Pratt: Oh, that was my editor's idea, along with the marketing people. As I understand it, they're trying separate this series from the rest of my work—to create a new, strong, consistent brand for the Marla Mason novels. It's being marketed as urban fantasy, which is currently a hot subgenre (lucky me, for accidentally writing a novel in a hot subgenre!), and the urban fantasy market doesn't actually have a ton of overlap with the core science-fiction/fantasy readers, which make up the majority of my existing readership. So they don't think they're losing much by changing the name. Plus, my series has an ass-kicking female heroine, and pretty much all the other successful books with similar protagonists are written by women. (Jim Butcher is the only big-name guy in the urban fantasy field, and his protagonist is a man.) They didn't want a male name on the cover to turn off potential casual browsers in bookstores, I guess, so they went with the gender-neutral initials. I don't claim to have any particular savvy when it comes to marketing, so I'm happy to go along with the advice of those who know better. The name change is actually useful shorthand, too—anything under the "T.A. Pratt" name is set in the Marlaverse, while my other books and stories are still as "Tim Pratt," so people who really dig this series won't get annoyed when they pick up, say, my first novel and discover it's not about their favorite characters at all, but about art school students and cowboys!
Marla was a teen runaway from a pretty dysfunctional family (absent father, manipulative mother, con artist and small-time criminal brother), and she wound up in Felport, where a local sorcerer took her on as an apprentice and introduced her to the hidden world of magic. By the time
Blood Engines begins, some 15 years or so later, Marla has clawed her way to the top of the ruthless sorcerous hierarchy, and she's chief sorcerer and protector of the city—sort of a cross between a mob boss and a superhero. She makes sure no supernatural nastiness disturbs the blissfully ignorant masses, and in exchange she gets to indulge in various business dealings of questionable legality. ... While most sorcerers specialize—they become necromancers, or pyromancers, or seers, or chaos magicians, or whatever—Marla believes in adaptability, so she does her best to learn a little bit of everything, though she does have a special affinity for inflicting violence (both magically and the old-fashioned way). She's ruthless, hardheaded, stubborn, pragmatic, sarcastic, kind of bitchy and doesn't have many friends. Those few close friends she does have, she might not be willing to die for ... but she's certainly willing to kill for them.
I'd go with necromancy, though Marla looks down on necromancers. Who doesn't want a zombie army? Though it would also be nice to transform into a bear, like the sorcerer Finch from
Blood Engines. I bet if I could turn into a grizzly, I wouldn't have to wait in line at the post office anymore.
What would you do with a zombie army?Pratt: My house would be kept so clean! Except for the bits of zombie falling off here and there. Seriously, though, what wouldn't I do? Zombies for all the menial tasks I hate! (Nothing involving food prep, natch, but yardwork? Definitely.) Plus, I would have the single greatest haunted house in the world each Halloween.
In the book, practicing black magic seems to incur a karmic debt. Do you believe in karma in real life—that your negative actions will come back to haunt you?Pratt: Well, not in any fundamental force-of-nature kind of way, but it's human nature to want to be nice to those who are nice to you, and mean to those who do you wrong. In that sense there's karma—if you're an a--hole all the time, people won't be very sympathetic or helpful when you need a hand, and if you're nice, you're more likely to receive niceness in return. That's certainly been the case with me, in the science-fiction field. I'm not saying I'm sweetness and light all the time, and I'm sure there are people who think I'm a dick, but I try to be open and honest and basically kind, and I've received a lot of goodwill, and good opportunities, in return). But as for karma in the traditional sense, nah. I'm basically a cheerful atheist. I think the universe is random, and that's OK with me.
Marla's principal antagonist in the novel is of Aztec origin, but you don't discuss much the origin of her own magic. Is there some cultural antecedent?Pratt: Marla's a magpie when it comes to magic—she'll use anything. She's from the Midwest, from a mostly secular church-on-Christmas kind of religious upbringing, and she doesn't have a lot of personal culture to draw on, apart from basic middle-American culture. So she borrows freely from other magical systems. In the novels, every kind of magic works. Vodoun, chaos magic, sympathetic magic, contagious magic, prophetic dreams, dowsing, wart-charming, whatever. The trick is, you have to do the magic right, and doing magic right is hard, like juggling knives one-handed while doing brain surgery with the other hand. It takes a lot of practice and hard work, and it's easy to f--k up, and there are things dwelling in the ether that will eat your brain and crap out your soul if you're not careful.
I don't know! It's clearly a minor obsession of mine, though. I've always been fascinated with the choices made in my own life, and the very clear "linchpin moments" when I made life-altering decisions. As one random example, there was a point some years back when I could have moved to New York, or to Oakland—I had places to stay and people to be with in both cities. If I'd chosen to go to New York, my life would be utterly different. I wouldn't work at
Locus—I'd probably be an editorial assistant at some publishing house. I wouldn't be married to my wife, wouldn't have a kid (anyway not this kid!), wouldn't have written all those Bay Area stories I've written. So I can't help but think what kind of life that other Tim Pratt might have had, and maybe there's a parallel universe where he's living those lives. Not that they're necessarily worse lives, or better—just different. The whole many-worlds thing has been in my work for years, going way back to stories like "The Scent of Copper Pennies" and my poem "The God of the Crossroads." They touch on all sorts of subjects I like—the potentially poisonous nature of nostalgia, the allure of regret, the throes of dissatisfaction (though personally I'm immensely satisfied with my lot). I imagine those subjects are ones I'll keep circling around. I think it's human nature to wonder what might have been, if.
So how did you end up working at Locus? Pratt: Moved to Oakland in 2001 to be with my then-girlfriend, now-wife Heather Shaw. Had some small savings, but needed a job quick to avoid missing rent payments! Heard
Locus was hiring, realized they were about five miles away from our house, and applied. Turns out one of my Clarion instructors, Michaela Roessner, is great old friends with
Locus publisher Charles Brown, so when I applied and mentioned I'd gone to Clarion, he asked her about me. She said nice things, so as soon as I came up for the interview, I was told I had the job if I wanted it! Least stressful interview ever. Now I do a lot of the news writing, pretty much all the obituaries, some of the editing, and about half the layout, along with cleaning out gutters and hauling boxes (we're a small office, so everybody does everything).
Your fondness for parallel universe stories, along with several other aspects of your novels, would lead one to believe that you are (or were) a big fan of comic books. True? Pratt: Not as big a fan as it probably looks like! I read some superhero stuff when I was a kid,
X-Men and
Batman and stuff, but I was never the type who knew the whole tangled continuity of the DC universe or anything. In college I had some housemates who were serious comics fans, so over the course of a couple of years I mainlined everything by Neil Gaiman, much of Alan Moore's oeuvre, Warren Ellis, Garth Ennis, etc., etc., etc. There are some comics I still keep up with—
Fables,
Y: The Last Man, things like that. I was in a pretty heavy comic-reading phase when I started writing
Rangergirl, and since my obsessions tend to bleed into whatever book I'm writing, the heroine was a comic artist.
What obsessions bled into Blood Engines?Pratt: Aztec mythology was a big one, obviously. For a while I was reading about that stuff very deeply, though of course now, years later, most of the knowledge has been shoved out of my head to make room for newer obsessions. I started the novel shortly after moving to California, so I was really interested in the history of San Francisco (I live in Oakland, but Oakland's history is a bit less colorful), so I worked a lot of that stuff into the book. Poison dart frogs were a big interest—I became fascinated by them when my wife found one of the first photographs of
Phyllobates terribilis, the golden poison dart frog. Late in the book I wrote the scenes with the cannibal witch Bethany, and that was mostly inspired by the German "consensual cannibalism" case, where a guy who wanted to eat people met up with another guy who wanted to be eaten—and they proceeded to make one another's dreams come true. Deeply disturbing stuff! But I can't control what my brain latches on to.
There seem to be subtle (and sometimes overt) pop culture references in the book. For instance, Marla's relationship to her magical cloak is a bit reminiscent of the relationship between Spider-Man and his black costume (which later becomes his nemesis, Venom)—the way it seems to be an alien intelligence that gives her greater powers and tempts her to do bad things. Pratt: Ha! I did mention Spider-Man in
Blood Engines at one point, because I'd been thinking about the first
Spider-Man movie and how the best parts of it were those scenes where Peter Parker is exploring his power, and just loving the hell out of all the cool stuff he can do. I wanted to refer to that joy of discovering amazing abilities. I never thought directly about Marla's cloak and the evil alien symbiote, though. That's interesting. But the idea of an item of power that corrupts the mind is much older, and it entered the fantasy mainstream most powerfully in the form of Tolkien's magical ring, which was honestly more what I had in mind. Although the cloak is weirder and nastier (and its weird nastiness is increasingly important as the series goes on). I like including pop-cultural references, mentions of books, music, etc. I know some people who bemoan this practice, but when I was a kid I discovered tons of great books and music by reading characters in books talk about them, and I want to pass on my own loves! I also like the frisson created by juxtaposing magic with the mundane so sharply.
Nah, I'm not a huge film buff. I had a housemate in college who was, and I got a lot of the movie trivia in the story from him, actually. I like movies, don't get me wrong, but it's always been books for me. But writing about a guy who finds a magical bookstore that has novels that were never written? Seemed to me a trifle overdone (for one thing, Neil Gaiman's
Sandman has a whole library of unwritten books!). Doing a little magic-shop story about a video store, though, seemed like enough of an innovation to keep me interested. Still, my obsession with the written art of fiction maps pretty well to an obsession with the filmed art of fiction, so it wasn't hard for me to get into the protag's mindset.
If you were him, and you had the opportunity to watch just one of the alternate films he encounters in the story, which one would it be? (Or would it be something else not mentioned in the story?)Pratt: Hmm ... Tim Burton's
Superman would be pretty cool! Though David Lynch's
Return of the Jedi would also be worth checking out.
In addition to being a writer (and editor at Locus), you also edit your own small-press zine, Flytrap. What made you decide to publish your own magazine, and how would you describe its editorial focus?Pratt: I co-edit it with my wife, actually. Our editorial focus: publish stories and poems we like! Heather and I don't have a manifesto or a high-minded guiding principle. We just like 'zines, and thought it would be fun to publish one. I love reading the submissions and all that, but I especially love the act of putting together an issue, playing with desktop publishing software, doing the layout. I find it very zen, very flow, very time-devouring (in a good way). When I'm burned out on writing, I can always do layout!
Speaking of poetry, you're an award-winning poet yourself; your poem "Soul Searching" won the Rhysling Award in 2005. What is it you find appealing about writing (and reading) speculative poetry?Pratt: I don't really think of my work as "speculative poetry"—I just write poetry, and the poems sometimes have speculative elements, sometimes not. I discovered that if my poems happened to have some mythic or fantasy elements, then I could sell them
Asimov's and
Strange Horizons and the like, so I did, and the Science Fiction Poetry Association membership liked some of them very much! I was editor of their newsletter Star*Line for a while, which was fun, though eventually I had to quit because of other time commitments. (And as occasional poetry editor for
Flytrap, I can take any kind of poetry I want, speculative or not!) I love writing poems—perhaps even more than writing fiction—but there's just no money in it, so fiction gets precedence. I don't write much poetry at all anymore, which is a source of sadness for me. Maybe once I catch up on my novel deadlines ...
What are some of the jobs you had before becoming a writer and editor? Pratt: In order, from high school on: retail peon, office assistant in a college dean's office, clerk at an antique shop, advertising copywriter for a big-box hardware store, admin/technical writer/office manager, various positions at
Locus from editorial trainee on up. Plus intermittent freelance writing of various types (at the moment I get about a third of my regular monthly income from writing reviews of porn movies, strangely enough).
You've achieved a lot as an author at a pretty young age. To what to you attribute your early success? Pratt: I seem young until you realize I've been writing steadily since I was 8 years old. It took me 10 or 12 years to publish anything at all! I've been actively submitting stories since I was 15 or so. I write a lot. I got through my million words of crap at a fairly young age. I'm still learning, and I think my work gets better every year. Though as I try to do more ambitious work, I naturally fail more often. There's a certain kind of gentle contemporary fantasy that I can write with my eyes closed, and I try not to fall back on that style too often—I want to keep pushing myself. In the past year I've been working on brevity. Most of my early published work tended to be long stories or novelettes, but a lot of my stuff coming out next year is short, under 3,000 words. Ever onward and upward!
Speaking of success, I hear Marla and company may be coming to the big (or small) screen. What can you tell us about that?Pratt: We're a long way from any kind of screen, but yeah, a production company called Phoenix Pictures has purchased an option on the TV and movie rights to the whole Marlaverse (which is cool, because it's free money, and because now I can justify playing the "Who would I cast as Marla in the movie?" game). Beyond that, though, there's not much to report—because of the WGA strike, the producer can't even approach anyone about writing a screenplay, so it's pretty much in stasis, like every other narrative project in Hollywood! I'm cautiously hopeful that something might develop once the strike is settled, though. The producer who pursued the option is very enthusiastic about the project, and very capable of getting things done.
What's up next, after you finish writing books three and four of the Marla Mason series? Anything already done and in the pipeline? Pratt: Book three is all done! Book four is about a quarter of the way written. I have to turn it in next May. Beyond that, I have another novel finished—not set in the Marlaverse—called
The Light of a Better World. It's about alternate realities, the search for transcendence, the allure of the sociopath, bears, light and cars, among other things. I'm hoping somebody will buy that. As for my next new project, I dunno. I have firm ideas for at least two more Marla Mason novels, if my publisher wants to buy them. I might try my hand at a YA, since I've written a lot about young protagonists in my short fiction, and think I'd enjoy doing so at greater length. And if nobody wants to buy any more of my novels, maybe I'll go back to writing poetry for a while!
