Writer Wednesday: Luc Reid
Originally published at finding my words. Please leave any comments there.
Today’s special guest is Luc Reid! Please read what he has to say.
1. First things first…a quick bio:
I’m a Writers of the Future winner, a former radio commentator, the founder of the Codex online writers’ group, a musician, a small-time playwright, and a black belt in Taekwondo Chung Do Kwan. In addition to two Writers of the Future anthologies (numbers 19 and 20), my fiction has been published at Abyss & Apex, Brain Harvest, Thaumatrope, and elsewhere. My non-fiction appears in places like Strange Horizons, Clarkesworld, and The Writer magazine. My first book was Talk the Talk: The Slang of 65 American Subcultures (Writers Digest Books, 2006).
2. Where are you from and what’s your favorite thing about where you live?
I grew up in northern Vermont, on the western shore of Lake Champlain, back when living on the lake wasn’t so swanky that my family couldn’t afford the taxes (we later moved).
It’s hard for me to pick a favorite thing about Vermont. The disproportionately huge arts community? The progressive politics? The great schools? The often ridiculously gorgeous scenery? The personable citizenry? Scraping ice off my windshield in January? Actually, I can narrow it down: it’s not that last one.
3. Tell about your latest book/story. What made you want to write it?
This’s a hard question to answer: the latest one I completed? (Bam! 172 Hellaciously Quick Stories)? The latest one I self-published (a young adult novel called Family Skulls, about curses and old family rivalries in rural Vermont)? The latest one someone else published (Talk the Talk)? You can probably tell that I like to write a lot of things, even though I’m trying to keep the question narrowed down to books. I think it sums up this way:
For fiction, a story starts coming together in my head and I think: “I want to see what it would be like for that character to live through that.” I want to know how a terminally shy person tries to date in the future, or how a millionaire rock star tries to deal with his artistic limitations through time travel.
For nonfiction, usually it’s a matter of: “This question must have an answer, and nobody has written the answer to it yet. Maybe I could do that”
Both of these situations happen to me a lot.
4. Where can people find your books/stories?
I hate to be unoriginal in my answer, but Amazon is the place to go for most of my work. So far Family Skulls is available only for the Kindle (though it will be more widely available soon, when the new cover is done), at http://www.amazon.com/Family-Skulls-ebook/dp/B00573Y36W .
Bam! is available in all kinds of eReader formats, on Amazon at http://www.amazon.com/Bam-Hellaciously-Quick-Stories-ebook/dp/B004GUS8Q8 and on Smashwords at http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/35395 .
There’s more of my work available on Amazon, both print and eBook, and I have an article coming out for (I gather) January or February in The Writer magazine. You can also find my column on the psychology of writing every month at http://futurismic.com .
5. What are you working on right now?
As usual, the answer is “several things.” I have a novel I’d love to get back to that’s on the back burner, short stories going out fairly regularly, a book about understanding mental schemas as a way of getting past patterns of behavior that cause us problems, and I’m collaborating with a friend on a series of early reader books about solving difficult personal problems in historical settings.
6. What inspired you to be a writer?
I’m pretty sure it’s that I like to hear (or read) myself talk, but by the time I realized that writing was a character flaw rather than a gift, I had gotten so much practice at it that it had sort of become a gift.
I love reading, I love understanding people and things better, and I love the idea of making a positive impact in other people’s lives. I also like the possibility of becoming famous but not having to put up with people recognizing you on the street: that’s really the best of both worlds.
7. Who is your favorite character in your stories? Why?
It’s hard for me to pick, as I’ve written literally hundreds of stories. One of my favorite characters is a teen girl from a family of spacefaring white trash who starred in a novel of mine that eventually had to be scrapped, but she’ll be back sooner or later in a novel of her own. She’s singleminded and ruthless and likes to state things in the absolute baldest, most ornery ways, but somewhere deep inside (deep deep inside) her heart’s in the right place.
I also enjoy the cigarillo-smoking old Korean lady in my story “Chance Meeting with a Baby on a Train,” which is one of the 172 stories in Bam!.
8. What is your favorite comfort food?
Taekwondo. I know that’s not a food, but I’m never hungry when I’m doing Taekwondo, and there’s little in this world more comforting to me than kicking things really hard at head height.
9. What character from your stories was the hardest to write?
Well, I often have trouble writing gods, because who the hell knows what’s going through their heads? Not that it’s stopped me from trying.
In terms of sheer effort, I think the most difficult character I’ve written is the letter X. I don’t mean that as a joke-I mean I have a story called “B is for Bureaucracy” in which the main character is the letter X. It’s difficult for him to say things because he would prefer to use words that begin with him, and there aren’t many of them. Also, it’s hard to know what X is thinking. He’s just that mysterious.
10. What’s the biggest challenge about being a writer?
Finding time to write! I have no shortage of willingness to write, but often I add up the number of hours I need in a given day and they add up to between 27 and 500.
11. Do you have any advice for beginning writers?
Yes: as much as possible, write things you love. If you stop loving what you’re writing, work really hard to find a new way to love it, and if you can’t do that, consider trying something else. (But ignore this advice if you’re one of those people who can’t write while happy.)
12. Who are your favorite authors and why?
Again with the next-to-impossible questions! I’ll name two I really, really like, but there’s always the possibility I’m not thinking of someone I like even more.
Jonathan Stroud, because Bartimaeus is one of the most entertaining characters of all time.
William Goldman, because for the love of Pete, the guy wrote both The Princess Bride (book and movie) and Bruce Cassidy and the Sundance Kid .
13. What books have most influenced your writing?
The Chronicles of Narnia, The Lord of the Rings, and the Earthsea trilogy basically ensured that I would be smitten with science fiction and fantasy. Orson Scott Card’s books about writing have taught me an enormous amount, and A Guide to Rational Living opened my mind up to how useful a book could be in changing the way we live and deal with the challenges in our lives.
14. What tools are in your writer’s tool-kit?
I love writers’ tools: I had to build a small addition just to house them. I keep meaning to put up some peg board in there and organize. In terms of software, I love Scrivener ( www.literatureandlatte.com ), which gives me an entirely new way of handling complex stories and nonfiction works. In terms of learning, Orson Scott Card’s Literary Boot Camp and the Writers of the Future workshop were transformative, but it’s possible I’ve learned even more from discussions on Codex, the online writers group I run, because I’m fortunate to know some truly brilliant people in that group. In terms of writing motivation, I have a bag of tricks the size of a small sandworm, many of which I talk about in my short book The Writing Engine.
15. Where can people find out more about you and your books/stories?
My Web site, where I blog about writing and the psychology of habits, is http://www.ambersistla.com/blog/www.lucreid.com . I’m also sporadically on Twitter @lucreid .
16. What question(s) did I forget to ask?
What I want for my birthday. It’s coming right up, you know.
17. Any other links you want mentioned …
I have all kinds of brilliant author friends whose Web sites and blogs I’d like to send you to, but if I started listing those links, I probably wouldn’t stop.
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If you are a writer interested in participating in Writer Wednesday, please send an email with a short biography to ww (at) ambersistla (dot) com.