Delighted to share more news on the awards front: Braking Day has been longlisted for the British Science Fiction Association’s Novel of the Year Award! Not only that but Kekai Kotaki‘s excellent cover has been nominated for the artwork. Kekai lives in Seattle, so it’s possible he doesn’t even know yet! Regarding the cover, some credit must also be given to my agent, the estimable Brady, whose concept of Michaelangelo’s Creation of Adam in space was the starting point for Kekai’s (inter) stellar treatment.
Admittedly, the BSFA long list is long and includes entries from Gareth L. Powell, Adrian Tchaikovsky, and Emily St. John Mandel, so this is probably the last we’ll hear of it, but it’s the company you keep, right? Super excited!
I have started working on the second draft of E_________. It’s an interesting experience to return to the opening chapters of a novel because, in this case, you’re reading words you put on the page a whole year before you typed the last ones. A lot has changed in the interval, not least your understanding of the characters and the journey you sent them on, so there’s a fair bit of work to be done to make sure everything is internally coherent. But it’s fun work. An opportunity to layer and foreshadow and polish. I find it soothing, actually, a bit like sanding down an almost finished bit of woodwork (not that I’d be caught dead doing that: I’d undoubtedly find some way to stuff it up) in preparation for putting on the varnish and stepping out with the finished product. The stress of creating something has gone and the stress of worrying that the finished product is no good has yet to arrive. This is the comfortable middle, where you can just lose yourself in words, and story, and structure.
As we aim to close the books on 2022, I’m not going to lie: it’s been a rough year. Putin’s (re)invasion of Ukraine had a brutal effect on my day job, making the time for writing even shorter than usual – and frequently wiping it out altogether. But despite that a surprising amount got done on the writing front. Braking Day came out in April; A Quiet Teacher hit the shelves in November; Worlds Long Lost, the anthology to which I contributed the story, The Wrong Shape to Fly, was published in December; and I finally (finally!) finished my first draft of E________, to which I plan to return in the New Year, once the froth of it has settled out of my head.
Nor is that all. I HAVE BEEN NOMINATED FOR A LITERARY PRIZE! Which, let me tell you, never ever happens to me. Not even in school.
I am one of the finalists for the 100 Year Starship (100YSS) 2022 Canopus Awards for Excellence in Interstellar Writing in the published long form fiction category (novels and longish novellas). Canopus recognizes “the finest fiction and non-fiction works that expand our understanding of the challenges, opportunities, pitfalls, and rewards of interstellar space exploration.” Cool, right?
What I’m really excited about is not just the nomination but the company I get to keep. These are real serious SF writers! And now I’m one of them!
Wow. Who’d ‘a thunk it?
Wait. There’s more! I made a few year’s-best-SF lists as well! I was particularly pleased to make the Library Journal’s “Best SF/Fantasy of 2022” (apologies in advance: the link is hiding behind the LJ paywall) and also the Track of Words website’s “Best SFF Books of 2022.” Track of Words always provide really thoughtful reviews, so it was really touching to read their year-end summary:
“A brilliant tale of deep-space travel upon the generation ship Archimedes, I’m actually tempted to say that this is the best book I’ve read all year (despite reading it way back in March). The premise is fantastic – a generation ship making preparations for finally slowing down as it approaches its destination, tensions rising within the stratified crew, and one young officer worrying that he’s going mad as he starts seeing impossible things. It’s a fascinating story full of wonderful characters exploring what life might be like for those who have only ever known the constraints of a starship. I don’t think I’ve ever felt such a dichotomy of beauty and terror as I did reading Oyebanji’s portrayal of space and the fragility of life on board the Archimedes, but the world building is so clever and so vibrant that I still sort of wish I could experience it for myself! It’s also just a really smart plot, and if you have any interest in space-set sci-fi then I really can’t recommend this enough.“
It’s just so gratifying when something lands with someone the way you intended. I enjoy writing. But writing that brings enjoyment to others is a whole other level.
So, not such a bad year after all, maybe. And here’s wishing you all the best for 2023.
I am finally done! The first draft of E________ is finished! It’s taken a whole year – six months more than I thought it would. Of course, that was in the heady days before the invasion of Ukraine became all-consuming, combined with a move from Pittsburgh to Edinburgh, so I suppose I should be gratified that I finished at all. I was typing away in an early-morning coffee shop on the Lothian Road, realized that the last sentence I had written was, in fact, the last sentence, paused for a moment, and banged out the two words writers fantasize about from time to time: “THE END.”
In movies, when a writer types “The End,” he or she really means it. The actor’s face registers a sense of achievement (broad grin, wry smile, whatever), they lean back, reach for a stiff drink, loved one, or both, and wait for the end credits to show up.
Of course, as I now know, typing “The End” like this simply means that I am done with the first draft. I will walk away from the MS for several weeks, until it’s half-forgotten, and then return for a second draft, and then a third. After which it will go to my agent, the estimable Brady, who will make a number of excellent suggestions requiring more drafting, after which (fingers crossed) it will go out to the publishers, whose editors will have further suggestions of their own. I did play around once with not typing “The End” until everything was finished, but the actual end (sometime after the copy editors have had their say) occurs after the text is set in stone, so it’s simply not practical – unless, I suppose, you want to add “The End” as an eleventh-hour correction accompanied by profuse apologies.
Er . . . no.
But even though I knew that typing “The End” was not a statement of truth, I still leaned back with a smile of triumph and reached out for a slug of coffee (which always tastes better if you don’t have to make it yourself). Because if typing “The End” isn’t strictly true, it’s not quite a lie, either. It is a stage in the process, and a really important one. You have written a novel, after all. Everything else is, in a sense, just tidying up. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, a first draft is not the end of the story, it’s not even the beginning of the end. But it is, most definitely, the end of the beginning.
The last few days I’ve been in an Artemis frame of mind, devouring every molecule of news about NASA’s much delayed test run to translunar space and back again. Another step in our slow, halting return journey to the moon.
The Eagle is landing.
And, of course, you can’t read about Artemis without reliving the Apollo program of the sixties and early seventies. The one that actually put human beings on another world. The one where, in 1969, the part of the planet with access to television watched a lunar module descend into a puffing of dust and announce, “The Eagle has landed.” The one that suckered a generation of children into thinking that they’d grow up to live offworld, one day. Aging Brits may remember the TV series UFO (which featured Benedict Cumberbatch’s mom, by the way), in which there was a regular shuttle service to the moon running in — wait for it — 1980.
*Sigh*
I’ve been on a couple of journeys of my own, both literary and literal, since I last posted. On the literary front, my murder mystery, A Quiet Teacher, has now been published by Severn House. We were lucky enough to garner a starred review in Booklist, which opened thus:
“Imagine John le Carré attempting an Agatha Christie mystery. Or the other way around. In any case, that mix is at the heart of this stunning novel.”
I’ll take it!
The sky isn’t usually this blue
As for the literal journey, we are in the process of settling into our new life in Edinburgh, Scotland. We have rented an apartment in the Old Town, the medieval neighborhood that huddles around the Castle. In addition to being almost indescribably steep (medieval castles were seldom sited on flat, easily accessible terrain, apparently) Old Town is full of nooks and crannies and cobbled streets. Oddly, though, living here has an almost Manhattan-like vibe. It’s extremely crowded, driving is more trouble than it’s worth, and everything you could possibly need or want is within walking distance. And, also like New York, the city is at the edge of the sea. We can see it from the apartment, and we’re so high up, the gulls glide by our window, big and weathered and very much in their element.
I wonder, when they open their wide beaks, if they keen with a Scottish accent.
We’re not hoarders – honest! You should see what we left behind…
I am sitting at my local coffee shop (Coffee Tree Roasters on Walnut) and mostly looking out the window as the sun comes up. I’d come down here early in the morning intent on adding a page or two to E________ when it occurred to me that, in all likelihood, I will never write here again – certainly not regularly. My day job’s much- threatened transfer from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to Edinburgh, Scotland is finally happening. Tomorrow, I drive the cats to Washington, D.C. to meet the people who will acclimate them to their cargo crates but fail to explain important concepts like aircraft, jet lag, or mice with Scottish accents. That job done, I will board a flight at Dulles and return to the land of my birth.
I’ve been away for 23 years and although I’ve visited regularly, living there again is going to be a completely different experience. I have so much to learn. What the heck is Sky Atlantic when it’s at home? Why is the paper money made of plastic? Where is the sun? It’s going to be an adjustment.
Like my mother, sisters and child, I was born on a Thursday. According to the old rhyme, Thursday’s child has far to go, and our family’s Thursday-born have certainly lived up to the prophecy. I am not a hundred percent certain I could recite all the places I have lived at this point. Leaving somewhere is miserable. You make friends, you get to know your way around, you feel . . . settled.
But arriving somewhere is exciting. A new adventure awaits. There will be new people to meet, new sights to see, new stories to hear and, of course, new stories to tell. I will need to find a new coffee shop, though.
When I got here this morning, I gave the barista my usual order. I didn’t tell her it was to go because that would have made no sense: I was staying to write, after all. Nor did I tell her that this would be my last time here: like all my family’s Thursday-born, I hate goodbyes.
I did, however, leave a ridiculous tip. I hope it’s enough.
It’s been a far stormier journey than I could ever have anticipated. In my own mind I expected to drop anchor in a sheltered cove labeled “The End” maybe six months after I set out. Yet here I am, five months past that, still sailing the ocean blue, thanks mainly to the hurricane unleashed by the ill-advised Russian invasion (re-invasion, really) of Ukraine. Given that my day job (financial counterterrorism) requires an intimate knowledge of, and involvement with, sanctions, the West’s unprecedented economic response led to several months of 16-hour days turning political pronouncements into financial reality. It was important work but utterly miserable, the only consolation being (as I’ve said before) that no one was trying to drop artillery shells onto the roof of my house.
But 16-hour days are not conducive to creative endeavor. If I have any talent at all it is not for writing so much as time management: 16 hours of work plus two hours of family time, face stuffing and chores leaves six hours for . . . sleep and nightmares. There is literally no time to write. I don’t care how motivated or organized you are, time is a zero-sum proposition. If you can’t kick something else out of your schedule, you can’t write, end of story. Or, rather, no story at all. I went weeks and months without writing much of anything. E________ languished. Ideas festered in my head, trying and failing to find a way out.
Fortunately, it is not just good things that come to an end. The pressure eased off at work and I was able to return to the keyboard. First in fits and starts and now more regularly. Then, yesterday, I realized something about E________, something shocking.
I can see the end. I’m the sailor at the top of a tall, swaying mast crying “Land ho!”
There’s still a ways to go, admittedly. I’m ten, maybe twenty thousand words out but I can see the destination on the horizon, all green trees and waterfalls. Knotted plotlines form a jagged reef between ship and shore, but I can see a way through. I am definitely going to get there.
The timing, though, is ironic. I am coming to the end of a metaphorical journey just as I’m about to start a real one. At the behest of the megacorp for which I work, I will be transferring from the States to Edinburgh, Scotland, thirty-odd miles from where I was born. I’ve lived in America for 23 years. Going home feels . . . odd. A stranger in a once-known land.
Like many dinosaurs (see previous post) I am not a multitasker, one of the myriad ways that I am unfit for the modern world. On the other hand, like most creatures of a reptilian bent (are dinosaurs reptiles?), I am seldom plagued by guilt. I try and do the right thing and/or my best, and if it doesn’t work out, too bad: time to move on.
A strategy that is presently failing me. My inability to multitask is drowning me in shame and remorse.
I love to write. Paradoxically perhaps, it helps me get out of my own head and relax, the perfect antidote to a stressful day job. For me, getting published was a fun daydream that might or might not come true, like winning the lottery, but the joy is in the writing. If I got rejected, my reptile brain wasn’t capable of mulling that over for very long. Time for another project, usually one that I’d already started before the rejections started to roll in. Back to the laptop.
And then I won the lottery. Braking Day got picked up and published. A Quiet Teacher is coming out on November 1. It is literally (and literarily) a dream come true.
But it also requires me to multitask.
Ideally, what I would like to be doing is writing. By which I mean, writing my next novel, E________ (as regular readers of this blog will know, I am . . . not good with titles, so I’m not going to embarrass myself further by spelling it out. It’ll only get changed, anyway). My time for writing is short: I can usually carve out an hour or two from the day (goodbye TV, it was fun knowing you; goodbye chores, until my other half gives me the evil eye). With an outline to point me in the right direction and a following wind, I can usually bang out about 600 words at a sitting. Not a blistering pace, obviously, but day after day it adds up.
But once you get published, cool things happen. Other people take an interest in your work. Like publishers. And readers. Who, not unreasonably, require other things of you. Which requires multitasking.
Recently, I have been preoccupied with: (1) crawling out of the hole I dug for myself by littering the audiobook of A Quiet Teacher with Russian words and phrases I had no clue how to pronounce. Thank you, Irina, for bailing me out!! (2) drafting back cover copy for the paperback version of Braking Day, which is due out in April; (3) reviewing the proof of The Wrong Shape to Fly, my contribution to the awesome Baen anthology Worlds Long Lost, which comes out on December 6; and (4) debugging this website, which crashed a few days ago and delayed my posting of this extended whine. I now know far more about plugins than I ever imagined possible.
All of which I approached, dinosaur fashion, one after the other, to the exclusion of anything else. All of which came out of my daily hour or two of writing time. And none of which involved writing E________. Had I been more evolved, maybe I could have done these other tasks and written a few paragraphs of story, just to keep things ticking along.
But I can’t. I’m a dinosaur.
A guilty one.
Sorry, E________. I will come back soon. I promise.
I like to think that, when it comes to thinking, I’m a forward-thinking guy. And flexible. I write stories about the future but can also put out a good old murder mystery like A Quiet Teacher, which is heading pell-mell toward publication.
Unfortunately, the reality is that I’m not so much forward thinking as irredeemably backward, a swivel-eyed triceratops stampeding in panic along the information superhighway: a metaphor that, on reflection, only serves to illustrate just how dinosaurial I am. Who says “information superhighway” anymore? To make matters worse, the industry that has exposed me as a living fossil is not high finance (my day job is in financial counterterrorism) but book publishing, which, let’s face it, is hardly a byword for the cutting edge.
I’m a living fossil, it turns out, because when I think of book publishing, I think about, well, books. Hardbacks, posh paperbacks, less posh paperbacks. Spines, cracked (ick!) or otherwise, the rustle of pages, the serried ranks of carefully formatted lettering. Books.
I do know that there are such things as e-books. I even own an e-reader. But I rarely use it. For reasons that I can’t fully fathom, anything I read on an e-reader doesn’t seem to stick. I can re-read a book I bought decades ago and bits and pieces will start to come back to me as I turn the page. But an e-book I bought last year? Crickets, so far as my memory is concerned.
My true blind spot, though, the thing that makes me a complete dinosaur, is audiobooks. What I still insist on calling books on tape. My wife does almost all her “reading” this way, her iPhone feeding book after book after book into her wireless headphones as she potters about the house. I, on the other hand, one: still own headphones with wires; and two: had never listened to an audiobook until I received my complementary copy of Braking Day from the publisher. It’s simply not a habit I’ve ever picked up. If I see someone looking at a kindle, I’m sufficiently with-it to know they’re reading a book. If I see someone wearing headphones, I assume they’re listening to music.
A fact of which I remained blissfully unaware until recently. Perhaps, if I had been more aware, I wouldn’t have written A Quiet Teacher quite the way I did.
A Quiet Teacher is a murder-mystery set in an upscale American high school. Owing in no small part to the main character’s backstory, there are a number of characters who speak English as a second language or are far too educated for their own good. As a result, Dr. Google and I had a great deal of fun peppering the manuscript with Russian, and German, and a little bit of Latin (the Latin is very, very rude, by the way). The Latin is all me (I’m a dinosaur with a dinosaur’s education after all) but I can’t speak Russian or German or any other living language to save my life.
Which didn’t much matter until last week.
Last week, Susan, the rights whiz kid at my agency, got in touch to talk audiobooks. Who would I like to narrate A Quiet Teacher? Oh, and by the way, here are some options to consider.
Feeling like a pretend Hollywood bigshot, I reviewed a number of audition tapes (they’re computer files now, of course) and settled on an awesome actor to do the reading. He has a great voice, can do a variety of accents, and his delivery is spellbinding. Even though I am not an aficionado of audiobooks, I can’t wait to hear the finished product.
Job done, I returned from my virtual visit to the movie industry and knuckled back down to the writing of E_________, which, thanks to the horrors of Ukraine and the resultant sanctions, is well behind schedule. My schedule, admittedly, but I hate missing deadlines, even if they’re totally made up.
So, I’m typing away when another email from Susan pops up. Could I please go through the book and prepare a list of unusual words with an accompanying audio file demonstrating how I’d like the words pronounced? Also, can I do it by August 26?
No problem, says I, once again abandoning poor E________ for a more pressing task. E________, when it grows up, is going to have daddy issues. I start going through the proof of A Quiet Teacher, making an index of words and their page numbers for inclusion in the file.
And then it hits me. There are a lot of Russian words. And some German. And I don’t know how to pronounce any of them! Why did I write them in the first place? Why couldn’t I just stick to good old English? Why did I not remember that audiobooks are a thing? There was no need for all those fancy foreign words. No need at all. Pretentious old coot, that’s what I am.
And now, continuing to be pretentious by quoting Vladimir Lenin, no less, “What Is To Be Done?”
I have no freakin’ clue.
So, here I am, a swivel-eyed triceratops stampeding panic-stricken down the information superhighway, leaving giant, steaming, dinosaur-sized droppings as I go.
The day job has brought me to London, which has been . . . interesting. I should have known that when my employers told me they were going to fly me over business class there would be a price to pay. Suffice to say, on the eve of returning home, I am completely exhausted.
It did, however give me a front row seat to Britain’s hottest day, ever. Temperatures in parts of England, including London, reached more than 40C/104F. Even in the States, this is hot. But most Americans have access to air conditioning, the British do not. Also, US infrastructure, however rickety it may be, is designed for hot weather. Britain, on the other hand, burst into flames, as if a giant with a magnifying glass had turned the sun into an orbital weapons platform. London had more call outs for its fire brigade than at any time since World War II (when, one presumes, German bombers were the cause of the trouble). Instead of a normal day’s work of 350 calls, the fire brigade handled something north of 2600. The tarmac at Luton airport, er, melted, preventing planes from taking off or landing. It was an apocalypse in miniature, courtesy of global warming.
Which brings me to the subject of evil clone armies. While, last summer, I scared myself witless reading Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife, a near-future thriller set in a world desiccated by global warming, I tend to gravitate to far-future space operas, where clone armies and their ilk threaten to plunge entire galaxies into millennia of misery. Unless, of course, our plucky band of heroes can save the day. Which, though it may surprise you, doesn’t always happen.
I was asked not too long ago why I enjoy space operas so much. After all, they can be pretty freakin’ dark (millennia of misery, remember) and I am not, by nature, a downbeat person. I think the answer is that, for me at least, all space operas, no matter how grim, are basically exercises in positive thinking. Because in order for a space opera to happen, we have to get into space, which means that we have to have survived long enough to figure out the awesome technology, not blow ourselves up with nuclear weapons and, most importantly of all, survive climate change. If, in the far far future, we find ourselves facing off against a clone menace of galactic proportions, it means we got an awful lot of stuff right in the meantime. Yay, us!
Very excited about the upcoming publication of my second novel, A Quiet Teacher, which is due out on November 1! But also feeling that, as the saying goes, I have some ‘splainin’ to do. How has it come about that a writer of science fiction has turned his hand to a murder mystery?
The answer, I guess, is because I couldn’t stop myself.
The SF writer, Harlan Ellison, when asked where he got his ideas from, reputedly answered, “Schenectady.” Speaking for myself, the ideas that flash out of the atom-smasher of fact, memory, and emotion that is the Oyebanji subconscious tend to be about things, or situations. Fermi’s paradox, for instance (The Wrong Shape To Fly in Baen’s upcoming Worlds Long Lost anthology), or “What would happen at the end of a generation ship’s voyage?” (Braking Day). But A Quiet Teacher wasn’t like that at all. I literally (literarily?) woke up one morning with the character of the protagonist, Greg Abimbola, fully formed in my head. Well . . . I didn’t know his name at the time, and it was a while before I realized he’d lost his left eye in something other than an accident. Still, apart from that, I knew everything about him.
It was, to say the least, weird.
But there was nothing I could do with him. I was an aspiring science fiction writer (I don’t think Braking Day even had an agent at the time, never mind a publisher). Outside of high school English assignments, science fiction was all I had ever written, and Greg was very much a character who belonged in the “real” world. He was absolutely, most definitely not for me.
And yet he wouldn’t go away. Bit by bit, flashes of a mystery novel built around him would appear while I was buttering toast, or riding my bike, or (please keep this to yourselves) during conference calls at work. I kept ignoring it, but the flashes kept coming until I had something close to a complete plot just floating around in my head with nowhere to go. At which point, I stopped ignoring and got scared instead.
I don’t know how to write mysteries, I told myself in an increasingly panicky internal dialog. I don’t know enough about the genre. I’ll be a laughingstock. Well, why don’t you read some? See if you can get the feel of it? Can’t be any harm in that, surely?
So, I did. I read Shroud for a Nightingale by P.D. James, The Witch Elm, by Tana French, Broken Promise, by Linwood Barclay, and a bunch of others. And then, thinking it need never see the light of day, I had a crack at what became A Quiet Teacher. It wasn’t called, A Quiet Teacher, of course. I called it Varsity Reds. No one, and I mean no one, liked that title. As related elsewhere in this blog, my titling expertise is so poorly regarded, I expect that I will soon be contractually forbidden from naming my own books.
Having written it, and really enjoyed writing it, I put the manuscript to one side because I wasn’t sure it was good enough. No. That’s not quite right. I thought it wasn’t half bad. I thought it had pace, and great characterizations, and a really cool mystery at its core. But here’s the problem: I’m a science fiction writer! When it comes to mysteries, I can’t tell the difference between a Roche limit and an event horizon.
Enter R. R is my wife’s very good friend, not mine. R, unlike my tactful, circumspect better half, is blunt to the point of rudeness. R is also a retired police officer and, most importantly of all, a fanatical consumer of murder mysteries. I honestly don’t think I’ve ever seen her read anything else. With some trepidation I handed her a copy of the manuscript (printed out, the old-fashioned way). It came back covered in red ink. On closer inspection, though, they were nits, easily fixed. R even went so far as to say she had to force herself to slow down and give feedback because she kept racing on to find out what happened next. Pleasantly surprised, I screwed my courage to the sticking place and called up my agent, the estimable Brady. Brady’s interests are adult science fiction, the UNC Tar Heels, and world peace (in that order) and here I was, asking him to sell a murder mystery by a science fiction writer with one not-yet-published book under his belt.
He did, too. A Quiet Teacher comes out on November 1, 2022, courtesy of the fine folks at Severn House. Please give it a try. If you like it, I’ll write some more. If you don’t, you, me (and Brady) will pretend like it never happened.
