Lorina Stephens, a Canadian writer of fantasy fiction, is in the process of launching her second novel, From Mountains of Ice. She’s also launched herself into the changing landscape of publishing, by starting her own independent press, called Five Rivers Publishing. Her previous books include the novel Shadow Song, and a collection of short stories, And the Angels Sang. Lorina’s chosen my little simian-obsessed corner of the web as one of the stops in her virtual tour! I interviewed her (via email) recently, and here’s our conversation:

Mark Rayner: So how is the launch going?

Lorina Stephens: The launch has gone well, thank you for asking. I’m receiving some good reviews, one in particular from Brian Rathbone, author of The Dawning of Power who has said, ‘Among the best fantasy books I’ve read in quite some time.’

The actual (versus virtual) part of the fall tour continues November 28 when I appear at Coles Books, Orangeville Mall, Orangeville, Ontario. After that I’m at Chapters at Stone Road Mall, Guelph, Ontario on December 5, and Smith Books, Heritage Mall, Owen Sound, Ontario on December 11. More details about that can be found on Five Rivers’ website, through www.BookTour.com or Facebook.

MR: Can you tell my readers a bit about the book?

LS: From Mountains of Ice is a classic tale of a fall from grace and subsequent redemption, set in an Italian Renaissance milieu. Sylvio di Danuto has spent the past decade banished from Simare’s court, stripped of land, ancestral home and title – from Minister of National Security to back-country bowyer. But not any bowyer; Sylvio creates bows from laminations of wood and human bone, bows that are said to speak, bows known as the legendary arcossi.

And now, after a decade, he is called back to the capitol, summoned by his Prince whom he suspects is a patricide and insane. His very life is in danger and with it the country he has served through all his days.

I tend to enjoy approaching reality obliquely. Sometimes a message is better carried in metaphor. And in this case I felt I would be allowed greater latitude to examine the concept of honour in a fantasy setting rather than in a contemporary.

There’s also the whole archery aspect of the novel; that is, the fabrication of the arcossi, a variation of a longbow made with laminations of human bone, and bows that, because of my fantasy world’s simpatico (albeit rare) with the dead, are sentient.

MR: I’ve noticed you do a lot of readings around Ontario — how do you get so much exposure?

LS: Do I receive a lot of exposure? From my side of the universe it feels as though I’m shouting into the abyss and no one can hear. I keep thinking of new and better ways of getting the word out to readers that I’m here, that I have something to say and hopefully say it fairly well in a fairly entertaining manner. What exposure I have received is the result of plain old hard work, and the belief that the only reason I’ll be a failure is if I make that a reality. My destiny is my own to shape. So I pick up the phone. I knock on doors. I fire of emails. I research. And with polite persistence I go about my work as a writer.

It also helps that I keep a quotation from Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson running like a mantra through my head: ‘The only failures are those who fail to try.” Almost sounds like something Yoda would say: ‘There is no try. There is only do.’

MR: Yes, that’s one of my favourite lines from Star Wars! So what prompted you to start up your own independent press then?

LS: Frustration with the arrogance of legacy houses — plain and simple. There are so many valid, talented Canadian voices out there who need a break, a chance for their stories to get out there and be read by an appreciative, and I believe a hungry audience who are sick to their teeth of a clone of some vampire tale, or some doomed earth. When I’d forged the distribution channels for Five Rivers, a colleague of mine, Paul Lima, approached me about publishing his writing book, How to Write a Non-fiction Book in 60 Days. He’d received a rather questionable offer from a legacy house, framed with required sales quotients and all, and decided nix to that and asked me to take a shot at it.

Knowing Paul as I do, and trusting implicitly in his integrity and skill, I thought sure, why not? His book lead to another colleague’s dictionary of historic colour names and definitions, which led to a six book deal with Nate Hendley for three biographies, an investigative book on crystal meth, one on China as an emerging super-power and one on the motivational aspects of writing. That in turn led to another book deal with well-known gardening duo Patrick Lima (Paul Lima’s brother) and John Scanlan.

In 2009 Five Rivers published three books. In 2010 we’ll publish seven, with another two confirmed for 2011.

MR: That’s exciting. So as a publisher, where do you stand on this whole, give-things away-and-that-will-increase-your-profile approach? Are you in the Cory Doctorow school or the Harlan Ellison camp?

LS: At the risk of sounding like I don’t have an opinion, I’m in the middle of the two extreme camps. I’ve been marketing products for years in one form or another and I know from experience that if you give something away there is a perception the item isn’t worth anything anyway, and hence you aren’t, and so the expectation is that you’ll always give your product, or your time, for free. However, I also think it’s good to temper a ‘pay me or else’ approach with a little humility and good will. It doesn’t hurt to offer a limited-time give-away, to offer to speak for a charity, to pay it forward, as it were.

I’m going to sound rather grey in my approach, I’m afraid, but I believe a moderate, middle course is usually the wiser approach. It works in most life decisions, and there’s no reason to expect it can’t work in a business model. Equally, you have to add some panache to that middle course, else you end up simply pabulum instead of a round mouthful of flavour.

So, yes, I expect to be paid for my work. I don’t expect you to pay for my mortgage every time you purchase my product, but I do expect to be paid. And yes, I’m completely open to distributing promotional copies of work with the complete understanding you’ll live up to your end of the bargain. If you don’t, I won’t rampage. That would be gauche. But I will remember. I do have a very long memory.

MR: I have been warned! So, onto my current obsession: The book. Does it have a future?

LS: Of course it does. I don’t think we’ll ever replace print, not completely. When we started making recordings of music, did that replace the live concert? No. When we started listening to radio, did that replace reading? Certainly not. When we started watching television, did that replace radio? Not at all.

The fact we have digital readers is a thing of marvel and wonder. Instead of carrying a novel in my bag on the commuter train, I can carry a considerable library on that train, while away the time, and then tuck that small reader into the bag without worry of it becoming dog-eared.

However, when I go to bed at night, or when I lay out in the afternoon shade under the apple tree on the hill behind our home, it’s that paper book I’m going to retrieve and allow to fall on my face when I succumb to sleep. There’s a sensual, interactive thing that happens with print that can’t happen with a digital reader, the smell of the book whether old or new, the feel of pages under your thumbs, the way light plays across the page as worlds materialize in your mind.

All of these technologies have a place in our lives, if we choose to allow that. One does not necessarily absent the other.

You see, that middle road, Grasshopper.

MR: A Kung Fu reference too! Thanks for that and the interview Lorina!

A Genre Twisting Magazine of SF and Fantasy

Okay, Bart R. Leib is making all of us guys look bad, and he must be stopped. I met him over the weekend, when he stopped by our vendor’s table, and became intrigued with the funky covers of my publisher’s wares (an independent literary press in Canada called Crossing Chaos.) Then he spotted MARVELLOUS HAIRY, and he seemed even more intrigued. In fact, he read the blurb and said:

“I’m intrigued.”

We chatted for a while, and I may be having a black out (not the only WorldCon-related memory short-circuit) but I think he failed to mention that he is the editor of Crossed Genres, a very cool (and twisted) SF-Fantasy mag.

But I digress, I was speaking about how he’s making all of us guys look bad. Well, you have to go read it for yourself, but he created an epic scavenger hunt for his wife to follow on her birthday, and I was quite honored to have Marvellous Hairy included in the mix, when he had me inscribe: “To Kay. Your next clue is ‘Y’. Happy birthday!”

You can read all about it at the Crossed Genres blog. Then perhaps you can think of other ways to intrigue him. (I imagine painful twisting might work, or perhaps a simple mass drubbing by all the other shown up husbands out there.)

Seriously, though, it was very cool to be included, and Kay obviously enjoyed it.

More WorldCon to come.

The prolific Ahmed Khan has just released the list of stories appearing in one of his upcoming anthologies, Fun Times in Strange Lands.

I was pleased to see that “Hounding Manny” made the grade for this anthology, which is aimed at “precocious” 10-12 year olds who enjoy speculative fiction. Fully illustrated too, which is cool.

“Hounding Manny” is a reprint of a story originally published in Oceans of the Mind. You can find “Hounding Manny” here. Bonus points if you spot the inspiration for the title character. Come on it’s easy!

I’m starting to get excited about the release of MARVELLOUS HAIRY, and I found this round-up of quotes about, and relating to, the publisher, Crossing Chaos Enigmatic Ink (CC). I particularly liked this one from Tom Bradley, and why he describes CC as “The Enigmatic Polygeneration”:

“The envy inspired by exquisitely smooth foreheads and cheeks; the superciliousness engendered by wrinkles and arthritic gaits; the mutual revulsion that results in commingling the disparate B.O.s of maturity and im-; the disharmony of voices cracked with senectitude and late teen hormones; the ambiguous eros ignited when the androgyne grace of late adolescence rubs against grizzled moobs; the subcortical whiffs of the Freudian family-disease that obtrude on every animal awareness when figures substitutable for parent and spawn rub elbows, when personal encounters take place among people separable by more than a sibling’s number of years — none of this signifies through the hermetic medium of the internet.”

Tom Bradley, at 3A Magazine.

Warning: while this post may be about comedy, don’t expect it to be comic.

I would consider the quote “comedy is tragedy plus time” an old saw, but it’s still an interesting idea. Could every tragedy become funny, given enough time? The British comedian David Mitchell seems to think so. (I’ll link to his video rant, which tries to explain why Vikings raping and pillaging in the Dark Ages is funny, but the Soviet takeover of Berlin in 1945 isn’t yet, below.)

The quote should really be, tragedy plus time allows comedy. Depending on how you portray events, you can still achieve either a laugh or tears, and sometimes both. That’s what art is all about, right? But can you imagine taking a scene say, Schindler’s List, and turning that into a rip-roaring farce? Wait, no! Don’t even try to imagine it, because, as they say in another cliché: “it’s too soon. ” You can make jokes about Nazis (not much fun in Stalingrad), but please, no jokes about their atrocities. Personally, genocide strikes me as one of those events that is impossible to turn into comedy, no matter how long ago it happened. (But perhaps I’m not really trying. Maybe there is some good humor to be had in the Church’s elimination of the Cathars, for example.)

Read the rest of this post at The Skwib …>