All the Best Highlights You Can’t Miss From TorCon2022’s Afternoon Author Panel
I never would have known about this free book community event, but happened to see Tor’s Instagram post announcing #TorCon2022 the day before it happened, so I had to check it out. If you didn’t get a chance to attend, I’ve gathered the highlights, incredible insights from some of our favorite SFF authors, as well as some unexpected answers they had for a question I was lucky enough to ask.
I attended the afternoon panel, “Something wicked this way comes” and it was by far my most anticipated, as it included Olivie Blake, one of my favorite authors from this past year. She also announced a 7-figure deal this week with Tor to bring to life more of her stories, and I cannot wait! Also included on the panel were SFF authors, Susan Dennard, Catriona Ward, and Rita Woods.
Interviewer Kayti Burt jumped right in by asking them how darkness plays a role in their upcoming books. Olivie answered saying she sees The Atlas Six series as more of a bleak story rather than dark, “I always think of it as ‘true academia’, rather than dark academia.”
Rita similarly expressed this sentiment: “I don’t see my books as dark, I see the world as dark…or at least having a very dark shadow that hangs over it….I think the books are an opportunity for me to imbue the characters with some light…you know…a way of taming some of the chaos.”
Catriona so eloquently puts it as, “It’s impossible to have the darkness without the promise of light isn’t it? Because that’s what throws it into relief and allows us to see it and explore it.
“We turn to these books…to make sense of things which are difficult to make sense of in the world outside…in a way a perfect place to put the darkness is inside a book…it’s the architecture that contains these fears, and…part of the writer’s job, I think, is to sort of look their own fears in the face, and share them with the readers, and hopefully walk through it together, and come out the other side.”
Wow. She did go to Oxford after all, so I shouldn’t be surprised by her lyrical points of view. *Immediately adds her book to my TBR.
The panel then dug into magic systems, one of my favorite topics. Rita shared a quote she’d taken as inspiration for her own books, Remembrance and The Last Dreamwalker:
“Magic is just science that hasn’t been explained or discovered yet.”
“I like to visualize it that way,” she says, “That these are things that the human organism is probably capable of, we just haven’t reached our Star Trek moment yet, where the science has caught up with the amazing ability of what humans have.”
In addition to writing, Rita is a doctor, and Director of a wellness center. How does this impact her work as a storyteller? She gets a little gleam of glee in her eyes as she shares, “One of the skills you have to have as a doctor is attention to detail…you get to, legit, listen in and get to be part of other people’s stories and their lives without getting arrested….people come to you…[you have] on some level the honor of being invited into people’s most personal lives, and most personal secrets…that also provides fodder for some amazing stories, and if you’re a writer, the universe is your Petri dish.”
Kayti, of course, has to ask as a doctor if Rita has any pet peeves for authors writing injuries and first aid. It’s an immediate “yes.”
“I’m that annoying person…going, ‘Really? You got DNA back in 45 minutes?’ Or they’ll come up with these injuries that people have, that in my mind, I’m thinking, ‘yeah, that’s not survivable,’ but the person will lay in a field giving soliloquies. I’m thinking, ‘Your intestines are in the mud. Move on and die.’”
Rita is rapidly becoming my favorite person. *Also adds her book to my TBR.
But then we get into Susan Dennard’s book, The Luminaries, and we find out it actually started out as a “choose-your-own-adventure” story on Twitter. This is officially my favorite author panel of all time. Technically it was a book she’d tried to sell back in 2013, and didn’t receive a great response from publishers. She got a lot of, “hmmm urban fantasy/paranormal is dead.” So six years later, she had a miscarriage, and was in a bit of a dark place, and decided to “DM the internet”.
“Let’s see if anyone would answer my poll,” she says. “The next thing I knew, I was updating it every day as they voted on what the character would do.”
The experiment lasted about six months. And then after having a baby, she began working on a final draft. She realized quickly she wouldn’t be able to stick to the story they had told on Twitter, but she kept the same world and same characters. She didn’t leave it all behind though, saying, “There’s lots of little Easter eggs for the people who were part of the Twitter thing…little moments they’ll recognize.”
Catriona’s book is being published in the U.S. for the first time after having been out in the U.K. for a few years. Kayti asks how this feels or if she thinks it will hit different being released in a new country. Catriona admits you never really know, but says, “What I do feel very strongly…is it’s quite emotional coming back to this book, because its my second novel…and I was, on a molecular level, I was a completely different person when I wrote it…it’s incredibly fulfilling to have it be given a second life.”
As someone who started out self publishing, Olivie feels much the same. “I had been self-publishing for a few years,” she explains of how The Atlas Six came to life. “I had been rejected so many times, and I started to think maybe there isn’t space for me…maybe they just don’t want my voice, so I’m gonna write whatever I want.”
This is your reminder, dear reader, to never give up on your dreams, or belief that your voice and point of view matters, and that there are people waiting to hear it.
Speaking of POVs, Kayti also asks the authors about the choice to have multiple POVs, and what they like about this as a formal structure.
Olivie immediately jumps in, “I just want to say that in my experience there’s no such thing as a reliable narrator, + so if there's only one POV, I just assume everything is a lie…like there’s no objective narrator in The Atlas Six. What is objectively true is for the audience to decide.
“That’s part of what’s fun about storytelling. The part about real life where you only get certain insights and you kind of figure out what’s happening and who’s right, and who’s telling the truth.”
Catriona agrees, and says, “Very life-like…the subjective, like very close first-person narrative–it’s exactly how we muddle through life with very imperfect, partial knowledge…I love how it destabilizes that security that fiction sometimes holds…the more like life it is, the more it sort of brings all of that anxiety and all of the…habitual uncertainty and doubt we live with every day into the text…it’s almost like an oppressive act…you’re forcing the reader into a perspective that may not be entirely comfortable.”
So what hobbies do they have outside of writing that keep them creatively inspired? After dead silence where they rack their brains trying to make sure they have a life outside of writing (does any writer, truly?), Olivie shares an unexpected answer: “I had a baby and I still don’t sleep more than two consecutive hours, but I do boxing and Muay Tai, and that is something I specifically do to be able to write fight scenes better…I wanted it to be hand to hand combat, as opposed to, you know, weaponry. Although I shot a gun…my husband is from Iowa, so I had his brother, like take me out in the middle of nowhere and shoot some coke cans so I knew what it felt like to pull the trigger.”
Catriona likes to ride horses when she can, saying it’s very much a meditative state for her, “You shut off the…surface level thoughts…I don’t know about you guys, but all one does is sit there and think like, incessant chatting inside one’s head, you know, about ideas…and sometimes something physical…can stop the noise and allow things to surface.”
Susan mentions she reads a lot of non-fiction books, and gets a lot of her ideas for stories from those. Rita agrees, non-fiction can be a great place to source ideas.
“I love magical-realism. The idea that the boundary of what can be, what might be, and what is possible in the everyday, and the mundane, that boundary can be very elastic, and can be pushed to its limit,” Rita says, and continues. “I also love non-fiction as well. If you mine the sources of history…some of the historical things that have happened are almost more unbelievable than anything we could imagine as fiction writers. I don’t even consider myself a writer so much as a court stenographer…stuff is happening, and I just record it…I’m just writing down what the characters are telling me to say.”
Olivie also draws inspiration from what’s happening in the current world climate and mentions, “This whole series is being written from…’How is it possible to be ethical in a society where it’s impossible to be ethical?’…it’s a very timely discussion.”
Sometimes fiction allows us to have conversations and discussions we wouldn’t otherwise be willing to have, because it’s happening in a make believe world. But even then, some people refuse to take SFF seriously.
Catriona once again describes it perfectly: “The genre makes people uncomfortable, because it deals with the big feelings and big fears…we’re not supposed to feel afraid because we’re grown ups…I think that’s why people react to it as if it’s a bit childlike, because it has this…archetypical, grand structure to it…it doesn’t pretend to be simulation of reality…there’s a temptation to dismiss it, or trivialize it, when actually it’s a very profound way of talking about ourselves and who we are and what we could be.”
And for those anxiously awaiting any teasers on The Atlas Paradox, the panel closed out with Olivie sharing this of the upcoming second installment: “I’m allowed to say alliances shift…I had very little time to write it…I wrote the whole first draft in four weeks…I made decisions on the spot about what should happen next, and I think they will be surprising to the audience because they were surprising to me.”
Alliances change?! Now I’m even more concerned. Tor, if you happen to see this, I desperately need this in my hands stat, ok? Please.
Pre-order their books here:
The Atlas Paradox by Olivie Blake, October 25th, 2022
The Luminaries by Susan Dennard, November 8th, 2022
Little Eve by Catriona Ward, October 2022
The Last Dreamwalker by Rita Woods, September 20th, 2022
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