We are glad to have Adam R. Shannon visit with us today. Adam, what inspired you to write this story?
I had an idea for an opening scene – a young runaway on a train, making faces at a baby in the next row of seats. She's returning to a city where she once witnessed frightening battles between superheroes and villains, events that only she seems to remember. She's looking for answers, and she's not going home without them. The rest of the story unfolded from there.
I got a big kick out of developing backstories and powers for the superheroes who are mentioned in the story. I wanted them to feel a little familiar – using the syntax we've come to employ for these stories – but offer new variations rather than stamped-out copies from the genre.
There's a flashback in which the protagonist recalls encountering a superhero in the middle of a cataclysmic incident. I wanted to show how much that event meant to her, even though the moment itself was very brief. Writing it was a reminder of how humans can transform even horrible events into personal, private moments that resonate with them for the rest of their lives.
That's always been something of a mystery to me - I don't have reliable access to that part of my brain's machinery. I had a few broad sketches for the main characters when I started writing, and they grew more flesh as I wrote them.
I'll be attending the Clarion West writers' workshop for six weeks this summer. I'm very excited to have the opportunity to study under Daryl Gregory, Kij Johnson, John Chu, Pat Cadigan, Daniel José Older, and Connie Willis.
They say that every time you remember something, you open up the memory and repack it again, like viewing a painting and making a perfect copy of it, over and over. With time, the details smear and change, until the picture is something entirely different, not a transcription of the way the world was, but your own creation.
But my memory of the Outsider feels perfect, untouched.
Dust blew around me. Not like a sandstorm, but an unspeakable darkness, the pulverized remains of people, buildings, and dreams. Blocks of debris impacted nearby, like the footsteps of an approaching giant.
My mother, somewhere in the dust, was screaming my name.
He never bothered with an extravagant costume, never indulged in theatrical capes or high collars. He wore the same simple shirt and pants he had on when he came back to our time. When his feet settled on the cracked sidewalk beside me, I felt the solid, reassuring thump through the bottoms of my shoes.
"And what are you doing here?" he asked. There was a faint accent, an endearing lilt he never quite shed when he learned our language.
I knew him by sight. Everyone did. I'd watched him in videos, on the news, and listened to my parents debate whether he was a hero or something else.
A man ran out of the swirling dust, his face contorted in panic, and vanished back into the storm.
Outsider smiled. Caked dust cracked at the corners of his eyes. "Emma the Brave," he said.
Adam R. Shannon is a career firefighter/paramedic, as well as a fiction writer, hiker, and cook. His work has been shortlisted for an Aeon award and appeared in Morpheus Tales and the SFFWorld anthology You Are Here: Tales of Cryptographic Wonders. He and his wife live in Virginia, where they care for an affable German Shepherd, occasional foster dogs, a free-range toad, and a colony of snails who live in an old apothecary jar. His website and blog are at http://AdamRShannon.com.
Seanan is the author of the October Daye and InCryptid urban fantasy series, both from DAW Books, and the Newsflesh and Parasitology trilogies, both from Orbit (published under the name "Mira Grant"). She writes a distressing amount of short fiction, and has released three collections set in her superhero universe, starring Velma "Velveteen" Martinez and her allies. Seanan usually needs a nap. Keep up with her at www.seananmcguire.com, or on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/seananmcguire.
Carrie Vaughn is best known for her New York Times bestselling series of novels about a werewolf named Kitty, who hosts a talk radio show for the supernaturally disadvantaged, the fourteenth installment of which is Kitty Saves the World. She's written several other contemporary fantasy and young adult novels, as well as upwards of 80 short stories. She's a contributor to the Wild Cards series of shared world superhero books edited by George R.R. Martin and a graduate of the Odyssey Fantasy Writing Workshop. An Air Force brat, she survived her nomadic childhood and managed to put down roots in Boulder, Colorado. Visit her at www.carrievaughn.com.
Stephanie Lai is a Chinese-Australian writer and occasional translator. She has published long meandering thinkpieces in Peril Magazine, the Toast, the Lifted Brow and Overland. Of recent, her short fiction has appeared in the Review of Australian Fiction, Cranky Ladies of History, and the In Your Face Anthology. Despite loathing time travel, her defence of Dr Who companion Perpugilliam Brown can be found in Companion Piece (2015). She is an amateur infrastructure nerd and a professional climate change adaptation educator (she's helping you survive our oncoming climate change dystopia). You can find her on http://www.twitter.com/yiduiqie, at stephanielai.net, or talking about pop culture and drop bears at no-award.net.
Ziggy Schutz is a young queer writer living on the west coast of Canada. She's been a fan of superheroes almost as long as she's been writing, so she's very excited this is the form her first published work took. When not writing, she can often be found stage managing local musicals and mouthing the words to all the songs. Ziggy can be found at www.twitter.com/ziggytschutz, where she's probably ranting about representation in fiction.
Great questions asked ot the author. Really enjoyed the post!
A ton of great authors.