Diving Into the Wreck
In an effort to make up for a lack of interviews a month or so ago, I will be doubling up weekly interviews for the next couple of weeks. Enjoy and thanks for your patience.
Kristine Kathryn Rusch, as detailed at her website, is “an award-winning mystery, romance, science fiction, and fantasy writer. She has written many novels under various names, including Kristine Grayson for romance, and Kris Nelscott for mystery. Her novels have made the bestseller lists–even in London–and have been published in 14 countries and 13 different languages.
“Her novel, Diving into the Wreck, will be published by Pyr in November. The sixth in her Retrieval Artist series, Duplicate Effort, appeared in February. Her next short story collection, Recovering Apollo 8 and Other Stories, will appear from Golden Gryphon in spring of 2010.” As informative and interesting as her website clearly is (given how much I just quoted it), I was curious to learn more about her via an e-mail interview. My thanks to Kevin J. Anderson for getting me in contact with Rusch, and even more thanks to Rusch herself for her valuable time.
Tim O’Shea: What can tell folks about your new short story, “Flower Fairies,” which just appeared in the new issue of Realms of Fantasy?
Kristine Kathryn Rusch: I usually let the stories speak for themselves. So I hope people enjoy it!
O’Shea: From 2000 to the mid-2000s, you wrote several books under the pseudonyms “Kris Nelscott” and “Kristine Grayson”. Also you and your husband (Dean Wesley Smith) wrote under the name “Sandy Schofield” in the 1990s. Were the choices to work under different pseudonyms more of a business logistical decision as opposed to a creative choice?
Rusch: It’s both. I am a voracious reader, and I’ve learned that readers don’t always care for everything a writer does. So when I do something radically different, I put an open pen name on it. That way, my Grayson readers who are expecting a light funny romance don’t get surprised by The Fey novels, which are violent fantasy novels with no romance at all.
O’Shea: When did you first come up with the idea for The Freelancer’s Survival Guide–is this your first book to have capitalized upon the Kindle platform?
Rusch: I really haven’t done a lot of Kindle work with it, except to put the blog on Kindle. It’s my first time going directly to the readers, however, and asking them to support what I do rather than going to a publisher first. It’s an experiment. I’m hoping it turns out well, because it’s been fun so far.
O’Shea: When you’re writing a romance novel or another of your genre specialties, do you ever find yourself wanting to rework the concept into another genre?
Rusch: Yes, and I often do. Usually my books come out as short stories first, so you can see the roots of the longer project in the story. If I feel I didn’t handle the concept quite right, I try again, and sometimes get an entirely different book in an entirely different genre. Writing is mysterious, but it’s also fun.
O’Shea: You and your husband regularly host workshops (as shown here at his website), how did this concept first come about?
Rusch: Because of our background—we owned a publishing company, we’ve both edited extensively, and we’ve written in a variety of genres—we started giving short presentations on the business of writing. Then we realized that people needed more. We taught at Clarion, and got in trouble for teaching business (!) We were told writers didn’t need that. Since we both knew writers needed business training more than anything—most writers’ careers have business problems that destroy a less-than-savvy writer—we decided to teach a Master Class to writers who’ve already been published, and whose careers have stalled. So far as I know, we’re the only people in the country (maybe the world, since we’ve had students from England and Germany and Canada) teaching that side of things regularly. We’ve added other master-level courses, and we still occasionally do the short version for newcomers (although “short” is now 2 days long).
O’Shea: Your novels have been “published in 14 countries and 13 different languages”. Is there any particular country that it really surprised you that your work had been translated? Have you ever had an occasion to visit some of these countries for book signings?
Rusch: My mystery novel, Hitler’s Angel (which is being reissued in England next year), was purchased by Israel and became a bestseller there. I didn’t know then, and I know now, that literature about WWII is big in Israel, but at the time, it surprised me. And yes, I’ve been to France a couple of times for book signings. I did a tour in 2007 for my Kris Nelscott mystery novels, and learned it’s tricky to do signings in another country. Even though I speak a little French, I still had to have the customers write out their names for me, since I have no idea how to spell most French names. It was fun, scary, and enlightening, all at the same time.
O’Shea: Did you find out around the same time that your “short story, ‘G-Men,’ will appear in The Best American Mystery Stories and The Year’s Best Science Fiction, the first time the same story will appear in both a mystery and science fiction best of the year collection”?
Rusch: I found out in the same month—January. Boy, was I a happy camper.
O’Shea: Could you give me a little background on your Diving into the Wreck universe (which includes the upcoming November novel of the same name as well as the novella, “Room of Lost Souls”)?
Rusch: I had the idea for “Diving” for a long time. Dean used to scuba dive (and teach it), and he had stories that intrigued me. I thought about wrecks in space, and I thought about exploring them. And suddenly, I had the first novella. The second I thought would be a different universe, but it wasn’t. Then there’s a third (with different characters) called “The Spires of Denon” which was in Asimov’s April/May issue. I’m currently working on a fourth from yet another point of view. The novel is coming out in November, and so far I’m very pleased with everything. The cover is spectacular, and Pyr has even advertised in Asimov’s to let the readers who follow the series of novellas know that the book is coming.
O’Shea: You released the seventh volume in the Retrieval Artist series this year, Duplicate Effort. Do you have a finite end in mind for the seires, or do you hope to be writing the series for several years to come?
Rusch: I see my Retrieval Artist books as my 87th Precinct novels. For your readers who aren’t familiar with Ed McBain, let me say that he wrote (I believe) 80 of them, from differing points of view, from the 1960s until his death a year or so ago. So no finite end. Right now, though, Miles Flint is on hiatus to raise his daughter. He has come back already in a novella that Analog will publish in its January/February issue. I’m hoping to sell a book about his daughter Talia, and publishers are considering it at the moment. And eventually, DeRicci will have her own book, and so will Nyquist, and several others. The universe is big; there are many stories to tell.
Which contemporary writers do you think should be getting more critical and mainstream attention?
Honestly, I care less about attention than sales. I want all of my favorite writers to be bestsellers so that they can continue writing without worrying about money. Of course, that won’t happen. Mostly, I have no idea what’s happening with other people’s careers. I write about the writers I enjoy in the Recommended Reading section of my blog. I also have trouble remembering who is where because I read a lot of my students’ work before it gets published. So I’m seeing a lot of really good stuff in manuscript that eventually hits print months/years later.
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