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Shen Braun: Shen Braun
TT: Where in Canada are you currently located?
Shen Braun: Brandon, Manitoba.
TT: What is the name of your story in T15?
Shen Braun: "Costumes."
TT: Could you please share a summary of your story (without spoilers)?
Shen Braun: The weirdest teacher in school traditionally goes all out for Halloween. This year one of his students is about to discover the unbelievable reason for his obsession.
TT: What is the first sentence of your story?
Shen Braun: "I opened my sister's yearbook to the page I'd marked last night and tapped the picture with one finger."
TT: What do you love the most about this (or being in this) anthology?
Shen Braun: The stories in Tesseracts 15 are fantastic. Considering it's a Tesseracts anthology, that almost goes without saying. The thing I love most about this particular anthology, though, is the cover art. Michael O has created a gorgeous piece that never fails to fill me with curiousity, questions, and inspiration. You could probably write a hundred stories just based on that illustration.
Optional questions:
What was the best piece of writing advice you have ever received?
Shen Braun: Writing advice is pretty subjective. What works for one person may be a nightmare for the next. However, in my case, the best piece of advice I've ever received is also wonderfully simple: "Practice makes perfect." It's a cliche, but it's very true. Masters of any art or craft rarely take extended periods of time off. I can't write just when the mood strikes me, or I find the mood starts striking me less and less. Making that daily effort to get some words out of my brain is always worth it in the long run. It can feel like a waste of time if nothing's working, but even producing garbage can still teach me something about what not to do. That's my two cents, anyway.
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E. L. Chen: E. L. (Elaine) Chen
TT: Where in Canada are you currently located?
E. L. Chen: The city other Canadians love to hate-- Toronto, Ontario.
TT: What is the name of your story in T15?
E. L. Chen: "A Safety of Crowds"
TT: Could you please share a summary of your story (without spoilers)?
E. L. Chen: "A Safety of Crowds” explores celebrity and anonymity in the digital age through the interconnected lives of two young women.
TT: What is the first sentence of your story?
E. L. Chen: "Jan's phone chimes."
(Not particularly enticing, but it fits the rhythm of the first scene.)
TT: What do you love the most about this (or being in this) anthology?
E. L. Chen: I love that because it's YA--and Julie and Susan were committed to publishing at least one previously unpublished writer--there are so many names on the TOC I don't recognize.
Optional questions:
What is your main inspiration while working?
E. L. Chen: Deadlines.
(That was a brief one so I'll answer two more.)
What is the best piece of writing advice you've discovered?
E. L. Chen: "What would E. L. Chen do?"
Seriously, I find it helpful to think of "E. L. Chen" as a separate persona. It reminds me that I need to learn how to write like myself, not someone else. It helped me write the end of "A Safety of Crowds" when I was stuck. "Well, WWELCD? She'd give it an ambiguous, self-referential unhappy ending that could be interpreted several ways." I'm currently rewriting a very old unpublished story and going through the same exercise. E. L. Chen would never write something so one-dimensional, I tell myself. She'd make it more challenging, for herself and the reader.
Man, I hate that writer sometimes. She's probably more fun at parties than I am, too.
How do you feel social media has impacted your writing career?
E. L. Chen: Social media is great for keeping in touch with people and staying in the loop in whatever community with which you're involved. It has also destroyed my productivity and rewired my brain so that I can no longer focus for long periods of time like I used to.
Background: I was on Twitter for three years. I tweeted incessantly as part of the local digital and social media community. As a web designer I felt it was important for me to stay on top of how people use the internet, and it was also an invaluable source of the latest local and/or tech news.
When I stopped last June, I had clocked 12,047 tweets. Let's say each tweet was at least a dozen words. I could have written a novel, maybe two, with all those words. Instead I wrote pithy gems like, "Why, hello again, insomnia! You can just suck it."
(I won't try to justify it by saying it trained me to be a more concise writer. It only trained me to be a smartass and be quick with written quips and comebacks.)
But the main trouble is that social media channels like Twitter and Facebook that offer real-time updates become addictive. That's no secret. With Twitter, it's like a slot machine. I think studies have even shown that it appeals to the part of the brain that likes gambling. Once you follow a certain number of prolific twitterers it becomes that slot machine. Clicking refresh is like pulling the handle. Mostly you get useless crap, but you keep pulling every five minutes in the hope that something interesting will come up.
So I've quit it now, on hiatus while on I'm on mat leave but I don't think I'm going to take it up again. Which is kind of a pity because it seems the SF writing community has started jumping on. But my brain feels more at peace, and now at 3am, instead of tweeting that I'm up with the baby, I'm answering this question instead. And if I weren't doing that I'd be working on a story.
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Michele Ann Jenkins: Michele Ann Jenkins
TT: Where in Canada are you currently located?
Michele Ann Jenkins: Montreal, Quebec
TT: What is the name of your story in T15?
Michele Ann Jenkins: "Take My Waking Slow"
TT: Could you please share a summary of your story (without spoilers)?
Michele Ann Jenkins: "Take My Waking Slow" is the story of a young woman code-napped from virtual-reality program she's grown up in.
TT: What is the first sentence of your story?
Michele Ann Jenkins: “Who the null gave you access?”
TT: What do you love the most about this (or being in this) anthology?
Michele Ann Jenkins: I love the diversity of stories -- “speculative fiction” brings together so many interesting genres and it’s exciting to think it might be the first time some young readers are exposed to these ideas.
Optional Questions:
What was the best piece of writing advice you have ever received?
Michele Ann Jenkins: “Kill your darlings” -- supposedly writing advice from Faulkner, but (I had to go look this up now, of course) originally from Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch: “Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it – whole-heartedly – and delete it before sending your manuscripts to press. Murder your darlings”
I heard this advice in a high school journalism class and didn’t quite know what they meant until I was writing my first long story. I had this one scene - really just a few sentences, and I loved it, it was great, witty, writing. Only, it didn’t seem to fit in where the rest of the story was going. I actually stuck it at the bottom of the page while I wrote out the rest of the story and it just kept moving down below the edge of the screen. Finally, the story felt done and... I realized I just needed to delete that part. To kill my darlings. I think it’s really about letting the story take you where it needs to go and not holding on to your initial expectation of where you think it’s headed.
What's story have you written that's your favorite and why?
Michele Ann Jenkins: I usually don’t like going back and rereading my stories once they are done, but I do occasionally re-read “Mother’s Little Helper” (it’s coming out in an Anthology from Vehicule Press next month). It had a very short limit -- only 1200 words-- so I constantly had to take sentences out and try to get as much as I could out of every single phrase. It was an interesting exercise and I think the piece holds together really well as this short, fast, read.
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