This week we have the pleasure of talking to a prolific author with lots of speculative fiction under his belt! That’s right, Jim C. Hines joins us to discuss his career and journey, from the early attempts at a magnum opus, all the way to his latest book about kite fighting in a world of eternal wind. Also, some of the strangest publishing drama you’ve ever heard.

Generously transcribed by Michael Frank. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny. 

Chris:  Welcome to the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Chris, and with me is …

Oren: Oren.

Chris: And we have a very special guest today: Jim C. Hines. He’s published over twenty novels, over fifty short stories, and he won a Hugo Award for best fan writer after he took pictures of himself posing like the women on book covers!

Oren: That was great. [Laughs]

Jim: Thank you.

Chris: And apparently, as I recall, that gave you some back pain?

Jim: Some of the poses, yes. Trying to get both the chest and the backside on the same image. Um, yeah. You definitely need some ibuprofen afterward.

Chris: Of course. ‘Cause the reader’s gotta see both boobs and butt.

Jim: Well, of course!

Oren: Look, the spine must be sacrificed. That’s just the way it works.

Jim: Right.

Oren: Well, welcome to our podcast.

Jim: Thank you! Thank you for having me.

Oren: So, we have some questions that we’re going to ask because you have written a lot of books and you have a very cool writing career, and we wanna know what you’ve learned over that time, and we wanna share that with our listeners in the hopes that we will all benefit from your wisdom.

Jim: Wait, I was supposed to have learned something?

Oren: Yeah. You know, they tell you that at the end, right? They’re like, “Hey, can you come tell people what you’ve learned?” And you’re like, scrambling. Eh? Probably something, you know? 

Jim: So why didn’t you gimme a heads up about this thirty years ago when I started?

Oren: First we have a term that we use a lot at Mythcreants that we call ‘the magnum opus.’ We use it ironically. It kind of means a mega project that is also usually the writer’s first, or maybe close to first, book that they start on. It’s really ambitious that they aren’t prepared for. It seems to be pretty common. Have you done that? Did you–when you were first starting off–did you have a magnum opus?

Jim: Oh boy…

All: [Chuckling]

Jim: I had two, really.

Oren: Oh! With the Magnum Opi.

Jim: The first one, it was the first book I wrote. I was a junior in college and it was this grand fantasy adventure of my Dungeons & Dragons character.

Chris: Yeah! [Laughs]

Jim: His name was Nacor the Purple. He was just, very much the stereotypical cool elf character. And every night I would do classes or do some homework, and then go sit down and write more about this D&D character. And it was, looking back, terrible. It was full of cliché. It was sloppy, shallow world building. There was no real consistency. You know, he has a falcon companion that I think at one point becomes an owl. It was awful, but I didn’t know that. I just knew that I was having fun. I was loving getting into this character and writing all these cool action scenes and things that I thought were very dramatic and even emotional. And then –

Oren: Well, it sounds like you discovered that the owl familiar had shape-shifting abilities and could become a falcon. That’s cool! That’s like a, you know, an emergent property, I would say. 

Jim: Now, see, if I was writing it now, that’s exactly the BS explanation I would go for. It’s like, oh yeah, that’s totally, um … What I actually ended up doing with it, I think probably about ten years back, I had volunteered for a fundraiser that if, you know, if you raise this much or bid on this, I will read this awful fan fiction of my character while dressed as the character.

Oren: Oh wow.

Chris: Oh wow! That’s great.

Jim: And then when I read it and posted the reading, people wanted to know more, which is like, really? My readers are masochists? What’s going on? So I ended up self-publishing it. It’s called Rise of the Spider Goddess, and it’s annotated.

Chris: Oh.

Jim: It’s the manuscript exactly as I wrote it. But then twenty-years-older and more experienced me doing the mystery science theater treatment throughout. Just all the snide comments, all of the, “Oh God, what was I thinking?”

Chris: [chuckles] That sounds delightful.

Jim: It was kind of fun. And, you know, I do like putting it out there as just reassurance that we all suck when we start and we get better. But it’s okay to suck when you’re starting out.

Oren: This kids, is why you should never get rid of the novel draft, no matter how bad it is. You never know when you might need it for a fundraiser.

Jim: Exactly. People might actually pay money to suffer through that.

Oren: And you said there was another one?

Jim: There was. There was a book called Hamadryad that I was trying to be … You know, this was a few years later. It was more ambitious. It was dealing with female characters and how they’re written and sexism and objectification and just getting into a lot of cultural issues. And I was totally not ready to write it.

Chris: Mm-hmm. Oh man. We encounter so many writers that really wanna take on important issues, but you know, when you start writing, that’s the hardest time to take on something that’s, you know. It’s ambitious in its own right because it’s sensitive.

Jim: Years later, the character came back in part of the Libriomancer books. But yeah, that was like ten more years of learning how to write, learning how to get a little deeper with the themes, learning how to not be completely heavy handed about it all.

Oren: [satirically] I’m sixteen and I have just heard that religious discrimination is bad. I’m gonna write the quintessential novel about Islamophobia.

Jim: [chuckles] Yeah.

Oren: Right? Like, let he who has never done this cast the first stone.

Jim: And it’s – I mean, you don’t wanna discourage it because it’s great that sixteen-year-old you has discovered this, and I’m very happy that you’re exploring. But yeah …

Oren: It’s good that you want to, and then eventually you will learn the expertise and you can probably do something that will actually work a little better.

Jim: Hopefully.

Oren: Yeah. Like when I get clients who wanna do this, I always encourage why they want to and their motivations, and then I try to help them avoid the big mistakes that we all make. Right? 

Chris: I mean, I try to encourage people to start by depicting the world they want to see. Right? Instead of taking on all of those difficult topics when they start. But yeah, no. We’ve all – my magnum opus was overly edgy and not trying to comment enough. So I’ve definitely done worse. 

Jim: I think we’ve all been there, you know, one way or another.

Chris: So, your list of short stories is very impressive. And I noticed going through your bibliography that the earliest one I spotted was Whisper of a Dream published in 1997, which is nine years before your earliest novel that you have listed.

Jim: Yup.

Chris: And it looks like you’re still writing them. So I’m always telling people to write more short stories, and I would just love to hear more about, you know, what you feel short story writing has done for you. Whether it’s, you know, your personal happiness or forwarding your career. You know, what you get from doing that?

Jim: Oh, that’s a good question. When I was starting out, you know, mid ‘90s, that was the very common advice. That was what I was still hearing from the established writers is, “No, no. Start with short stories. Break in there, and then you’ll build your reputation, build your name, and then you’ll be able to sell a novel.” I think there was a shift going on at the time, and it didn’t really work that way anymore.

Chris: I mean, if there was a straightforward path to success, everybody would do it and then it wouldn’t work anymore. [Laughs]

Jim: Well, unless the path was hard.

Chris: Yeah. It’s true. Very true.

Jim: But yeah, it’s – most of the writers I talked to, it’s like, how did you break in? It’s, “Well, it’s a weird story.”

Chris: Ooh, we love weird stories.

Jim: It’s never just, oh, it’s a straightforward, “I did this.” It’s some weird circuitous mess. But that said, I mean, I enjoyed writing short stories. I learned a lot about structure, about plotting. Some of the basics of, just like, how to write dialogue, how to structure a paragraph; how to use a semicolon.

It didn’t necessarily carry over directly to novel writing because a short story is a short story and a novel is a novel. And they’re different beasts. But some of the basic skills definitely helped when I started doing novels. And I still do them occasionally. I tend more toward the books because the books reach more people, they sell better. They, you know – I have children and cats to feed. But the short stories, they’re fun break sometimes. You know, it doesn’t take a full year for me to write one. I can explore ideas that maybe wouldn’t work at a hundred thousand words, but 3,000 words, this works great. Like, there is one that was a parody of Sesame Street where a werewolf shows up.

Chris & Oren: [Laughter]

Jim: I wrote it as a script for the show, and there’s just no way I could have done that at book length. But much shorter? This was fun. This was funny. It didn’t get too old by the end. This was great. You know, there are things you can do in the short format that you just can’t really do at novel length.

Chris: It sounds like that, you know, was a good way to practice in your earlier years.

Jim: To some extent, yeah. I do kind of wish I had started writing novels sooner, so I could have gotten better at that more quickly. But honestly, I can’t complain. You know, I’m happy with the short fiction output I’ve had. I’m happy getting my stuff out there in different … Oh! I’m blanking on words. Professional writer here. In different anthologies, different magazines. Just different ways for people to find the stuff.

Oren: Well, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, because you’re absolutely right about there being some things that you can do in short stories that just would not work for novels. I’ve even run into a couple of clients who were trying something like that where it really felt like what they wanted was a short story that had a very cool high-novelty premise that works for, you know, about three or four thousand words and then it stops working.

Jim: Yeah. Terry Bisson did They’re Made Out of Meat.

Oren: Mm-hmm.

Chris: Yep!

Jim: And it’s brilliant. And it can’t be – it would never work if you kept dragging it out.

Chris: Yeah.

Jim: But at that length, it’s perfect.

Oren: I do have a short-story-related question before we go to the next one actually.

Jim: Sure.

Oren: Have you ever thought of doing like, an anthology of – and maybe you already have and this is an obvious question to Chris – but an anthology of short stories that are like, you know, they’re not chapters in a novel, but they have the same characters and take place in the same world. Is that something that you’ve looked at? 

Jim: Sort of a mosaic style?

Oren: Yeah.

Jim: The closest I’ve come, there’s a – sort of a chapbook thing called Goblin Tales that’s got five of my goblin related short stories.

Chris: And was that published after the Goblin Trilogy?

Jim: After, yes. Yeah, I’ve thought about it. I’m not sure I would … I’ve never seriously wanted to dive into it, but it’s been at the back of my mind sometimes.

Oren: Okay, cool. Thank you. I just, I’m always trying to find out information on that. ‘Cause that’s another thing that my clients are often, you know, looking to do and they want to know how viable is this in the market. And, you know, all I can tell them is, well, short stories are hard in general. Yeah. So I’m always trying to find more specific information on that.

Chris: Yeah. I will say a lot of times when I see short stories on the market and anthologies like that, it is as a follow up to a novel. ‘Cause then you already have a fan base, right? And people are like, “Oh, I’m out of the Goblin novels. I feel sad. Oh, I can read some short stories! It’s a nice way to wean fans off of the characters once you’re pretty much done.”

Jim: Well and sometimes, you know, you’ve written these books, you’ve written these characters. And you know, I find sometimes I just miss them.

Chris: Mm-hmm.

Jim: You know, I want to go back and play in that world again. Or there’s an idea that didn’t quite make it into the books, but we can put it into a short story and get it out there.

Oren: Very cool. Alright, so my next question is when you were, you know, still learning, did you go through any periods of disillusionment when you realized you weren’t as far along as you’d hoped?

Jim: Oh, I love that you phrase this in past tense.

All: [Laughter]

Oren: Yeah. Never happens to any of us in the present. Don’t worry about it.

Jim: Right. No, that’s been there pretty much – won’t say from the very beginning. ‘Cause when I was writing that first really bad D&D magnum opus thing, I thought it was great. And my girlfriend at the time liked it, which looking back was probably another sign of her … questionable judgment. But –

Chris & Oren: [Laughter]

Jim: Then a few years into it, when I started submitting and getting all the rejection letters, there was definitely a lot of discouragement. And in some ways it was harder in those first few years because I didn’t realize how – well, how bad I was.

Oren: Yeah. 

Jim: I didn’t know how much I had to learn. I couldn’t look at my own work and see the problems. And then – I don’t know – five, six, seven years in, I guess it was like flipping a switch. And you know, maybe it came from doing some writing workshops, working with other people, learning to critique. I started seeing the problems and you know, this was in some ways very discouraging. But in some ways this was great because, oh! I can fix that. I can go in and make it better. But the discouragement, the depression, the feeling like I’m not as good as I want to be. That’s always there, off and on. Even now, thirty years since I started doing this, you know?

I am currently working on the first draft of a new book. And my first drafts tend to be really bad. It’s just, you know, vomit up all the ideas onto the page. We’ll fix it later.

Oren: As is the nature of a first draft.

Chris: Right. I mean, I might argue that by their nature they … [laughs]

Jim: Right. But as I’m sitting there writing it, I’m still having that thing in my mind, that voice that says, “Oh, so this is the book that everybody’s going to realize you’ve been faking it this whole time and all of your other stuff,” you know? “You’re this horrible, terrible writer that you’ve just somehow managed to fool people.”

Oren: Well, I mean, it’s gotta happen to us all. Eventually, you know, eventually they will figure it out. 

Jim: Right. We’re just trying to postpone it for as long as possible.

Oren: I have a follow up question, because you mentioned that you gained the ability to see what was wrong and that motivated you to want to make changes and wanna fix things. Was that, like, your main way of getting through the disappointment or did you have something else going on?

Jim: Ooh. Getting through the disappointments? Um … 

Chris: Tell us your coping strategies. We need them.

Jim: Ice cream.

Oren: Very good, very good.

Jim: Probably the worst: the first time I almost sold a book to a major publisher and I had gotten all excited about it, and then they pulled the offer.

Chris: Ouch!

Oren: Yeesh!

Jim: And I crashed hard. You know, looking back at it, it’s like, no, Jim, you wrote a book that a major publisher, at least initially, wanted to buy. This is good.

Chris: Right. It was a sign you were getting closer, but –

Jim: But, no. It’s probably the worst writing depression crash that I’ve had. And it lasted a month or two and the coping mechanism that brought me out of it was the birth of my second child. 

Oren: Wow.

Jim: I don’t necessarily recommend this for every time you get a rejection.

Chris: [Laughter]

Oren: Yeah. You can see how that might have … other consequences!

Jim: Right! That could cause other forms of depression and overwhelm.

Chris: I don’t know. Maybe you can just create your own readership.

Jim: [riffing] Oh honey?

Chris: Eventually you’ll have enough.

Jim: Yeah, I’m fifty-one. I don’t think that’s happening at this point.

Chris: Thank you. That’s very touching. We have a lot of people – obviously a lot of writers go through this disillusionment phase. I think, because a lot of us are lied to, basically, by culture about what it entails.

Jim: Oh, yeah!

Chris: And so, you know, all of those movies about like, “Oh, just write with your heart!”

Jim: Oh God.

Chris: [laughing] And it just magically assembles itself.

Jim: Just sit down and the words flow. And a year from now, you’ll be in your limousine with your agent sipping champagne as you drive to your book launch.

Chris: Mm-hmm. And man, if we just treated it like other professions, you know?

Jim: Mm-hmm.

Chris: I think people would be so much better off. So yeah, thank you so much for sharing that. So we’d like to hear about your writing process. Is it different now than when you started? I’ve heard from many writers that over process, I mean, over time they tend to do a little bit more planning when they find something – “Oh, I wish I had accounted for that.” And then they plan a little more. Is that you? Or do you have a, you know – Is it pure chaos? Is it very orderly? What’s your style? 

Jim: It’s definitely more chaos than I would like. I’ve gotta have an outline. You know? I learned that pretty early on. My brain is not big enough for a whole book. I can’t hold it all in my head. I don’t – if I just write from the seat of my pants, I meander all over the place and I don’t know where I’m going.

The problem I run into is, you know, what my process has evolved into is I write the outline, then I start writing the book. Then I get about 10,000 words into the book and I realize my outline is broken. So I go back and I write a new outline. Then I write the next part of the book. Get maybe halfway through, maybe even two-thirds, if I’m lucky. Break the outline again and you know, repeat until you finally have a messy first draft that I can work with.

But I would love to be able to get the outline right the first time! And I keep feeling like, okay, you’ve written twenty plus books. You should know how to do this. But I think part of the process with every book is learning how to write that book. Because whatever you figured out on the last one may or may not apply.

Chris: I’ve certainly seen many books by authors where there’s one book that just does really well because the author just happened to fit in that perfect formula. And then you see them just make a slight change to the books and suddenly it doesn’t, you know, work together as well anymore. And yeah, right. Stories are so niche in how they work.

So it sounds like for you, you feel like when you ride into a roadblock, it’s something that you could have accounted for in the outline as opposed to you came up with a new idea and then started wandering away from where your outline was.

Jim: It’s a bit of both. Sometimes it’s realizing that what I put into my outline was stupid or obvious or boring. And sometimes it’s more like you were saying that, you know, the outline is perfectly fine but, oh! wouldn’t it be cool if this happened? Or this character that I didn’t think was very important is a lot of fun. I’m gonna write them another scene and see what happens. Yeah, there’s definitely some discovery to it, at least for me.

Chris: Sounds like a good way for your outline to break; if you find something fun and you want more of it.

Jim: Hopefully … yeah. That’s a good way of looking at it. Hopefully it’s breaking better.

Chris: Yeah, and like going back to your outline, I mean, that just sounds like the right move. You know, you find something new and fun, you go back and you know, account for it. Yeah, that sounds great. I mean that would not be something that I would worry about, but certainly with other things, you know, again, sometimes people just take more and more notes every time they outline. But you know, it doesn’t work for everybody.

Jim: And this, it’s a frustrating process a lot of the time. But, it seems to work for me. Readers don’t see all of the outlines and all of the drafts. They just see the finished product. So, however you get there. 

Oren: Once you have the first draft, you know, the one that we’ve been describing is, you know, often very messy. Is there a single process that you go through for revision or is it different with every book?

Jim: There’s not a single identical process. Usually when I finish the first draft. At that point, I have a much better sense of the story and what it’s about and who these characters are. So I’ll read through it. I’ll make notes. But most of the time I’m pretty anxious and eager to just jump in and start writing it again from page one. And I’ll use that first draft as sort of the new outline and the new basis. But now I know where it’s going and now I can develop and add in all the description, and start layering in theme and foreshadowing and inside jokes and all of that fun stuff.

Oren: Yeah, we love it.

Jim: Yeah. The second draft is so much more fun than the first draft.

Chris: That’s great. Do we have time for maybe one more?

Oren: Yeah, I think we have time for one more ’cause we wanna make sure …

Chris: Any preferences, Jim? Do you have a preference for what question if we have time for one more? 

Jim: I do not. Choose your favorite. 

Oren: So we’ll go with our last question ’cause we wanna hear about your upcoming project. 

Jim: Okay.

Oren: Tell us the story of how you got your first ‘trad’ publishing deal for a novel.

Jim: Well, that would be Goblin Quest. That was the one that I was talking about that had the very tragic backstory. Goblin Quest was weird. Most books take me about a year to write. I wrote and revised Goblin Quest in six weeks.

Chris: Wow.

Oren: Damn.

Jim: I had just moved back to Michigan. I was unemployed. I had no social life. This is all part of it. But yeah, I wrote it and it was the book where I stopped worrying about what I’m supposed to be writing and just had fun with it. And then started sending it out to publishers, sending it out to agents, collecting all of the rejections and getting on with life. Eventually, a smaller publisher said, “Hey, we like this. We’ll pay you a small advance. We’ll do a library edition. We’ll get this book out there.” 

And by this time, you know, it had been rejected by pretty much everyone. There were one or two publishers that had been sitting on it for a year and a half with no response. So I figured, okay, this is great. I’ll have a book. I did email those last few holdouts saying, “Hey, just letting you know, you’ve probably moved on long ago, but I got a deal. So withdrawing the book.” Another year passes, the book comes out from the small press and two months later the publisher who had had it at this point for probably two and a half years sends me an email with revisions saying, “These are the changes, these are the things we want you to work on.”

Oren: Oh!

Jim: “And by the way, we wanna buy this book.”

Oren: [laughing] Oh no.

Jim: And I just say, “Wait, what? No. I already – but you. I can’t.” But – And so for a while. There was this sense that – well, the small publisher put out a hardcover, but they didn’t buy mass market rights, so maybe you could take the mass market rights, maybe I can salvage this.

I was able to get an agent through this, just by querying a few agents and saying, “Hey, I have a really weird situation and I need help.”

Oren: Yeah.

Chris: Yeah.

Jim: And Joshua at JABberwocky – I still remember the phone call. You know, he called and said, “We’d like to help you with your problem.” 

The deal with that publisher fell through.

Chris: Oh.

Jim: I went into my depression until my kid was born. But I had an agent now, and the agent was saying, “Look, you’ve done this once, you can do it again. Write the next book. We’ll still be here.” And I ended up writing another Goblin book ’cause I didn’t know what else to do.

Oren: Well it did get a publisher’s attention, right?

Jim: So yeah, why not? So the agent sent it out to some publishers and we got some interest from two of them. And one of them said, “I really like this book. It’s a lot of fun. But it feels like book two,” you know? “It feels like it’s a sequel to something.” And my agent said, “Well, it’s funny you should mention that, because we do still have mass market paperback rights for this first book.”

And DAW Books ended up buying both of them.

Chris: Oh, that’s great!

Oren: Nice.

Jim: So it eventually worked out even better. But it was just bumpy and ugly and not how I would recommend breaking in.

Chris: At the same time, it sounds like you did the right things, right? Part of the trickiness of the situations, agents want you to have a publisher. Publishers want you to have an agent.

Jim: Right.

Chris: So you’re able to use what interest you got to get an agent, you know? That sounds like you made the right moves, even though it was hard.

Jim: I was trying to. And when you’re new, you don’t know how – you don’t know what the rules are. Did I screw up by going to an agent? Did I … should I have not submitted it until I got the official rejection two and a half years later or … ? It was rough. I don’t look back and think, oh, I really messed up here. It was just messy.

Oren: It does sound really hard, but – I don’t know if I would say it worked out. But I’m glad that it had a positive ending at least.

Jim: I mean, in the long run, I think it worked out great. I have been very, very happy with DAW. Almost all of my books have been with them. You know, I’ve been with them almost twenty years now. So I’m pleased.

Chris: That’s fantastic.

Jim: Yeah.

Chris: So do you wanna tell us about Kitemaster?

Jim: Sure. Ironically, not with DAW. This one was a smaller press title, because it’s hard to summarize. It doesn’t have a nice pitch line like my next. My next book with DAW in October is Buffy the Vampire Slayer crossed with The Golden Girls.

Chris: [laughing] That sounds very new.

Jim: Right. But Kitemaster, it doesn’t have that punchy one-sentence summary.

Chris: That ‘high concept.’

Jim: Yeah. It’s this fantasy world, which is very much built on my sense of wonder. It started out, just because I read something about fighting kites and thought, oh, that’s really cool.

Oren: They are really cool. So, you know, good instinct.

Jim: I know, right? So I built a world around that. Where wind is eternal, it never stops. And so all of the technology and magic is sort of wind based. And you have ‘kitemasters’ who can manipulate the wind and control the things that fly on it. And you have kiteships, which – the physics were a little tricky, but – if you put a kitemaster on and mix in a little magic, you can fly around on these ships with huge ‘kitesails.’ And you’ve got stars that don’t actually work like the stars in our world. They’re more of a river of stars that flow through the night faster or slower. It depends on the wind.

Oren: That’s gonna make horoscopes hard.

Jim: Yeah, they don’t do horoscopes.

Oren: That sounds super cool though.

Jim: And you’ve got dragons who are, like, half a mile long who live in the stars. And when a star falls, the dragons eat them to keep the stars from hitting the world.

Chris: Oh, that’s cool.

Jim: It’s all of these ideas that made me happy. That made me think, oh cool, I wanna see that. And then layered onto this is the story of Nial, who is a twenty-one-year-old widow who discovers that she’s a kitemaster, and gets drawn into this, you know, fantasy adventure to stop the queen who is raising an army of kitemasters to – without getting into spoilers – do very bad things.

So Nial, she’s grieving, but she’s also fighting and learning and exploring. And there’s sort of a found family thing going on with her two friends on the kiteship. And it’s a book – it’s one that I’m very proud of. I think it’s one of the best ones that I’ve done. But it’s definitely not quite as commercial as most of my stuff.

Chris: I’m looking at the cover and I really think that it kind of conveys that sense of wonder.

Jim: Oh, the cover’s beautiful, isn’t it?

Chris: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Looking over this very pretty landscape and – yeah! No, that sounds great. It sounds like a wonderful read. I certainly look forward to testing it out myself.

Jim: Thank you! I hope you like it.

Chris: Alright. Well thank you so much for joining us.

Jim: Thank you for having me. This has been fun.

Oren: Alright. Well I think that will about do it for this episode.

Chris: If you enjoyed this episode, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants. 

Oren: And before we go, I wanna thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Amon Jabber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s the professor of Political Theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.