Mockingbird: Author's Notes
The Process: Climate, The Sub-Tropical Novel, and The Guy Who Writes The Books
One of the oddest things about being an author is observing the parallax between one's everyday self, and the Person Who Writes The Books. William Gibson puts it strongly when he says, "I'm just the guy who buys the paper, tidies the desk, sits down in front of the computer, and then waits for that other guy to show, the one who produces the novels." He goes on to assert that, in his experience, you never cease to be surprised by the difference between the guy you meet and the guy who wrote the books; and indeed, that on those occasions where the two people are one and the same, the books tend not to be very interesting.
I wouldn't like to assert this as axiom, but it has often seemed anecdotally to hold true. As time goes by I become more and more struck by the differences between Sean Stewart, guy, and Sean Stewart the author, whose pre-occupations are related, but not identical, to my own.
An obvious example of this, for me, comes in the impact of place on my fiction. I grew up thinking of myself as pretty much an urban kid; have 7-11, will travel. So I have been quite surprised at the amount my muse seems to get from my physical setting, particularly in more recent work. Clouds End is steeped in my impression of the Pacific Northwest; "prairie boy goes to Vancouver" could be one of its hidden subtitles. Obviously The Night Watch draws explicitly and at length on my reactions to the geography and climate of the Canadian prairie and Pacific Northwest, respectively.
In the summer of 1995, my wife got a job in Houston, Texas. By the end of that summer I had largely finished The Night Watch (or so I thought—hubris, it turned out) and was on the prowl for the next novel. Why not take advantage of my surroundings? There is always a shock of the alien when you first experience a place, but I knew that in six or twelve months the things that seemed so strange to me (the way the little man on the American WALK symbol leans forward like an icon of Bustle, as opposed to his staid, upright Canadian counterpart, for example) would begin to fade into the background. So I decided to set a book in Houston, and see what came of it.
This also fit in with another project. The Night Watch had benefitted, I thought, from the chance it gave me to revisit childhood turf; I figured the same would be true for Texas, in spades. As a child I had spent my summers in Dallas and San Antonio, living with my Texan relatives, unbuffered by my mother, who remained behind in Canada to work. The theory was, I had the perfect writer's angle of vision on Texas, insider and outsider both, and should put it to use.
Once I had committed to Houston as a setting, I began to think a lot about what on the face of it seems a rather eccentric question: what would be the features of The Sub-Tropical Novel? How would a sub-tropical book be different from it's temperate or arctic brethren?
Houston is a swampy sort of a place, with the same climate as New Orleans: steamy and lush, a kingdom of mud, plants, flowers, crawdads, mosquitos, and tree roaches the length of your thumb. Things grow there. It seemed to me, retrospectively, that Passion Play was what you might call a Northern novel: spare, remorseless, a bit bleak. A Sub-Tropical novel, on the other hand, should be unexpected. Things should flower from unlikely beginnings.
(I think I had the film Enchanted April at the back of my mind at the time; and as I write this now, I can't help noticing the degree to which I seem to be recapitulating the differences between the Sea and Forest people in Clouds End.)
Mockingbird, then, is my Texas book, and my Sub-Tropical Book. I had in mind something that would 'fit' with Resurrection Man, but with the quantities of light and dark reversed; a scary comedy, as it were, rather than a brooding novel with occasional jokes. But unlike Resurrection Man, in which much of the action turns around the slow unravelling of a family mystery, I decided all that would happen much faster than the reader expected, so that the big mystery that might normally be the climax of the thing would come at the end of about chapter 4 (which it does)...after which new and unexpected stories would sprout forth.
Commercial Context: More Headaches for Ace
So after several books of drunkard's walk across genre lines, I finally fell off the edge of the world with this one. Ace said they were very happy to publish it and would I please consider writing an sf/f book next time and take subsequent odd things like this elsewhere. Damn' sporting of them, I thought.
Although it's a book that people who like contemporary fantasy will like (I yhink) Mockingbird clearly is not principally a fantasy novel. (To avoid a tedious taxonomical argument about what is and isn't fantasy, I submit here an operational definition of sf-genre work, which is, "Does having read other books in the genre help to read this one?" For the first time, the answer to that question was clearly, No.)
What to do? Well, we agreed that the book needed to have a different style of cover art. I have been pretty happy with Tara McGovern's covers, especially the one for Resurrection Man, but they still have the post-Whelan airbrush look which identifies a book as a genre novel. Instead, the art director at Ace chose a woman who had done a book for them by Sheri Reynolds (recent winner of the Oprah Book Sweepstakes—a fella can dream, can't he?). She worked with montage, which I thought a happy choice; it's a mainstream-compatible look that, thanks to the Sandman covers, is pretty genre-friendly too.
Ace continued with their valiant New Look. They put an author photo on the back (out of date, but less so than the ones on this Web page, so what the heck). They even took the words "Science Fiction" off the spine. I believe this is the first ever Ace hardcover to say just ACE NOVEL on the edge. Then those nice people made some of the most gorgeous Advanced Readers Copies you ever saw. I'm sincerely grateful.
Useful Women
Maureen McHugh had a big hand in this book. First, she believed that it would be really neat-o, and backed up that belief by being available for long telephone conversations of the "But, like, so, if this personal voodoo god takes over your head in a shopping mall, how much of that do you remember?" sort. She and my friend Michael Stearns also pointed me to Maya Deren's useful book about Haitian voodoo, which was good inspirational reading and provides an excellent description of what it's like to have a god annihilate you and take over your body for a couple of hours before giving it back.
In the "You've come a long way, baby" department, it strikes me as noteworthy that I talked to several experts about parts of this book: a doctor, a commodities broker, an actuary, and a specialist in oil-well drilling and exploration. All four were women.
The usual suspects all contributed greatly. Mockingbird follows the main character from the time her mother dies to the time her new baby is born, so I finally had a really good use for two pregnancies' worth of stories. Much of the pregnancy material in the book is taken from life, including Christine's nightmarish evening of attempting to conceal morning sickness while being taken for an expensive dinner at a fancy ... revolving ... restaurant.
First Person Female Narrator
What is up with this? I dunno. Ask The Guy Who Writes The Books.
I had this thought that I should write about men more. So I thought, it's hard to see the forest for the trees, being a guy and all. So then I thought, if I have a woman as the p-o-v character, it will free me up to look at men more analytically; from her point of view, you see.
Only, it turned out that men just weren't all that important in her life. Actually, now that I think of it, there may be a very sobering truth lurking in there somewhere...
I guess a question has to be asked about the point of writing this kind of book at all. It's an odd novel. A lot like a "woman's book" (you know what I mean, Doris Lessing and Margaret Atwood, Anne Tyler und so weiter) only, um, sunnier. And with more Zombie Frogs. It could have been a much, much darker book: the plot elements could almost make Bastard out of Carolina or Beloved; one of those absolutely wrenchingly painful women's novels. I didn't do that. Part of me felt it would be inappropriate, somehow; or perhaps I just lacked the guts or imaginative empathy. I hope that wasn't it.
I think for me, in those months after finishing The Night Watch, tragedy was a cold thing, a spare and lonely thing. I wanted my sub-tropical novel to be different.
Perhaps I was just glad to be warm.