, Mean Girls, Intolerable Cruelty, Empire Records, Jesus Christ Superstar 2000 (yes, really) X-Men and X-Men 2. We do not speak of X-Men 3.
Favourite TV Shows: Avatar: The Last Airbender, Leverage, Friday Night Lights and Bones.
Favourite Play: Much Ado About Nothing.
Favourite Musical: Chess (You guys, you have no idea how blessed I feel to live in a world where there is a musical about chess).

What is a dorky thing you have done?

I do dorky things so frequently that if dorky things were earthquakes anywhere I lived would be a highly unstable seismic region. I have a blog that is pretty much dedicated to talking about the dorky things I have done.

But one of the best stories involves me jumping up and down in an elevator, which subsequently jammed, and trapped me in it for two hours. With my best friend. Two days before her wedding, on the groom’s bachelor night. I’m clearly the best maid of honour ever.

What is an awesome thing you have done?

I’m pretty proud of writing a book. But probably the most awesome thing I do is giving to charity, which has the salutary effect of doing awesome things for other people. My favourite charities are Amnesty International, Medecins Sans Frontieres, and the Alannah and Madeline Foundation.

Writing Questions (non-spoilery):

Will there be a sequel to Guardian of the Dead?

Well, that depends. I am not currently contracted to write a sequel, and my next book published is not related to Guardian other than being a contemporary fantasy thriller set in New Zealand. (Although in my head they both take place in the same world, there aren’t any characters in common).

However! I would love to write a sequel. It pretty much depends on how much demand there is for one, and that depends on sales.

I’d like to be a professional writer. Do you have any tips for me?

1) Read the heck out of everything – although probably if you want to be a writer you have already developed a sustained and diverse interest in reading. It’s very difficult to write a book without one. If you don’t have time to read, you probably don’t have time to be a writer.

2) If you don’t already, start making time to write, every day, or at least every week. It doesn’t matter so much what you are writing, as long as you enjoy it most of the time (say, 80 percent) and are actively paying attention to getting better. I think fan fiction is particularly fantastic, whether you view it as sufficient in itself, or as training. Feedback and discussion are plentiful, and if you’re lucky, you can hook yourself up to a community that devours all kinds of writing and really cares about craft and experimentation.

3) Be aware that you will probably never make enough money to support yourself from your writing. Don’t let this get you down!

4) If you’re a member of the dominant culture where you live, see if you can spend some time in a place where you are not, ideally where the main language is not one you grew up speaking. Your horizons will expand immeasurably, as will the attention you pay to communication and nuance.

How long does it take to write your books?

So far, it varies. The first draft of Guardian of the Dead took three months. The second-to-eighth drafts added another 15 months onto that. The first and second drafts of The Shattering took about eight months.

I tend to like writing a terrible first draft and then fixing it up, like I might fix up an antique car if I were into cars. Other people write in different ways. The only right way to write is the right way for you. That said, I have never heard of anyone getting a first draft published. Revision always happens, and fortunately, I enjoy doing it.

How do you research?

I wrote various bits of Guardian of the Dead in four countries (Japan, Australia, the USA and New Zealand). I did read many books, in the traditional manner of my people, but that is a lot of places to drag books around, and that is why I am so grateful for the internet. My favourite research tool is my secret boyfriend, the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre. Tons and tons of fascinating material, collected and digitized by those smart people at Victoria University.

My second favourite research tool is Google Image Search. Want to know what parts of Napier can be seen from Hospital Hill? Want to describe the appearance of traditionally applied moko when you’re far from home? Want to know what a crushed human head looks like? Type those terms in and go! Don’t do that last one, though, it was pretty gross. Another useful tool for geographic reference research is Flickr’s Map tool.

I understand people wrote books before the internet, but I’m not quite sure how. For one thing, how did they procrastinate? Playing whist?

The other thing I am very grateful for is smart people who know things I don’t. I would email or call knowledgeable people (sometimes I knew them beforehand and sometimes I didn’t) and say things like, “If I was going to kick someone in the stomach, how would I do that and how would it feel?” or “I just want to check; is this a decent definition of tapu?” and they would make me look much cleverer. Of course, all responsibility for the remaining errors is mine.

Where do you get your ideas from?

I would love to be a smartass and say “I order them online”, but that is actually partially true. I get ideas from browsing around the internet, from watching TV, from reading great books and thinking “what if I took that and did this?”, from reading bad books and thinking “what if I IGNORED that and did THIS?”, from reading the newspapers and wondering what would happens if I stuck one of my characters in a particular situation, and from sitting in the bath and thinking about my toes.

(What if I was missing my big toes? What if some sort of calamity had taken place? What if my parents had always been very cagey about this, but it turned out my missing big toes were a symbol that they had, when young and starving, promised their firstborn to the fairies in return for their aid, and that was why we had kept moving all these years and why I had been told to wear this iron ring all my life but I had taken it off in a fit of teenage rage and the fairies had come at last to claim me?)

Ideas are not really a problem for me.

Choosing the good ideas and making sure there’s a whole story to go with them is more challenging. I am a big fan of the “throw it all in and see what happens” school of storytelling. During the first draft if I know something needs to happen in one part and I’m not sure what, I generally write [TK SOMETHING HAPPENS HERE] and keep going. Often I will work out what that thing was and proceed as if it had happened without going back to fill in that piece right away. This is entertaining for my first readers, who will be tootling along and suddenly discover that someone has acquired a magical item or broken their arm without any explanation of how.

But that’s the best thing about writing; it’s generally not a performance art. You can always fix it up later.

How did you sell a book/find an agent/get published?

Well, first I wrote a couple of Nanonovels that were terrible, then I co-wrote a couple of novels that are not quite as terrible, but are not at this point sellable, as well as dozens of short stories and fanfic pieces.

Then I started writing the book that became Guardian of the Dead, and people that I trusted to tell me the truth told me that they didn’t think I was being delusional when I said I thought I might be able to sell it. So I started researching agent blogs and websites. I attended “how to get an agent” panels at cons. I looked in the acknowledgement sections of YA books in my genre that I really liked, and I made a list of all the agents to whom I wanted to submit.

(Of course you should never submit to an agent without a completed and thoroughly revised manuscript, so I knew I wasn’t going to use the list for a while, but it was good to have it there for a goal.)

During the revision process I took the first three chapters to a workshop at WisCon. Holly Black, who is one of my favourite writers, ran the workshop, and she recommended that I submit to her agent when I’d finished the manuscript. Holly’s agent was Barry Goldblatt, who was – gasp! – at the top of my list.

So I finished the book, revised the heck out of it, wrote a query letter (that took three days. Query letters = v. important!) sent that off and reminded myself that everybody gets rejected and it’s okay. I put stamps with Marvel Comics characters on the self-addressed envelope, so that when I got rejected, I would at least be cheered by seeing Elektra and She-Hulk being badass.

But Barry asked to see the full manuscript (this is why you never submit until you’re done) so I sent that. Then he called me to have a chat, and about halfway through the conversation I realized that he was actually going to be my agent and freaked out all over the place in hilarious manner. There may have been some jumping on the bed; it’s all a blur.

I revised the manuscript again in accordance with his suggestions, and he sent that out to various publishing houses, most of whom rejected it (everybody gets rejected and it’s okay!) but some of whom made offers. I talked to more people and made more decisions and THAT is the story of how I got a publishing contract.

If your real question, sneakily hidden in that one, is “How do I get published?” then I hope the above is helpful. Particularly the parts about practicing and researching the business and revising. I realize those bits aren’t very sexy, but they’re fairly crucial when it comes to the extremely sexy sensation of being able to tell people that you are a professional novelist.

Will you read my unpublished book and tell me how to make it better?

That depends. Are you a member of my writing group? Are we professionally connected? Is this in the context of a workshop or class? Do I know you? If the answer to these questions is no, then I am sorry, but I will not read your book. Reading is a big part of my job, and it takes a lot of time. Several of my writing friends are owed critiques right this minute.

What you need is a writing group! A good writing group is an awesome experience – you get to read other people’s work and respond to it (which is an excellent way of learning how to self-critique your own work) and in return they respond to yours. If there isn’t a group you like in your local area, there are a ton online. I recommend the assistance of the charming Google in finding them.

Can I write fan fiction using the characters from your works?

Knock yourself out! I think fanfic is awesome. However, I can’t read fanfic derived from my work (this is what we call irony) so please don’t send it to me. I’ll have to delete it unread and that will make me sad.