NEWS – Page 8 – John Joseph Adams

Category: NEWS

Codex Q&A: Alcoholic Drink of Choice?

In July 2013, I served as the “editor-in-residence” for the Codex Writing Group, which meant basically I was asking a month-long AMA (“Ask Me Anything”) interview. With Codex’s permission, I’m re-posting the Q&As here on my blog. The questions were all provided by members of Codex.

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I can’t figure out if this question is non-writing related or extremely writing related… Alcoholic drink of choice?

I actually don’t drink at all (or smoke or do any drugs). I am, what you might call, a teetotaler, which as it turns out, actually has nothing to do with a fondness for tea. Which seems kind of appropriate given that I now live in a former temperance colony.

My dad was an alcoholic and he died when I was 8, so that may have something to do with it. Perhaps as a result of that, I just never developed any desire to drink. The funny thing is, growing up I had super easy access to both alcohol and weed and cigarettes, so I could have easily indulged in those if I had wanted to. It’s just never held any appeal for me.

ETA: Since I listen to metal, it might be relevant to point out that there’s this movement known as “straight edge,” which basically is just a cooler(?) way of saying “teetotaler.” Personally, I never identified as straight edge, or made any decisions about my life based on that philosophy. For me it was just a personal choice.

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Codex Q&A: What music do you mostly listen to?

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What do you mostly listen do? Classic 80’s metal? Death metal? Thrash? More punk-influenced styles? Progressive/instrumental metal? Do you prefer the more melodic sung vocals or the Cookie Monster-style delivery that’s popular these days? What are some of your favorite bands?

I talked about this a bit earlier in the Q&A. Here’s what I said about metal:

If anyone’s interested in the metal I listen to, here’s a spreadsheet export of my iTunes library. It’s almost all metal, though there’s also probably some random shit in there that I added to my library and rarely (if ever) listen to it. I do like some lighter stuff, but I just don’t listen to it very much. Here’s my current playlist.

Some of my favorite bands: Dark Tranquillity, In Flames, Protest the Hero, At the Gates, Baroness, Eluveitie

To expand a bit on that, melodic death metal is probably my favorite subgenre of metal, but I also listen to a lot of folk metal and metalcore. But my library has a pretty good mix of subgenres. There’s thrash, progressive, power metal…all kinds of stuff.

As for vox: I don’t particularly have a preference for one or the other. I tend to like bands that mix up the screaming with some clean singing.

I feel like a failure as a metalhead–and as a human being–for not mentioning Mastodon in my answer. So, yes, I do like–nay, love–Mastodon. Also, I once killed a man because he killed my goat. Though there are so many bands I could have mentioned as favorites, it’s inevitable that I would neglect to mention some. Like I didn’t mention Lamb of God!

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Codex Q&A: What gives you the creeps in fiction?

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What gives you the creeps in fiction?

I’m going to again cheat and copy this answer from an interview I did, which I think gets to the heart of your question:

For horror, the best way to grab the reader, I think, is to make them feel something visceral. It’s a tough trick to pull off, and a lot of horror fiction–even great horror fiction–doesn’t quite manage it, but when it does, man do you know you’ve got something special. I’m not easily frightened or disturbed by fiction–be it prose or film–so whenever I come across something that truly unsettles me, I immediately take notice. Otherwise, what I look for just boils down to the basic tenets of good storytelling: deft prose, engaging characters, originality… I want to be surprised and delighted by an author’s turn of phrase, or by the plot turns a story takes, or–in a case where the events are all but inevitable–that feeling of satisfaction of a story coming to a conclusion in the only way that it can.

Also, from another interview, I discussed what scares me in real life:

Other than death itself, the threat of dementia and the like robbing me of who and what I am is probably the thing that scares me most in life. When I first started working at F&SF, I had moved up to New Jersey from Florida and went to live with my grandparents, who both had gotten to the point where they couldn’t really take care of themselves anymore. My grandmother had a litany of ailments–she was mostly blind, mostly deaf, fairly crippled by arthritis and other various symptoms of old age. My grandfather, though, despite smoking a couple packs of unfiltered cigarettes a day since the age of thirteen, was pretty much healthy as a horse–except for that fact that he had Alzheimer’s. He’d kind of shamble through the day, mostly unaware of what was going on, but every now and then you’d see this glimmer of awareness in his eyes, or in something he said. But mostly he just sat and smoked cigarettes and drank coffee–all day, nonstop, probably because he couldn’t remember how recently he’d had either. Being a person who thinks a lot about zombies, I couldn’t help but think of how Romero’s zombies always seemed to just remember that one thing in life they had been most passionate about and so, in Dawn of the Dead, for instance, they flock to the mall, because that’s what our consumer culture had embedded as important in their minds. And so, as unkind as it might seem, I couldn’t help but see this parallel with my grandfather who had become very much like a zombie himself, reanimated by nicotine and caffeine.

So–yeah. That. That’s mostly what scares me. I guess that’s kind of a longwinded way of saying that I’m afraid of getting old and dying, but I thought maybe if I explained my firsthand experience with it, it would seem a less whiney and more valid dread. Though now that I’m married and have a family, I have the additional fear of losing them or having them lose me. The latter is, at least, a good thing in a way since it helps motivate me to take better care of myself.

And other than basic genre differences and what those entail, what do you look for in Nightmare slush that you wouldn’t in Lightspeed slush?

It’s mostly just about how dark a story is. Since Nightmare is for not just horror but also dark fantasy, how dark a story is is usually the deciding factor where something would be a better fit. I’ve had a number of stories that were submitted to Magazine A, but I thought fit better at Magazine B and vice versa. Sometimes it’s just a gut feeling. One of the reasons I wanted to launch Nightmare is because I was getting more good dark fiction than I could conceivably use in Lightspeed if Lightspeed were to remain a general SF/F magazine without some specific dark focus.

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Codex Q&A: Would you tell us a few personal details about yourself?

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I think sometimes writers forget that editors are people too. Would you tell us a few personal details that you feel comfortable sharing? Your cats, your hobbies, your interests, things like that?

Charles Tan (Bibliophile Stalker) just did a little interview with me along these lines: i.e., not about publishing, but about my other interests.

In an interview a couple years ago, when I was asked a similar question, I led off with “I’m a geek. I listen to metal. I follow the Oakland Raiders and the Orlando Magic. I’m obsessed with Rock Band. I have an illogical affinity for Star Trek: The Next Generation.”

Most of those things are still true. Still a geek, still a metalhead, still obsessed with TNG. I don’t follow sports as much anymore, though I’m still interested and I could fall back into it at any time. (Kind of ironic that, now that I actually live in Raiders territory, that my interest in football would wane.) Rock Band, it wouldn’t be fair to say I’m obsessed anymore. I don’t play it much these days, and in fact I’m so out of practice that I can’t really play on Expert anymore.

Metal

If anyone’s interested in the metal I listen to, here’s a spreadsheet export of my iTunes library. It’s almost all metal, though there’s also probably some random stuff in there that I added to my library and rarely (if ever) listen to it. I do like some lighter stuff, but I just don’t listen to it very much. Here’s my current playlist.

Some of my favorite bands: Dark Tranquillity, In Flames, Protest the Hero, At the Gates, Baroness, Eluveitie

Video Games

I go through periodic binges on video games. I try to avoid trying new ones a lot of the time though because I become obsessed with them and want to do nothing but play them until I’m done with them. I’m a huge fan of the Fallout series (I’m old enough that I actually played 1 & 2 even) and Skyrim. I lost a good month or more of my life to Grand Theft Auto 4.

One of my favorite books that I read in recent years is this book of video game criticism called EXTRA LIVES by Tom Bissel. Bissel is just such an astute video game critic, it’s a really enjoyable book. It probably helped that he and I seem to have an almost identical taste in video games, and reading his experience playing GTA IV was uncanny because of how similar it was to mine (though he, apparently, was also doing cocaine at the time, so that’s one major difference).

If you want to hear more about the intersection of JJA and video games, listen to Episode 84 of my podcast, The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Actually, if you want to learn more about my other interests, checking out the podcast is often a good way to do that. We talk about so many different topics on the show. A lot of the time we’re talking about publishing-related things, but we’ve done whole episodes focused on video games, horror movies, and all sorts of geeky things.

Television

I’m a big TV watcher. My favorite show ever is THE WIRE. Other favorites include BREAKING BAD, DEXTER, SOUTHLAND, HOMICIDE: LIFE ON THE STREET, FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS, ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT, THE OFFICE (US), PARKS & REC, THE WEST WING, GAME OF THRONES, HOMELAND… And, of course, as I mentioned above, STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION (though only maybe 25% of the show’s episodes are actually good, probably).

So as you can guess from my favorites there, one of my non-SF/F interests is police procedural type stuff. I’m fascinated by homicide detectives and whatnot. If I could be a homicide detective without all the dangerous/violent aspects of the job, I would totally be that (or would have tried to be). Though I may not have been very good at it, given I’d probably be crap at getting confessions out of people since, as my wife often points out, I am without guile. (And a good copy needs guile, it seems to me.)

Pets

I have two dogs and two cats, plus a third new cat that is technically Christie’s office cat, so I’m not sure whether or not to count him yet. (We’ve only had him for a couple of days, and he won’t let us pet him yet.)

Here’s a Flickr set.

The dogs are Suki and Jack. They’re outside dogs. Jack’s pretty derpy and an inveterate barker, so he wears this collar that sprays citronella in front of his face when he barks. They’re both impossible to walk.

Chewbacca and Maya are the house cats. Yoda is the new (office) cat. Chewie is basically the best cat ever, though we often say that he can’t possibly be a cat and he is clearly some other kind of cat-like creature. Maya is a very catty cat; she allows pets only when she wants them, and when she’s done with pets, the claws come out. Yoda we don’t know very well yet, but he’s been very skittish thus far. If you look at the photoset, you’ll see that Chewie is obviously my favorite.

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Codex Q&A: When looking at a translation how do you balance the story’s cultural origins with translating it into accessible prose?

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When looking at a translation, how much weight do you assign to the consideration (which militates toward preserving as much intact as possible) of having the story open a window into the soul of the country that produced it, and how much to the notion that it really should be playing on a level field with all the other stories originally written in English (which suggests rewriting the story nearly from scratch)?

Ultimately, I think that translations need to work just as well in English as any story that was written originally in English, but it ALSO may need to do what you’re saying–opening that window into the soul of the country that produced it. But that’s just for certain stories; some stories are going to be very much a product of the place that they were written in, whereas others will work well in translation, and not feel particularly foreign. For the stories where the culture is critical to the story, I think it’s definitely a difficult balancing act, to capture those elements that will convey the cultural differences to the foreign reader and yet still make the prose familiar enough to the reader that it is accessible. I’m not really sure how to offer advice for doing any of that, but I think those are the goals you need to shoot for.

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Codex Q&A: What magazines other than Lightspeed and F&SF do you like to read?

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What magazines (other than Lightspeed and F&SF) do you like to read, and how do you tend to do it, i.e. e-reader, on their website, their print form, etc.?

The magazine I read most often cover-to-cover is probably MacLife. I just recently got a new PC running Windows 8, but for the past four years I was a Mac user, and I also have an iPhone and an iPad (Mini). I expect I’ll still find much interest in MacLife, as it’s as much an iOS magazine as it is an OSX one. I read that in hardcopy, because, well, because I keep it in the bathroom. (I don’t like to bring my phone or iPad in there, at least not after an unfortunate incident in which my phone was knocked off the sink as I washed my hands an plunged into the toilet.)

Otherwise, I try to keep up with the other short fiction magazines as much as I can. Those I almost always read on my iPad these days (in the Kindle app). I almost never read fiction on my computer; I’ll almost always get it onto my iPad somehow to read it. (That doesn’t count editing, of course, which IS done on the computer.)

I used to read DECIBEL every month, but I found I was usually better off just doing my own research into metal to find stuff I liked, since half the time when I read the reviews I had no idea what kind of album it would be or even what sub-genre of metal it is.

Is the world ending?

I hope not–that’s where I keep all my stuff!

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Codex Q&A: What are your thougts on word counts?

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I’d like to hear your thoughts on word counts. From a writer’s standpoint, they seem fairly arbitrary. One publication will accept x, but prefers y, another will only accept y, and another takes anything at all. Are these purely practical concerns, do you think, or are there aesthetic decisions about “what makes an effective story” as well? If it’s more than just the practical, why do you think your preferences are what they are?

I personally have a strong preference for short stories, as opposed to longer works. Of course, I do like some longer works–not just novels, but novelettes and novellas, etc.–but typically, most often, short stories work best for me. That said, for Lightspeed setting the word count range was also definitely a practical concern; if you open the doors to longer and longer stories, it makes it harder and harder to fit that into a budget. And I don’t want to publish an issue of the magazine that only has two or three stories in it because I devoted all of my word count to two longer stories instead of finding the usual 8. People sometimes say: well, it’s all digital, so word count shouldn’t matter–there’s no limit to “page count”; of course that’s true, but while there’s no page count, there is, as I mentioned, a budget–and the cost of each issue needs to fit within it.

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Codex Q&A: Will Lightspeed expand to include flash stories?

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What are the chances of you expanding Lightspeed to include a flash story per issue?

I wouldn’t rule it out as something that will never happen, but I don’t have any current plans to implement something like that. I have considered the idea. It most likely would have to wait until we do some kind of major overhaul to the Lightspeed website, since the way it is currently setup doesn’t really give us much if any room to add additional content above and beyond what we already have on the site. Which is not to say that it couldn’t use some re-thinking; webmaster Jeremy Tolbert and I have discussed it on a number of occasions, given the magazine has changed and evolved quite a bit since the original site architecture was originally designed.

The other possibility — which could be implemented more easily — would be that I could add a flash piece to every issue, but make it exclusive to the ebook editions. The question there is: Would more people buy the ebook editions because I add that to each issue? And/or would it make my existing ebook readers happier with the magazine to have such bonus content? (Too bad I didn’t have this as a question on our reader survey.)

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Codex Q&A: At which local retailer can I redeem all of my rejection letters?

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Looking through my rejections, I figure you’ve read more of my fiction than anybody aside from myself, even including my wife. My question is, at which local retailer can I redeem all of my rejection letters? I’d like to upgrade to platinum status.

Also, are the old F&SF ones expired, or can I still redeem those ones?

Anyway, keep doing what you do. You give editors a good name!

My wife and I are currently in negotiations to decide how many rejections a writer needs to present in order to qualify them for a free drink (redeemable at convention bars). We’ll let you know.

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Codex Q&A: Has anyone wanted to study how you violate causality by sending rejections so fast they arrive before the story was sent?

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Has any one from the scientific community ever approached you to study how you violate causality by sending rejections so fast they arrive before the story was sent? There’s got to be a path to alternate energy sources in that line of inquiry.

I have not yet been approached about such a study. If I were, I would gladly participate. I am happy to do my part to benefit humanity.

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