That means it's time for the traditional PR interview with my cat, The Big Kahuna.
 |
| The Big Kahuna and his buddy Gnarly the Narwhal |
(The Big) Kahuna: Wake up and drink your coffee, it’s PR
time. So, Charon, tell us about your latest book.
Charon Dunn: Go away. I hate PR and launches and interviews. Leave me alone.
TBK: Do you or do you not intend for other people to actually read this book that you have been working on for all of four months? Including snapping at me for interrupting your muse process. Multiple times.
CD: This book has been an intense grueling experience. It started out as a NaNoWriMo but it ran into overtime. It’s sort of the distillation of my disillusionment with life itself.
TBK: Sometimes I wonder if you were ready to leave therapy.
CD: Well, now, that’s an important point. My initial goal with therapy was to get to the point where I could leave the house without having fifty panic attacks a minute, and I achieved that. My initial goal with writing was to travel around attending SF cons and plugging my books to a hypothetical few people who would also sell me their books, and then we could all eat lunch together. And write it off. I had decided that would be a pleasant way to spend my dotage, but then Covid19 happened. Conventions, traveling, restaurants, all those things became high risk activities. Music is my religion, so I’m willing to take my life in my hands in order to go see my favorite pop stars, but I’m not certain I’m willing to risk long covid to argue with trekkies at panel discussions. I only get along with about thirty-five percent of spec fic fandom anyway. So I decided to write a horrible offensive book that would drive most people away, and hopefully get me banned in Texas, which is my new career goal. That book is called Star Language.
TBK: I imagine it’s full of drag queens and other topical controversies.
CD: Actually no. I don’t think there are any drag queens, although there are some undocumented aliens. It does have lots of sex, and some of it is potentially disturbing, and some of it is vaguely explicit. It also has a lot of linguistics. Star/Non-Star language is terminology used in linguistics and computer languages to designate whether a language can be fully expressed in a standard character set. It’s a triple-barreled pun, because the protagonist is a polyglot who is gifted in languages, and then she finds herself serving as a translator for space aliens, and consequently becoming a celebrity who is familiar with the “star language” of media and security protocols, and making sure your translation is both accurate and polite.
TBK: What makes you think you can write a polyglot character? You only speak English.
CD: I guess we’re about to find out whether I can write in English skillfully enough to make it convincing. (*cracks knuckles*) You know, Asimov didn’t actually meet a lot of robots.
TBK: Isn’t there some kind of appropriation going on too?
CD: Certainly not the cultural kind. I did take a lot of inspiration from history, though, specifically the history of how the Aztecs and the Spaniards became acquainted. I was thinking about writing a story about first contact with aliens. My anti-colonialist side urged me to write it nasty, just so that when readers accuse me of being a psycho for writing horrible things, I can hit them back with, “you think that’s bad? Go read the history book that inspired it!” History books are some of the most gory, offensive, horrible books you’ll ever read, and I read several of them during lockdown. While I thought about making it more of a Captain Cook situation, which is familiar history to me since I grew up in Hawai’i, instead I came up with a character, Melina, who is inspired by Malinche, the first Aztec who learned how to speak Spanish. Interestingly, while I was reading about her, a musical theater production about her life opened in Mexico City, and I’ve been following it online and occasionally enjoying snippets of the music and dancing. I would love to see it, but since I’m monolingual, I’m going to have to wait for the subtitled video. That said, aside from a few plot points, Star Language is not really about the historical characters who inspired it. Melina is a lot younger and more naive than Malinche, and Morvain smells way better than Cortes. It's more like an attempt to give people a taste for the healthy fiber of history by mixing it with plenty of sweet salty space alien sex.
TBK: What you’re saying is –
CD: I must admit, I’m a little nervous as to how it’ll be received. I thought about getting an editor or a sensitivity reader to go over it, but decided against it because this is 18+ pulp fiction with sexual abuse and an abusive meth-head mom and an alien invasion. However, in the spirit of the current fad for post-publication book edits, I’m totally willing to fix any minor errors or accidental insensitivities as long as people keep buying copies. As to whether the entire concept is a disrespectful lapse in judgment … /shrugs … you know, the villain of this story was born in Texas. They oughta ban it. Or maybe the Karens of the world will unite to ban it because the villain’s name is Karen, because I figured the name was already ruined, and I didn’t want to villainize one that doesn’t have that association yet.
TBK: Yeah, let’s move on to the misogyny.
CD: Having a villain who is a narcissistic abusive mom does not constitute misogyny. There are lots of nice women characters and Bechdel Rule conversations, and one woman character who is a monster. Now I realize there are a lot of people who feel that anyone who would tell a story with a female villain is probably a misogynist. And I think those people probably overlap considerably with the ones who would never buy a book with an AI art cover, which is one of the reasons I have an AI cover in the first place. Personally, I feel it’s misogynist to state women characters are incapable of moral complexity, and that’s exactly the situation I was writing about – whether Melina is actually guilty of anything, or whether she has mitigating circumstances.
TBK: Any buttons left unpushed?
CD: Lots and lots of death, but none involving pets, they end up in a compassionate animal shelter that doesn’t euthanize. The named ones do, anyway.
TBK: Mighty human of you. Let’s talk about that AI cover – you do realize lots of places are banning AI art.
CD: I like things that get banned. The cover is a combination of AI art, real space photography hacked up and collaged together, and my rudimentary Paint 3D skills. The AI was used to generate the character’s face, and I’ve posted a progression of the artwork on my blog, how I initially came up with a sad-eyed anime girl who became a sepia-toned line-drawing, and then a photorealistic portrait. She is completely generated and does not exist in real life, although she looks normal enough that she probably has a few lookalikes wandering around. I could’ve used a real model, or a real artist drawing the face of a real model, but I don’t know any models who look that much like Melina, and if I did I probably couldn't afford their rates. Anyway, that’s how I use AI; your mileage may vary. I do think it’s wonderful to be able to visualize my characters without having very much skill when it comes to drawing or painting them.
TBK: You could have drawn a girl using your own limited skills and touched it up with AI.
CD: I could have chopped down a tree and made my own paper and decorated it with drawings in ink made from natural herbs and berries, applied with a sharpened goosefeather, but that would take forever plus I think organic flexing is cringe, so I used AI to make a cover that I probably could have achieved with clip art and filters. All the writing in it is human-generated without a single word of AI prose, and since I didn’t work with an editor this time, it’s extra super duper handmade. I would have finished it a month sooner if I hadn’t been nursing you back to health after that GI attack, old man. Is it time for your lactose-free vanilla ice cream? The vet said you need to gain weight and you can eat anything you want.
TBK: Meh, if you’re lucky nobody will even read it, and that way nobody will hold it against you, but it’s Kindle, and you could always unpublish if things get heated. What I’m really craving is some of that chicken bacon ranch pizza.
CD: I will make it happen. First I need to PR this book. Usually I do a freebie sale on launch but this time I’m saving all my freebie sales for April 4th to commemorate Taemin getting out of the army and resuming making music. So it’s going to cost actual money until then, which is all part of my “driving people away” business strategy. Which will keep me safe from Covid19 and save a bundle on launch parties. Until I figure out why I’m still writing this crap, since I’m not doing it for mainstream publication, good reviews, as an excuse to travel and socialize, to get small children excited about reading, or anything remotely productive or socially valuable, or likely to generate income. My literary soulmates will still be able to find me, but I am going to endeavor to be off-putting to everyone else. Especially if they live in Texas. I intend to keep writing though. Not sure why.
TBK: Probably because you enjoy it.
CD: Yep. Gotta do it.
Buy it here:
No comments:
Post a Comment