I recently had the chance to interview Luc Reid, author of Family Skulls, which I recently reviewed here.
I’ve “known” Luc Reid since shortly after the boot camp I attended with Orson Scott Card in 2003. Luc was an alumni from a previous year, and he organized the lot of us into a still-thriving community of aspiring writers called Codex. That community has been a source of companionship, advice, and inspiration over the years.
Here he is, in his own words:
I’m a Writers of the Future winner, a former radio commentator, the founder of the Codex online writers’ group, a musician, a 5th generation Vermonter, a small-time playwright, and a black belt in Taekwondo Chung Do Kwan. In addition to two Writers of the Future anthologies (numbers 19 and 20), my fiction and non-fiction show up in places like Abyss & Apex, Brain Harvest, Daily Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, Clarkesworld, and The Writer magazine. My first book was Talk the Talk: The Slang of 65 American Subcultures (Writers Digest Books, 2006). I blog about writing and the psychology of habits (mainly) at www.lucreid.com.
Q&A
Where did the idea for Family Skulls come from?
It started because I wanted to write something that grew out of my home state of Vermont, a place I really love and that is unique in the world. I like to bend the rules of reality in my fiction, but in this story I wanted to bend them gently, not to have aliens barging into the Waitsfield general store or wizards battling with fireballs on the peak of Camel’s Hump, but something that was quiet and that you could almost believe might be happening. Vermont can be a very cold place, and the curse in it is a very cold judgement that seemed to fit somehow. At the same time, my experience of Vermonters involves a lot of very warm-hearted, down-to-earth people, and those people formed the basis of the two families at the heart of the book.
Is the main character, Seth, anything like you?
Well, he certainly has a hell-bent quality that’s awfully familiar to me. If either one of us gets in our head that something needs to be done, we both tend to go after it with all our concentration–but Seth is more disciplined than I ever was at that age. He has to be, I think. It took me a long time to learn how useful it was to be able to do things entirely on my own, whereas Seth had to be able to survive on his own since age 7. That would be a hard way to live, and it produces a harder person than I ever was.
I think my favorite part of the book was the parallels you drew between literal curse-keepers (those holding and maintaining the magical curse on Seth’s family) and figurative curse-keepers (the people in our real lives who constantly hurt us). What do you hope readers will take away from this?
One lesson I seem to keep learning–and I say “keep learning” because people are affected in so many different ways by others in their lives–is that to understand people, I have to understand how they’ve been treated before or are being treated now. It’s funny, now that you ask this question, I’m realizing how much my current book project (a non-fiction book about mental schemas, which are patterns of problem behavior we pick up in childhood, and how to change them) is really about this same thing: when we’re young, the troubles we have shape our expectations and the problems we have later in life. We have to be able to recognize these personal curses and persevere in trying to shake them off if we want to see what we’re really capable of.
What was your favorite part of the book?
I like when the barn partly collapses. It’s not a happy moment in the book, but if you drive around for a while in Vermont, you’ll see some old barns that look like they’re just waiting, for decades if need be, for some poor fool to climb up in them so they can go down in style. I also like when Grandma Neddie drags Seth and Chloe into her “parlor” to set some things straight. She’s the kind of person who is both insightful and blunt, and I love that kind of character.
Which book (of yours) is your favorite and why?
I’m going to try to skillfully evade answering that (but fail by mentioning that I’m doing it), because I like different things about different ones. I have a book of flash fiction called Bam! 172 Hellaciously Quick Stories (http://www.amazon.com/Bam-Hellaciously-Quick-Stories-ebook/dp/B004GUS8Q8) that contains far more of my dreams, ideas, nightmares, fears, hopes, and wild imaginings than I could possibly fit in a single novel. Family Skulls (http://www.amazon.com/Family-Skulls-ebook/dp/B00573Y36W) is closer to my heart and my heritage than anything else I’ve written. My book Talk the Talk certainly has the most blood and sweat invested, and yielded a ton of fascinating information, and I have an unpublished novel that features one of my favorite characters of any I’ve come up with; she’ll get a new book of her own sooner or later.
What are you working on now?
Apart from short stories and collaborations, my main project right now is a book on mental schemas. Schema therapy is an approach to understanding what’s going on with ourselves and others that is incredibly useful, but there’s very little available for non-professionals on the subject, so I’ve been studying, using, and writing about that field for a couple of years now and am putting together a book that provides a lot of practical information. What’s surprised me most about the project is how useful it’s been to me: at a certain point, I realized I really should be offering a practical way to make use of all the information I was passing on, and developing that (in the form of something I call a “schema journal”) turns out open up all kinds of possibilities in my own life.
When do you find time to write? (And what do you do when you’re not writing?)
Writing for me needs to be fitted in among a lot of other important things: a day job, living a healthy life (and so getting regular exercise, cooking good food, and things like that), putting attention and energy into my connections with the rest of my family, and all of the miscellaneous daily needs, along with all of the tasks I’ve added on by running a large online forum for writers, pursuing my second dan black belt, and so on. So writing time comes most often later at night, first thing in the morning, or in small pieces between other tasks. I’ve learned to make use of smaller amounts of time by organizing my writing life better and to write happily in environments that used to be too distracting–I’ve had to!
Do you have any advice for aspiring writers?
A lot, actually! I especially have spent long hours learning about how to approach difficult tasks like writing–how to get the motivation, how to know what to write, and that kind of thing. The best compilation of that information I’ve put together so far is my short book The Writing Engine: A Practical Guide to Writing Motivation, which you can download free from my Web site as a PDF (http://www.lucreid.com/?page_id=1012) or for 99 cents on Amazon for the Kindle (http://www.amazon.com/Writing-Engine-Practical-Motivation-ebook/dp/B0032JTW64 ).
If you could have thirty minutes alone with any author, who would you choose and what would you talk about?
William Shakespeare! I’d question him about his life, how he got started writing, and what his guiding principles were. This would be fascinating for me as well as enlightening, and if anyone believed me, then as a bonus I’d get a best-selling book out of writing it up.
The only problem with would be that his rotted, crumbling corpse would probably have trouble enunciating, and his accent would already be unfamiliar to me, so that would make it a bit harder to communicate. I also would need the services of a good necromancer, and you know how expensive that gets.
Actually, one of the items on my short list of “Man, I’d love to have time to write this some day” novels is a fictionalized biography of Shakespeare that infers a lot of details based on what we know about how people become great at things–and we know a lot more now than we did even 20 years ago. Before that book, though, I have this novel about Lucifer I want to get back to.
If you could only read one book for the rest of your life, but you could read it over and over again, what would you choose?
That would be a special kind of Hell for me: I’m not a fan of repeating things. I would probably choose something fat and full of all kinds of different elements, like the Penguin History of the World or The Complete Works of Shakespeare. This may be cheating, but I’ve never claimed to be much of a rule-follower, so I won’t lose any sleep over it.
What should I have asked that I didn’t?
Well, “should” is a strong word, but how about novelists whose work I particularly love? I won’t dwell on the ones people have likely already read (Rowling, Tolkien, Lewis, etc.) but it’s also hard to go wrong with Philip Pullman, Jonathan Stroud, or Orson Scott Card. James Maxey comes up with gobs of wild ideas and weaves them into plots that never stop turning, Maya Lassiter has a knack for getting close with characters you quickly come to feel real affection for, and Judson Roberts has used an epic knowledge of Viking culture to make stories in that setting come alive. I’m neglecting other good novelists, but those are a few good suggestions if anyone’s looking.
Anything you wish I hadn’t asked?
No, you completely steered clear of the whole counterfeit ferret thing, so overall I’m relieved.
Thank you, Luc!