Inkygirl: Daily Diversions For Writers

A full-time author, anthologist and translator, Lawrence Schimel has published over 80 books in many different genres and for all ages. I was enchanted (no pun intended) by his latest book, Fairy Tales For Writers, a collection of poetry about the joys and struggles of the creative process and the writing life.You can read some samples online: The Little Mermaid and Sleeping Beauty. One poem, for example, is about a new writer who encounters a “wolf” on the path to publication. Another poem is about that member of a writing workshop who always needs to be the fairest of them all. Each poem weaves together fairy tale and real life, some humorous and some bittersweet. Only 30 pages long and in small format, it would make a nice gift for any freelance writer (and it fits nicely in a greeting card envelope!).

You made your first professional writing sale when you were still in high school. Could you tell us more about that?

My first professional sale was to Marion Zimmer Bradley for her anthology series SWORD & SORCERESS. Marion was always especially supportive of younger writers, and new writers in general, and very generous in letting other writers use the world (Darkover) she created. Since I was only 17, my parents had to countersign the contract for me.

I had previously been published in a few fanzines and small press publications–including a few translations into Flemish, even. I had begun submitting my work when I was 15 and went through a lot of postage submitting without knowing well enough the markets I was trying to crack. By the time I had to submit college applications I was already hardened to the whole process of submitting, waiting, getting rejected, etc.

You’re a Renaissance man when it comes to publishing, with over 80 books in all sorts of genres in 18 years. What’s your favourite genre?

While I make my living primarily with prose, I think of myself as a better poet than fiction writer or essayist–even though I don’t write much poetry (in general, nor as much as I’d like to).

That said, I absolutely love creating children’s books. I work primarily with a Spanish illustrator, Sara Rojo Pérez, and we’ve done around 30 projects together, from board books to picture books. I love the synergy of creating something that needs the format of an illustrated text, where word and image are each contributing something essential to the story, and the readership is also among the most appreciative: it’s great to have kids want to read and reread something you’ve created.

In “Fairy Tales For Writers”, how many of the poems are based on real-life incidents?

I would say that the poems are informed by my real life experience in the publishing world, and the experiences of people I know, but none of the poems are about things that happened to me. So, while I did fall prey to a vanity press scam when I was 16, I am not the character in “Little Red Riding Hood” who, along with her grandmother, are both deceived by the wolf in an editor’s clothing. In many ways, like fairy tales themselves, these are archetypal situations that a writer might encounter, and so are about more idealized “Truths” about the writing life than the mere facts of details from my own experience.

Do you work on one project at a time, or multiple? If more than one, how do you organize your time?

I am constantly juggling multiple projects at once, both my own writing projects and the anthologies I’m editing. I’m very driven by deadline pressure, but it’s complicated because I need to have enough projects going at the same time to keep me motivated, without leaving me feeling overwhelmed. But too few and I tend to lapse into a doldrums. A few years ago, I had a horrible year, with two book contracts cancelled per month between January and June; this left me rather depressed for a long while. This year, in contrast, I’ve published 13 books already (some which were bumped from last year) and have one or two which may still be published later this year. It’s all so unpredictable.

In many ways, it’s actually more efficient to edit a handful of anthologies at once as it is to edit one, so long as you’re not drawing on the same pool of authors too much. So much of the process involves waiting. And juggling the multiple projects also lets you cultivate a stable of writers whose work you rely on. Doing only the occasional anthology often requires much more effort to find appropriate material.

You live in Madrid, Spain, but it sounds as if much of your work contacts live in North America. What are the pros/cons of working where you do?

I moved to Spain when I was 27 and had already published 27 books back in the U.S. (and my first book of short stories, THE DRAG QUEEN OF ELFLAND, had already appeared in Spanish translation) I figured I had enough momentum to leave the country and continue having a career there, and that’s proven to be the case. At the same time, I wanted to push my overseas career, and living in Europe has helped tremendously in that respect.

I’m also now writing in Spanish (mostly children’s books) and that’s a genre where I was never able to get a foot in the door when I lived in the US (although I’ve since managed to publish some, with the Spanish illustrator I work with).

When I first moved abroad I was known more for my editing than my own books; one of the major things that moving to Spain allowed me to do was cultivate my own writing more. Europe also treats writers with more respect than tends to happen in North America, and my publishers here treated me as a house author, a type of loyalty I did not find in the US. (My second and third collections of short stories for adults, while written in English, were first published in Spanish or Catalan translation.)

At the time, the dollar was stronger than the peseta (this was before the euro) so I was able to live much better on what I earned as a writer in Spain than back in NYC (which has always been expensive). A corollary of that is that in Spain I have, as an integral part of my life here, enough time to read (I average 150-200 novels a year) which I wasn’t able to do when I lived in the US.

What’s your typical work day?

Well, one of the nice things about being a freelancer (and one with as disparate writing interests as I have) is that there isn’t ever a typical day.

Unfortunately, I’m very prone to procrastination and distractions, some of which are still helpful to my career. I enjoy the BUSINESS side of the writing and publishing industry, so I keep up on a lot of magazines/blogs/market sites/etc. looking for information about the industry and my colleagues. Even if it’s a genre I’m not currently writing in, I enjoy knowing about it, and I often send information that’s relevant to other writers I know (and many of them will likewise share this sort of info with me).

Also, because I publish in so many different genres and with different publishers, I wind up doing a lot of my own marketing, since publishers are only interested in promoting their own titles, whereas I, of course, want to promote (and cross-promote) all of my work (where relevant–not everything I write or edit will appeal to every reader, nor do I pretend that this should be the case; just because someone likes one book of mine doesn’t mean they’ll necessarily like all of them, though hopefully there will be other books or works of mine that will have resonance for them).

What this boils down to is that I don’t actually write every day, most of the time, but rather in bursts right before (or, too often lately, right after) a deadline.

Yesterday, for instance, I went and gave a reading from FAIRY TALES FOR WRITERS at an American University with a study abroad program here in Madrid; when I got home, I had to deal with some queries from the copyeditor on an anthology forthcoming in November and answer a short email interview for a website. What I didn’t get to was writing the non-fiction backmatter to go in a picture book about the Reina Sofia art museum, which I’ll hopefully get to today (perhaps after I finish answering this interview and before I need to present a prize for an erotic poem this evening).

How do you write? (e.g. do you set daily goals?)

I am so not a disciplined writer, and envy those who can sit down every morning and churn out x number of pages, methodically. I am a binge writer. And it takes me a while before I can even think about work, so I log on and read my email, check out my friends’ and various industry-related blogs, read an online article or few, etc. I’m much more alert at night than I am during the day.

In terms of how I write: I tend to go to cafes with my laptop, although it’s just as easy for me to waste writing time there as it is at home, but I’m less likely to be as distracted as I am at home.

For poetry, I almost always write the first draft in long hand, although for prose, especially fiction, I almost never do (unless I’m in transit somewhere and don’t have my computer at hand) which is just as well, since I also don’t write from beginning to end, in fact I usually jump from the start straight to the end and then have to go back and figure out how to muddle my way through to get from A to Z and flesh out the rest of the story.

What are your current/upcoming projects?

My most recent book is a picture book in Spanish, COSAS QUE PUEDO HACER YO SOLO (”Things I Can Do All By Myself”), from Macmillan Spain, and illustrated by Sara Rojo Pérez again. It features an adorable young raccoon, and I love how Sara has included references to some of our other books in the background details.

My next book to be published in English is the anthology FIRST PERSON QUEER, coedited with Richard Labonté, for Arsenal Pulp Press in Vancouver. It features work from Nalo Hopkinson, Kate Bornstein, Josh Kilmer-Purcell, Achy Obejas, Tim Miller, Katherine Forrest, and many others.

I’m also working (in my usual sporadic way) on a new collection of poetry titled IN THE SCHWARZWALD, again of fairy tale retellings, but this time using only the Grimm fairy tales as the lens through which to examine the Holocaust, since both originated in the same dark forest.

You can find out more information about Lawrence Schimel in his blog, and more about Fairy Tales For Writers at A Midsummer Night’s Press.

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