Introductions: Biography of a Novel

with an Welcome to new readers . . . and the inevitable footnotes

Substack informs me that I have passed the 1000 Subscribers mark! Thank you so much to everyone who’s been recommending me; many of you are coming from Nike Sulway & Carina Bissett of The Orange & Bee, a wonderful online folk and fairy tale palace of many rooms which I wholeheartedly recommend right back.

WELCOME! Julia Rios caught me in utter bliss at the Carousel Party we threw in Holyoke, Massachusetts in May, 2016 - technically to celebrate our anniversary, but really because I always wanted unlimited carousel rides at my own wedding, and since we couldn’t do that in 1996, we did it in 2016. It did not disappoint. I hope you feel welcomed into joy.

To celebrate, I’d like to re-Introduce myself, and to bring everyone up to date on my Shenanigans.

Deep Breath

The bio I composed in 2021 for my new agent¹ to post on the agency’s website begins:

It’s not that Ellen Kushner can’t hold a job; it’s just that she’s got a lot of interests. She began her grownup working life after college as the fantasy editor for Ace Books, but quit to write her first novel, Swordspoint: a Melodrama of Manners. The month it was published was the month she moved to Boston to start a new career as a classical music announcer on WGBH radio . . . .
And there I remained for some time, becoming eventually the host and co-producer of my very own quirky national series, Sound & Spirit: “music and ideas that celebrate the human experience around the world and through the ages.” You can hear some of the archived shows here on my (soon-to-be-completely revamped and not a moment too soon) website. I also wooed & won the fabulous Delia Sherman! We had an extravagant illegal wedding in Cambridge in 1996, and were legally married in our backyard in Somerville in 2004.

Wedding 26 October, 1996. We were ridiculously happy. And pretty much still are.

In 2006, Delia & I moved back to NYC. We live in a colorful Beaux-Arts apartment on Riverside Drive on the Upper West Side (about 15 blocks and a thousand years from where I lived when I wrote Swordspoint in my 20s). My last novel, The Privilege of the Sword, was published right after we moved.² I tried to start another novel, and I couldn’t do it. So I wrote short stories, and became president of a small, doomed arts non-profit³, and adapted my children’s book, The Golden Dreidel: a Klezmer Nutcracker, for a children’s theater⁴ on Broadway⁵, recorded all three of my Riverside novels for Neil Gaiman Presents/ACX (Audible, but available elsewhere, too) under the auspices of the amazing Sue Zizza’s SueMedia Productions, then fell in with a newly-formed company, Serial Box (now Realm), who invited me to create Tremontaine, a collaborative serial prequel to Swordspoint.

But write another novel I could not. I was filled with shame and bitter self-loathing. While that list looks impressive, I was painfully aware that everything listed up there would be but a mere side-gig for most of the working writers I know.⁶

I did start another novel, because a publishing friend said that queer YA fantasies were hot right now, and why didn’t I do one set in the Swordspoint/Riverside world?

So I decided to write about Alec’s bastard daughter, the angriest teenager in the world.

You may have encountered Jessica Campion in The Fall of the Kings as Theron’s dashing older sister, “the pirate queen” (“I’m not a pirate! I’m an international art dealer who happens to command her own ship!”), or even in The Privilege of the Sword in utero, being the reason the Black Rose feels a bit funny in the carriage and wonders what she ate . . . Jess also appears in “Honored Guest,” a short story I wrote for the Windling/Datlow anthology The Coyote Road: Trickster Tales.

Because Jessica Campion is a Trickster.

Which is why, even though readers who fell hard for her in TFOTK asked for a novel all about her adventures, I staunchly refused. Tricksters are impossible viewpoint characters, because their whole modus operandi is hiding & subterfuge;⁷ even their own authors, they don’t really like to let in.

But then I had a thought: what about Jessica as an awkward and angsty teen, showing how she finds her way to becoming her adult self? It could work; and it would fulfill the assignment of a queer teen novel admirably: Jess is one of my few Riverside characters who is not bisexual.

That was a good start to what become my Eternal WIP, provisionally titled City Year. My other viewpoint character is Lily Martin, a Riverside tavern girl who wants to be an actress⁸. The two of them meet, fall in love, and sneak around a lot, because Jessica is in the city to learn to be a Young Lady who will be presented to society by her cousin, the Duchess Tremontaine, as a marriageable member of the family.

(I am leaving out a lot. Because this is meant to be the Biography of the novel, rather than its contents. I’ve described more of the plotline in older Substack Letters, and even posted some excerpts, if you’d care to dig into the archives.)

For more years than I like to admit, I poked at the novel. I pinned it here, I pinned it there . . . Some years, I used my other work as an excuse not even to look at it!

What I needed was a Deadline. So I gave my beloved then-agent, Christopher Schelling, the first 100 pages of the novel,⁹ and an Outline [i.e., a Synopsis of the remainder of the plot], hoping he would get out there and sell the book on a Partial. But he didn’t think the time was right even to try to do that.¹⁰

In retrospect, I’m grateful: if I’d sold the book then, I would have finished it a lot sooner - but I would have been locked into the acquiring editor’s vision (and my own at the time). It turns out I needed to do a lot of re-thinking to turn City Year into the book it could be.

I could not have done any of this without the support, insights & listening ear of Delia Sherman, and those of my NYC writing group, who patiently read several drafts. People helped me realize that my hands were tied worrying about whether it fulfilled current requirements for Young Adult (YA) novels. “Just let it be a Riverside novel” was good advice - in theory. Because I had tens of thousands of words of material all about infighting and teenage girls - which I didn’t even enjoy writing!¹¹ But there it all was, chapter after chapter, with the characters fully formed . . . I rolled up my sleeves, took the characters, and began the arduous process of outlining, tightening and re-ordering the work.

Posted on Facebook October 25, 2021. The caption read: “Well, that’s about a week’s worth of revisions right there.”

In March of 2020, Delia & I were on our annual visit + writing retreat at the guesthouse of our friends at the edge of Tucson, Arizona, in the beautiful Sonoran desert. I was making good headway on getting a complete draft . . . .

And then a Global Pandemic turned the world upside down. No one could think - we could barely read.¹² I ended up taking up another task I’d been avoiding: shopping for a new agent. It went surprisingly well. They all requested a look at the novel-in-progress; I polished up the Partial I’d sent my old agent a few years back, figuring that while it wasn’t perfect, it didn’t suck, and would certainly give a good idea of what I was working toward. I got some generous, brilliant feedback from the two agents who were most interested in me, and I used it to do revisions (and to judge what it would be like to work with each of them).

At that point I abandoned all efforts to complete a rough draft of the whole thing, in favor of tightening and perfecting the first half of the novel so that my new agent could send out a really impressive Partial to publishers.

It took nearly two years just to do that. (Against that time, my friends Mimi & Liz had performed the Intervention that now has me dividing my life between Daily Life in NYC, and monthly Writing Retreats during which I leave home for a week and write my little brains out. I can talk more about that another time, if you want.)

Finally, after a blissful September with Delia in a remote corner of Maine, I was done. For the first time, I genuinely liked what I had written.

Writing desk. A remote corner of Maine

Before I sent it to my agent (who had read multiple drafts and loved them all so far), though, I Summoned the Council: Massachusetts colleagues with whom we’d had a high-powered writing group, before we moved and they all got famous and too busy. I did not do this lightly. But Holly Black, in particular, was the one who forced me to put in the section of TPOTS I really hadn’t wanted to write - and it’s probably the best thing in that book.

The Council is Summoned: 2022

So I knew what I was doing. I looked forward to their applause, but I was certainly willing to do a few tweaks . . . .

We assembled around the great table in Cassie’s barn.

“Do you really want to know?” they said. Well, of course I did!

They took it to pieces. It wasn’t up to the level of the other Riverside books. Where were the adults? Where were the politics?

It took me a couple of weeks just to absorb what had just happened. (Did I mention this was on my birthday, October 6th?) A part of me, of course, resisted: Didn’t my agent love it already? Wasn’t she eager to send it out?

But in the end, I sat down and began the task.

It was awful. Just awful. I can’t dooooo this!!!! I thought, as one does. I suck! It’s too haaaaard!!! But by now in my life and career, I know better. I said to myself, It’s only work. It’s not fun work, but it’s just work, and you can do it. Sit down and begin.

I moved everything around again, cheering myself up with extravagent colored stickers to let me know which POV I was in. I still hated it. I added two adult POV characters . . . .

December 1, 2022

. . . And then the magic happened. In this slog of a book, I had new characters to play with! People I loved, characters from TPOTS I had played with before. It was fun to write them as adults, dealing with the next phase of their lives - which unfortunately included The Angriest Teenager in the World. . . .

I love this novel now, and I hope you will, too. I sent it to my agent in January 2024, she strategized a list of editors to submit the ms. to, and with any luck one of them is reading it right now and saying, “OMG, I must offer Ellen Kushner scads of money for this masterpiece because I know it will sell millions!”

I’ll keep you posted.

And even though I’ve just realized that I’ve left out a huge chunk of Novel Bio Narrative,¹³ I think that’s enough for now; so as my parents would say when they had to stop a Bedtime Story read in the middle of a chapter:

And that’s a good place to stop.

Your pal,

Ellen

CODA

I know I’ve not been great at keeping up these Substack Letters in the past couple of years. After lockdown gave way to vaccines, Delia & I are back to major traveling - wonderful travels, but they eat a lot of my brain, and the rest has been eaten by trying to finish City Year.

But now:

I’ve got a new long-distance helper, Kim Rei Miller. She is acting as part-coach, part-executive assistant, with just enough Ellen Kushner Fangirl to give her the authority to advise me on what people who aren’t me might enjoy reading about here on Substack. Kim has given me a whole list of possible topics - but please feel free to add your own requests in Comments.

And now it’s my turn to fangirl Kim: She’s everything you want in a Coach: warm, sympathetic, non-judgemental, good-humored, capable, understanding, clever, intuitive . . . In the short time we’ve been working together, I’ve already passed her on to so many friends, for issues ranging from “I can’t function! Should I hate myself?” to “I cannot bear to make this phone call, could someoene else please do it!” It’s easy to get in touch with Kim for a conversation, to find out if she clicks for you the way she did for me - and see if she can help solve any of your problems. Here’s her website, Step Through Coaching.

1. Suzie Townsend of New Leaf Literary.

2. The Privilege of the Sword managed to win the Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel, and was nominated for a Nebula, so it got more than its share of foreign rights sales; as a result, we said Yes! to every invitation to attend a foreign conference - plus Sound & Spirit was still on the air on over 100 stations, even though I was no longer making new shows, which meant I was still getting to tour the live shows I had written, like Esther: the Feats of Masks. . . . we realized that it took us over 2 years to be in NYC for a total of 12 months. No wonder our place was such a mess.

3. The Interstitial Arts Foundation, championing work that falls in the interstices between genres; as Gavin Grant of Small Beer Press once explained: It’s a moving target. We did some great things with the IAF with a tremendous crew of passionate volunteers before finally closing the Foundation down ca. 2010.

4. The thrill of my life was getting to take a role in my own play, when the woman we had cast as Tante Miriam had to leave! I had a big, swoopy cloak, and great difficulty remembering my lines. Wow. Acting is hard work.

5. . . . but not the Broadway you’re thinking of: Vital Children’s Theater was at Broadway/76th Street, a long way from the glitter of Times Square.

6. You might say that’s a harsh comparison, since my old friends include high achievers like Neil Gaiman & Holly Black - but there’s plenty more folks like Tessa Gratton, a phenomenal writer who was with me for 3 seasons on Tremontaine (and eventually ran the Writing Room) while writing her own great novels with one hand tied behind her back . . . . truly, there are dozens of colleagues I could name, including many who are also raising kids, working day jobs, dealing with chronic illnesses . . . So let me have my shame here, eh?

(and in my head, Bert Lahr as the Cowardly Lion shamelessly adds, There’s only one thing I want you to do: Talk me out of it! )

7. Sure, I could have written about Jessica exclusively from other characters’ viewpoints, the way that Dorothy Dunnett does with the devastating Francis Crawford of Lymond - but that didn’t really appeal.

8. Yes, they still say “actress” in Riverside for women on the stage.

9. Yes, the FIRST 100 pages. I checked, believe me. It would be so much better if the Synopsis could be the bit at the beginning, and the Pages begin at the part of the novel where it really heats up . . . but no. Dammit.

10. Did you know that Publishing Strategy is a moving target? You learn a lot talking to literary agents: they need always to have their finger on the pulse not only of what kind of novel is selling, but how best to serve each particular client’s project at any given time. They work hard for the money.

11. I thought that was called Having a Work Ethic. But it turns out Worth Ethics don’t always produce my best work.

12. I turned to the Dido Twite books of Joan Aiken, and even found a couple I hadn’t read yet! They anchored me to safety and joy, and the sense that no matter what, things would end up all rug.

13. NOTE TO FUTURE ELLEN: Nicola Griffith! Two books!