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The evolution of trickster stories among the dogs of North Park after the Change

by Kij Johnson

(It’s a universal fantasy, isn’t it?—that the animals learn to speak, and at last we learn what they’re thinking, our cats and dogs and horses: a new era in cross-species understanding. But nothing ever works out quite as we imagine. When the Change happened, it affected all the mammals we have shaped to meet our own needs. They all could talk a little, and they all could frame their thoughts well enough to talk. Cattle, horses, goats, llamas; rats, too. Pigs. Minks. And dogs and cats. And we found that, really, we prefer our slaves mute.

(The cats mostly leave, even ones who love their owners. Their pragmatic sociopathy makes us uncomfortable, and we bore them; and they leave. They slip out between our legs and lope into summer dusks. We hear them at night, fighting as they sort out ranges, mates, boundaries. The savage sounds frighten us, a fear that does not ease when our cat Klio returns home for a single night, asking to be fed and to sleep on the bed. A lot of cats die in fights or under car wheels, but they seem to prefer that to living under our roofs; and as I said, we fear them.

(Some dogs run away. Others are thrown out by the owners who loved them. Some were always free.)

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Host Commentary

This episode is part of our 15th Anniversary special and includes an interview with Rachel Swirsky, the founding editor of Podcastle back in 2008.

This is a transcription of the interview.

Matt Dovey

Rachel Swirsky. Welcome back to Podcastle! And thank you for joining us and being part of these celebrations. It means a huge amount to us to have everyone involved again. How are you?

 

Rachel Swirsky

Yeah. Thank you for asking. Very exciting. I just got back from a writing retreat up in Southern Washington. So, I am tired, because it’s uh, well, last year I did 40,000 words over the four days but this year I did about 18,000, which was definitely less intense, but it was editing so it was a different process. And so, I’m both very tired and also in a way relaxed.

 

Matt Dovey

An odd mix for sure. Firstly, would you like to introduce yourself for those listeners who might not have been around for your original editorial run?

 

Rachel Swirsky

Most people I assume. Although I still do sometimes get people who come up to me and they’re like, “I’ve followed you ever since the original Podcastle. I like your voice because I’m used to you reading to me”

 

Um, I… My name is Rachel Swirsky. I am primarily a science fiction and fantasy writer of short fiction. Novels are really really, really long. I used to say that I didn’t have the attention span for novels and yet I was very surprised when I was diagnosed with ADD. It helps. Medicine helps. So, I have been very fortunate in being nominated for a number of awards such as the Hugo’s, the Locus Awards and World Fantasy. I’ve twice won the Nebula Award once for my novella uuuh…I definitely know

 

Matt Dovey

The Lady who Plucks Red Flowers Beneath the Queen’s Window.

 

Rachel Swirsky

Yeah, I definitely remember my own storie’s title. Sorry, its title. And also for the short story If You Were a Dinosaur My Love. I have one collection out. Actually, that’s not true. I have two collections out: Through the Drowsy Dark from Aqueduct Press and How the World Became Quiet through Subterranean; both of those from a while ago now. And this year, I just published about six months ago, a novella called January 15^th  through Tor.com. And it’s about the application of universal basic income in a future United States through the viewpoints of four different characters on the day the money is dispersed.

 

Matt Dovey

And I just read it and enjoyed it very much.

 

Rachel Swirsky

Oh, thank you!

 

Matt Dovey

We’ll come back to all that later. You’ve answered like half the questions I’ve got planned just in the introduction alone. This is gonna get really strange from now on

Rachel Swirsky

Well, I didn’t mention Iowa.

 

Matt Dovey

First up though, why this story? It’s Kij Johnson that we’ve just run.

 

Rachel Swirsky

My… The other story that I was considering was The Seven Librarians by Ellen Klages, which I also very much adore. The seven librarians has a very traditional fantasy vibe. Not a Tolkien fantasy vibe, like a children’s fantasy vibe, like the, an older I guess model of children’s fantasy. Not as old as you’re not getting into Dunsinay kind of territory but it’s very emotionally rewarding and fits very well within the genre and Kij Johnson is just absolutely experimental, Gonzo, exploding structure, exploding your ideas of what you can do with fiction. And that’s one thing I really liked about the pair of stories – which I both, I suggested both initially, and we settled on the Kij Johnson um, – is that they really represent different ends of the genre. And I’m so excited by Kij Johnson’s amazing facility with writing stories that are nothing like what you expect, and yet come through with these really profound emotional meanings. And this is just one of my favourite short stories altogether, although many of Kij Johnson’s stories are near the top or at the top of my list of favourite short stories.

 

Matt Dovey

And there isn’t anything else quite… I mean, there’s no other story like is this Spar in Clarkesworld. Spar or Spur?

 

Rachel Swirsky

Spar, I suppose there’s Spar: the bacon version, which I have to admit. I don’t quite understand why there was an anthology of bacon stories, so instead of having sex with the mysterious alien, they’re making bacon.

 

Matt Dovey

In a euphemistic way or just literally?

 

Rachel Swirsky

No, I think just literally making bacon. I do get the tendency to… I do get the urge to parody yourself. Like I totally understand why that was rewarding. I think what I don’t get is why there was a bacon anthology.

 

Matt Dovey

Clearly it was enough of an idea to get funding and or a publisher on board so..

 

Rachel Swirsky

It was the zeitgeist at the time after John Scalzi he taped bacon to his cat. It was funny.

 

Matt Dovey

You were our founding editor all of 15 years ago, back in 2008. So tell us a story about how Podcastle came about and how you got involved.

 

Rachel Swirsky

So Steve Ely, who is now Serah Ely – which is very exciting – Originally founded Escape Pod and was running both fantasy and science fiction, and was developing this really enormous audience. At the time, there were four major print magazines: Asimov’s, Analogue, Fantasy and Science Fiction and Realms of Fantasy and Realms of Fantasy died, unfortunately, right after Ann and I had a story in it. I guess we killed off that one… in 2010? But at the time, Realms had one of the higher subscription rates of the four of them. I can’t remember the exact numbers or whether it was first or second or whatever. But Escape Pod had a much higher listening rate, subscriber rate than any of the print magazines. The online magazines existed, some of them they were just coming into a space where they were becoming respectable like people had been viewing them with kind of, ‘uuuur’ you’d get from your, you know, your teachers. Like at Clarion West, they warned us you know, make sure that you’re publishing, if you’re publishing online, you’re also publishing in print spaces so that more people are reading you. And now of course, it’s the opposite. And so, Strange Horizons existed and had a very good reputation. Clarkesworld had maybe just eeked into existence Tor.com opened right after I stopped editing Podcastle I think, or there was may have been slight overlap. So, there wasn’t a hugely robust online scene at that point. And people were really excited about hearing stories and having them brought to them. And so, Steve realised that he could – I’m sorry – Serah realised that she could split it up and also still have the subscriber data base to sustain both podcasts. I believe Pseudopod already existed at that time. Of course, the horror podcast, which was run by Ben … and my brains not gonna give me the last name, but y’all know. And I suspect that’s because people are more picky about horror. Many science fiction and fantasy fans are more willing to understand to be cross genre interested. And there’s a little bit less I think, tolerance for horror, although an enormous overlap. And it’s not that an enormous gap in audience but there’s some. When it was running as Escape Pod had at least initially a higher audience than Podcastle and that had a higher audience than Pseudopod. And Serah wanted to be able to run more stories, which is great. I was active on the forums at the time. There had been a 300 word fiction contest. I don’t think you guys still do that.

 

Matt Dovey

We still do flash fiction contests here. Every two years, every six months, one of the shows runs them so it ends up being every two years. They’re 500 words now, so a little bit easier.

 

Rachel Swirsky

Well, yeah, the 300 words was probably why I entered because it is entirely very difficult. I was attending the Iowa writers workshop at that time. I was having a great deal of trouble producing material that I could turn in at this very fancy literary workshop that didn’t particularly want you to give them 500 word short stories. And I actually think it was my brain being obstinate. It was like this is pressure it will be hard to turn into them. But! if you write 500 words, you can send it to Ideomancer and then you’ll figure out whether it’s gonna get published very quickly and and you also can’t turn it in, so it’s not as stressful. And so I was writing short stories, you know, under 1000 words. Flash was incredibly popular at that point, it is much less so right now. I mean, it’s not that it’s not popular, it’s that everyone thought Flash was the way that online fiction was going to exist. So there were a tonne of magazines that publish nothing but flash, or that had entire flash streams in parallel to their full length fiction stream, much like Podcastle did at the time. I don’t know if it still does.

 

Matt Dovey

Occasionally, we tend to bunch them up into sort of having three or four flash stories in one episode now, rather than running the Podcastle miniatures anymore.

 

Rachel Swirsky

Yeah, that’s fair.

 

So being able to do something that was in a shorter space as a challenge was a very interesting prospect for me. At the time, I was often sitting down to write a 500 word story in a day, which is something that I’ve lost the ability to do. And so I was able to generate three of them for the contest. And you know what, it was 350. 350 words. And I was very involved in the the commentary from the forum from there. So Serah asked me if I’d like to do Podcastle

 

Matt Dovey

And then did you ask Ann from there?

 

Rachel Swirsky

Oh, Ann I were Clarion West classmates in 2005 and have moved in sync for a lot of our careers. I mean, obviously, we’re not doing the same thing now. Oh my god, it’s so cool that the Imperial Radch trilogy had all the awards and the attention sorry, it’s so!

 

Matt Dovey

I ran off the list of awards that Ancillary Justice won and my, it’s literally every award in a year I think,

 

Rachel Swirsky

Yeah. It’s completely. It was so exciting. I was like I’ve seen these books in process. I have to say when I got the near final draft for, for commentary, it was the, I read it. And I was like, this is the first time that I read something by one of my friends, where it didn’t just feel like a book. I was like, yeah, this is a book I feel like I might have encountered when I was doing my thesis writing on you know, like space empires or stuff like that in undergrad. Like this is one of the things that you pick up along with the Delaney and you know, the LeGuin in that pile of like profound pieces of work and then everyone else agreed with me, and I’m so happy.

 

Matt Dovey

It’s nice to be proven right isn’t it?

 

Rachel Swirsky

Well, it’s also nice when, What did one of my friends say about it a couple of years ago, it was just something like “Oh, it’s so great to see a really nice person succeed” Ann is so Lovely

 

Matt Dovey

She is

 

Rachel Swirsky

So, she and I became very good friends. We talked every morning while we were in the same time zone while I was in grad school. We actually were both published in the same magazine for our professional sales, Subterranean issue number four edited by John Scalzi. The only issue of subterranean that was open invitation and it was on science fiction cliches Ann did a story that was similar to Edgar Rice Burroughs, Mars stuff, and I did a dystopia story that I’m trying to remember if it ran on one of the podcasts. I don’t think it did. Called Scene from a Dystopia. That was sort of it was a scene that was cut from one of those books like 1984 or the heavily – the books that came out of being very heavily worried about a communist form of fascism. Which we should be worried about, but that didn’t necessarily portray all the different kinds of facets of what might happen with that.

 

Um. Pause

 

I’m sorry, brain. Anyway, so we’ve moved in sync for a lot of our careers. We have very close friends and we have very similar taste. So,

 

Matt Dovey

Really? because when invited you both to the interview, you both each said, we said Oh, can you send us two choices so that you know if there’s a clash, we’ve got a fallback, and both of us are like that’s not gonna happen? So similarly, quite different tastes actually.

 

Rachel Swirsky

Well. The thing about…Actually, we had fairly similar tastes in general. But we also remembered which stories …I asked Ann to run a couple of stories that she was very passionate about, because it was a reprint podcast. I did a lot of I know it’s, it has original work now. And y’all rely very heavily on this stuff that sent stuff people send you, I don’t know that you do any reading and outreach.

 

Matt Dovey

We do sometimes to sort of marginalised groups or if we’re running a special episode like we did a Nowruz episode last year that we’ve done Eid episodes for a couple of years. We’ll do sort of outreach to specific authors then either for an original or reprint but by and large it’s just submissions now Yeah.

 

Rachel Swirsky

I think doing that for marginalised groups is incredibly important. And I’m glad that you guys continued to do that. It has always sort of baffled me. What I did was seek out work that was already printed by people in marginalised groups. I did also contact people and say, hey, send me any stuff you’ve got I’d love to see it. But I also went out and did my own reading, but it always confuses me a little bit when people are like, I, How are we going to get stuff from minority groups and I’m like, did you talk to any of the authors?

 

Matt Dovey

Yeah, it’s not rocket science.

 

Rachel Swirsky

Yeah, I don’t feel that it is. Yeah, anyway. But I was actively reading anthologies and stuff to find things by authors you know, that had been printed 20 years ago, stories that had been forgotten, stuff by people who aren’t necessarily keyed into the online community. Right. I don’t know that Nancy Kress sends y’all stuff?

 

Matt Dovey

I’ve not seen her in the submissions pile.

 

Rachel Swirsky

Yeah,  I mean, she’s an incredible writer.

 

Matt Dovey

Oh, yeah,

 

Rachel Swirsky

See the Datlow fairytale anthologies, things like that. And so, the story is that and chose to run were the stories that she felt passionate about, that I had not already selected to run. So, Margo Lanagan. I don’t know if that’s the one you’re doing.

 

Matt Dovey

Benjamin Rosenbaum we are doing which is Ann’s choice

 

Rachel Swirsky

Yeah. Which was Benjamin Rosenbaum  wasone of the ones that gave into. I, Well, no, I say, Hi, Ben. Sorry. Um, this was one of the pieces that we argued over and slushed. And I was like, I don’t like this. I don’t understand. I mean, it’s fine. I don’t know why you want to run this. There was also one by Leah Bobbit. Those are the three I remember. The Margo Lanagan is lovely. I just also, it was a little much for me. It’s very dark. You know, I only run very dark things that who knows? it hit me differently. So, I’m not that’s why we thought we would have different feelings, right? Because the stories that she picked were specifically her favourite stories that like hadn’t already come through in the queue in some way. We agreed on a lot of stuff, but also when I say we have the same taste I partially mean that Ann and I have enough same tastes that when one of us is editing, I used to do slush for GigaNotoSaurus sometimes back when it was Ann was doing the editing. The role of the slush reader was sorting, right? to some extent. And Ann and I had the same idea of what how the sorting would go. So, and that can be quite difficult sometimes to find somebody who’s a match with you on that. But Ann and I, even if, you know, I wasn’t doing the slush reading, but if I had read the Ben Rosenbaum story, I would have been like well of course this is something Ann needs to look at. I would have talked, you know, told her these are my feelings. You know, it’s a little self referential for my personal taste. By the way, we ran a story by Ben Rosenbaum while I was editing called Ant King, I believe we also ran the Enlightened Orange?

 

Matt Dovey

Certainly Ant Kings we’ve not long rerun that one anyway actually as, as another tale from the vaults one or the other stuff picked it.

 

Rachel Swirsky

So I just want to say hey, it’s not that I don’t like Ben Rosenbaums work we’re very happy with Ben Rosenbaums work I just didn’t happen to click with that one.

 

Matt Dovey

It happens.  The conversation I’ve had with Ann which won’t have broadcast yet. So this is a bit wibbly wobbly timey wimey? But we had a conversation about you know, ultimately, it’s all personal taste. As an editor. You can just trust your instincts. And sometimes for some reason, you just don’t jive with the story and that’s no one’s fault.

 

Rachel Swirsky

Right! But she I had a very similar idea of what was significant enough to me to look at although, at the time, the slush pile was small enough. I don’t know that it still is that anything that had been published by a major editor I took a look at. Not because …how do I put this? It’s not like a handshake kind of deal. It’s a I know Sheila’s taste kind of deal. This story is coming to me with a recommendation by Sheila.

 

Matt Dovey

Yeah.

 

Rachel Swirsky

And I would do that for minor magazines that I had really liked that editorial taste like I really liked Jeremiah Tolbert’s editorial tastes, so something that came to me through that. Or I would often read something by someone who had just a tonne of credits. I just I think this used to be pretty normal practice. I don’t know that people do it anymore. Just because sometimes it would be like, well, you know, clearly a lot of people are seeing something valuable in this work. We’re doing reprints, somebody has seen something valuable in this particular story. And I want to make sure that I’m looking at everything that I could possibly want to buy. So, I actually read pretty deeply in the slush pile and did do some rejections. But first, level slush round rejection can often be easier than the further steps because you’re like, well, and that doesn’t mean that those stories aren’t valuable and sometimes it is a taste thing and you’re like I don’t get this one. So the person get this one or Ann might look at something and go Rachel’s not going to want to look at it. But you know, I hit two rape jokes in the first two paragraphs, maybe it’s not my taste. I think that may have used have been more common. I usually have like a three or four strike rule of like, I’m annoyed I’m more annoyed. And then what I would do, which was reading slush advice that I’ve gotten from Sean Wallace, who was doing slush reading at Clarkesworld at the time, and some of the other places I know he’s still at The Dark

 

Matt Dovey

Yeah he’s still running The Dark

 

Rachel Swirsky

Yeah. And he was like, you have to be careful not to spend all your time on the slush. I know Serah Ely read all of every story that came in. And so at some point, she ended up 700 stories behind. And so Ann and I went in and cleaned it up in a weekend. I mean, we tried to give everything a fair read and we spent the whole weekend doing it. Ann is an incredibly fast reader. But one technique that you can use is you read until you’ve got like, things that you don’t – you know enough things that you’re like, I don’t, I don’t think this is going to work for me. And then flip to the end and read the end of it. And then then sometimes you read it very rarely and you go oh my god, how did you get here? Now I have to read this! And most of the time you don’t

 

Matt Dovey

I often think about quotes about ‘believe people the first time they show you who they are’, you can genuinely believe the story the first time it shows you what it is. It’s very rare that it pulls it round by the ending. I do the same sort of get a third – 50% through like it’s gonna have to do something really special in the back I’ll skip ahead to check and it’s not very often that you’re wrong after a few years, you know, after enough time reading slush, you start to get that gut feeling for you know, it’s just not quite right.

 

Rachel Swirsky

And I didn’t have a whole lot of experience reading slush I had some I had worked on some of the academic magazines. I ran a magazine in college. But in my academic magazines, I mean the ones that are attached to MFA programmes

 

Matt Dovey

Sure

 

Rachel Swirsky

Which have very strange reading protocols sometimes. But actually I really had a great time. Sometimes you’re reading slush, and you’re like, I’m not going to buy this. But what are you doing? Like, I got a story once when I was reading for the Iowa magazine, that was like this Kafka investigation of Kafka’s life that was metafictionally engaged with like, his stories and his autobiography. And I was like, this isn’t the kind of thing that I think is directly going to be publishable in one of these MFA magazines, but it’s like outsider art. I feel like I’m reading one of those things that coming from a place that is just completely unattached to other traditions but deeply compelling. Yeah, so it’s hard to know sometimes, what to do with that, especially if it’s your own magazine, and you can’t just say well, I know that the editors are want stuff that is more Carver esque. For Podcastle, I would have had to reject it because I don’t think it would have been intelligible in audio format.

 

Matt Dovey

It does have its particularities. You do have to think you can’t easily skip back and forth and cross reference everything. So there has to be pacy enough to keep people engaged.

 

Rachel Swirsky

I’ve done a tonne of writing workshops and so I was extremely used to reading stuff that I’ve done in with professionals that done them with people just starting out. I was still very actively doing it in online critique groups like the online Writers Workshop and printers sometimes I would get a bit get an itch to critique things. I don’t know I don’t have it anymore. I feel a little bit nostalgic. And so, I kind of had a sense for what stories were going to be like what they were going to do and also what was finished to a standard that I felt was finished and what might need to be thrown back for a little bit more thoughts. And then some things like it just, what ideas do you find compelling? And for Podcastle I did make an attempt to solicit and select work that was sometimes simpler than what my taste is in reading prose because they would be very coherent in audio. I like Tim Pratt’s work a great deal. I think he’s an incredibly accomplished crafts person. And write stories that often like have a perfect shell of ,of what they’re doing and some of the stories that we ran by him I was just absolutely over the moon in love with and some of the stories I liked, and I thought they were very strong. But if I had been picking my top 10 stories of the year, they wouldn’t have necessarily made my list for a crazy print anthology, but they were perfect for Podcastle This is not a criticism of Tim Pratt. It’s just an explanation of how things fit in different formats. And where the editors rejecting something doesn’t mean that they don’t see its validity. I had a story of rejected from Fantasy magazine at one point when Sean Wallace was helping with the slush. And so when Sean started running The Dark, I was like I have a story that I haven’t been able to sell but I’m, you don’t like it. And he was like, Can I see it? And I sent it to him and he was like we’re gonna run this. Absolutely. It was in the first issue. And I was like, I thought you didn’t like it. He was like I didn’t like it for Fantasy Magazine! So you know,

 

Matt Dovey

When Cherae was editor here she’d been a first reader at Clarkesworld first and had rejected the story at Clarkesworld but bought it here at Podcastle. So yeah, sometimes different markets have different tastes as it were.

 

Rachel Swirsky

I’m so glad that she has editing positions in that field. Now.

 

Matt Dovey

What surprised you about editing your podcast was that you didn’t expect going in?

 

Rachel Swirsky

This is sort of terrible, but I didn’t expect to get as much sexist backlash. People didn’t know that Serah was Serah. A lot of people were upset that a woman was coming in, especially that a feminist woman was coming in. And one thing that happened was somebody who was a moderator on our forum actually accused me of being sexist in my selection of the stories because they were narrated… had male, female main characters. And I said those were all selected by then. Steve, before I joined the editorial stuff. You are reading things into this with a hostility that is very upsetting. Was very upsetting. One of my stories that was published on this is just funny but published on Escape Pod.

 

Someone was like, well, you can tell how sexist it is because the trees which are good people are all female and I was like they are? and he was like, Yeah, you know, it says my sisters and I checked and I was like it says seedlings. I don’t, they’re not gendered to me. But if you’re coming in with you think I have this particular agenda… I strongly suspect I got a anonymous review for my first Tor.com story Eros, Filia, Agape which was very negative, and in some ways that were very gendered said that my prose was like gauzy SF lingerie. Which is funny because now when I repeat that to people, they’re like, ooh, gauzy SF lingerie! But one of the things that cracks me up is that that story is about slavery. And he was like, I have uncovered the secret message of the story, which is that the man is a slave. And I was like, I am very glad that you have found the message of the story. But the assumption was because I was a feminist because I was a woman. The story couldn’t be talking about men, a man’s rights to sexual autonomy or with intellectual autonomy. Yeah. So, it was that’s why, That’s why I left event eventually. It just got really exhausting.

 

Matt Dovey

I’m not surprised, I do think I mean, I’ve been here seven years on we used to deal with a fair amount of that for when we did the Artemis rising special call, which was no male submissions. And yeah, there’d be people accusing us of being sexist for daring to have a limited submissions window like there’s eleven other months of the year, believe me, it’s fine. But But I do think we’ve been consistently feminist for long enough now we’ve always had, there’s only been two men edit the magazine and Dave Thompson and Graham Dunnlop. But other than that, it’s always been female or non binary, and it’s about I think the message has finally gotten through and we’ve finally stopped getting complaints.

 

Rachel Swirsky

When Dave and Anna took over. Dave did the intros and Anna, but this is something that they told me at the time. I don’t know if they still feel this way, but they felt like it cut down the sexism. Ann was completely active in the submission selection. But they were listening to Dave talk. And the other funny thing about that is I kept demographic charts. The whole time I was there partially because I was getting yelled at and I was like, Do I have a bias? And I never varied from a 40 to 60% ratio of male to female authors, and male to female main characters and it would go back and forth with which had the had more and which had less, but that was always the case. I also wanted to make sure that our numbers for people of colour stayed up. I wasn’t as focused on queer stuff at that point because that material was less available. I ran the …we ran as Podcastle stories that had trans protagonist that we found pretty much Sandra McDonald’s. Phoebe, I’m gonna use their wrong last name if I get a last name, actually and that might have ended up running after I left. And then there was a princess in the frog story that we ran. Those were three of the stories, you know, of a very small number of stories that we had run into. It just wasn’t it wasn’t a lot of stuff.

 

Matt Dovey

It’s a lot better now.

 

Rachel Swirsky

Oh, yeah.

 

Matt Dovey

We make an effort. We’ve only got about two minutes left. So we’ve got to the final, we’ve  got to skip a hunk of my script and come to the final question, but it’s been a very good talk. So thank you very much for sort of coming on and taking us back it seems such a long time ago in internet terms, isn’t it? 2008 is whole epochs ago really, isn’t it?

 

Rachel Swirsky

And the gay stuff has come on both culturally and online just amazingly since then, I don’t have to think about who can I submit my story with gay characters to. Anyone!

 

Matt Dovey

It feels like almost, yeah, it’s probably about 50/50 for our protagonist now it’s fantastic.  Just to wrap up, then quickly in the time we’ve got, what are you working on now that we can look forward to and where can people find out more about you?

 

Rachel Swirsky

My website is rachelswirsky.com. So that’s pretty easy. I’ve got a lot of stories online, on audio and in print, which you can access for free and then there’s links to other stuff, including my novella January 15. I’m working on a novel, it’s long. But I think my agent would like me to finish it and give it to him. So, um, I am actually not working a lot of fiction right now so that I can try to get that done.

 

Matt Dovey

Good luck. That was one of the questions I skipped actually, you’ve been sort of around 15 or more years as an author, and it’s all been short fiction. Just why you, why you love those waters so much. Because I mean, I write short fiction as well. Again, I’m just undergoing an ADHD diagnosis. So maybe there’s a clue there

 

Rachel Swirsky

I’m also incredibly perfectionistic. So, I retype when I’m rewriting and I will do that sometimes 16 times. Novels are long.

 

Matt Dovey

I’ve really had to try hard to break myself the idea that effort put in equals quality out because it’s really not true. Sometimes the first way you get it down is the best but anyway, we haven’t got time to get into this. So, I’m just gonna finish up and say thank you ever so much for joining us today and for starting us off all those many years ago and we hope you do you really proud now with where we’ve ended up.

 

Rachel Swirsky

Well thank you so much. And absolutely. I’m so glad that it’s continued in in the same tradition of you know, representation and excitement about fantasy.

 

Matt Dovey

I have no idea how many seconds we have left it just says that’s a one minute so I’m just gonna very quickly say thank you ever so much.

 

Rachel Swirsky

Yeah, thank you too diminishing returns is what I get with the rewriting. I still think I’m improving but…

 

Matt Dovey

Yes, and sometimes you sort of go I’ve got brilliant image to put here and you write in and then two sentences later though it bloody is I’m terrible like that. So well good luck with the novel. It’s kind of dread to think about just sitting on one.