Our last Sukkah guest, J.S. Fields, has worked with a variety of independent presses and has some really great advice for writers on how to find your own sweet spot. Plus, there’s talk of wooden spaceships!
BookishlyJewish: Can you talk about how you ended up with your publisher? What influenced your choice to publish with a small press?
J.S. Fields: I’d been published a while in nonfiction before heading to fiction. During the very first DVPit I was offered a contract with Ninestar Press, which published my first few books. Recently I’ve switched over to Space Wizard and have been very happy with the choice. The royalty rates are the best in the business as far as I know, I can buy books at cost to sell at conventions, and the press does decent marketing.
I did have an agent for a while and, as I noted before, have published with mid-sized presses. I really like small press for the flexibility and the better royalty rates. I don’t need to sell 10,000 copies to pay the mortgage with small press. I can write for my little niche of readers and still buy groceries. In that same vein though I have no interest in doing layout and editing myself, or wrangling cover artists, or doing my own marketing. So I needed at least some sort of publisher. I think finding the right fit in small press really worked for me.
BookishlyJewish: What is it like to work with a small press? Any surprises along the way?
J.S. Fields: When I first started with small press I was surprised at how much being able to buy books at cost mattered. Previously I could only get them at 40% off list, and when you have a $12 book, you have to sell hundreds to make back your booth at a convention. Learning how to negotiate book costs, royalty rates, these were big learning curves.
BookishlyJewish: What’s your writing process like? Pantser or plotter?
J.S. Fields: I am 100% a pantser. I hold interviews in my head for characters and then get to work writing. This means I delete over half of what I write, but I enjoy exploring worlds and characters, so this doesn’t bother me.
I’ve tried to outline and all that happens is I quickly diverge from the outline. What sounded good one day doesn’t work the next. I have to write where the characters are in that moment, which means outlines tend to just be a waste of otherwise useful writing time.
BookishlyJewish: Many of your books have interesting takes on gender and sexuality. I’m particularly intrigued by your newest release, QUEEN, and the incredible description of the female-only planet where no one is allowed to leave. Can you talk a little about your inspiration for this book?
J.S. Fields: Both my mother and one of my aunts are staunch feminists so I grew up reading a lot of the surrounding literature. This was, of course, all white and heteronormative. A few years back my aunt sent me a copy of Herland, which is a 1915 feminist utopia novel with an all-women colony where reproduction occurs via pathogenesis. The story is told from the perspective of a few men who stumble upon the colony.
I cannot tell you how utterly enraged I was at this book. Everyone is white. Everyone is beautiful. These women have no interest in sex, not just with men, but with each other. I…cannot. The amount of erasure is absolutely exhausting. This book haunted me. It haunted me for years as I hunted up more and more ‘all-women’ media and decided that most of it was just exclusionary garbage. Not a feminism I want to be attached to.
In response I wrote Queen, a future dystopian sci fi where Earth is toast and the world governments populated new planets more or less thematically. Queen is a barren wasteland world where they dumped all the problem women—where woman meant someone with a vulva. The main character is intersex (as am I), having the right external features to get exiled to Queen, and still coming to terms with what womanhood might mean for her (or not mean). There’s adventure and science and giant beetles and thousands of bunnies, sure, but there’s also a flagrant rebuttal to 1900s all-women utopia books, too. And the women have a lot of sex.
Take that, Herland
BookishlyJewish: What are you hoping readers take away from your work?
J.S. Fields: Mostly I aim for inclusion and escapism. I want my work to be fun, adventurous. I want it to be like your favorite sci-fi serial, but one you can easily see yourself in. I want people to finish one of my books with a smile, then maybe have to sit for a minute with themes they didn’t realize they’d absorbed.
BookishlyJewish: Do you have a favorite memory or highlight you can share about being a published author?
J.S. Fields: The first time a fan came up to me at WorldCon (Ireland). Wow. She just…flagged me through a crowd. She’d read all my work. She loved it. She said something like “Thank you all you do for the gays” then disappeared amongst the surge of people.
Thousands of people at that convention and I had a fan.
BookishlyJewish: I can’t help but notice that you are a scientist and that you make chainmail by hand. This is so fascinating! Does any of that influence your writing?
J.S. Fields: The chainmail doesn’t, because that is a pain in the ass. There is, however, a ton of science in my work. My Ardulum series, which is generally space opera, actually has a fair amount of hard science buried in it. I love being able to weave my field of science—wood science!—into a genre that usually relies on physics and engineering.
No one expects wooden spaceships!
BookishlyJewish: Has SFF always been your intended genre or do you write in other genres too? What draws you to this particular genre?
J.S. Fields: This is definitely my genre. I grew up watching old sci fi serials late at night with my mother. Not just the standard Star Trek and Babylon Five, but the one season failures, like M.A.N.T.I.S., Time Trax, and VR-5. And Highlander. Oh goodness was such a Highlander fan. I got the catalogs. Mom and I got all the VHS boxed sets and agonized over our free gifts. I have a Highlander bathrobe. I treasure it.
BookishlyJewish: Any words of advice for writers just starting out?
J.S. Fields: I get contacted pretty frequently by new writers who can’t figure out how to get their book published. 9.9/10 times they’ve never had anyone but their family read the work. When you’re just starting out you really need either a critique group or a really good developmental editor. It has nothing to do with your skill and more with learning how the publishing game is played. Once you’ve got a few books under your belt you can break all the rules you want. But you have to know the rules to break them, and there are formulas that sell and those that don’t. Hedge your bets. Get that first book into not just readable but sellable shape. Get that contract. Sell a bunch of copies. Then write your magnum opus.
BookishlyJewish: I always end by asking if you have a favorite Jewish book
J.S. Fields: I love Lilah Tov.
This is one of my kid’s favorite books. Even though they’re well past picture book stage, the artwork and emotions in this book pack a punch. It’s beautiful, heart wrenching, but so full of hope. We read it maybe once a month still, right before sleep, and think of how nice it is to snuggle in bed with a lovingly family and safe home.
J.S. Fields’ Bio:
J.S. Fields (@Galactoglucoman) is a scientist who has perhaps spent too much time around organic solvents. They enjoy roller derby, woodturning, making chainmail by hand, and cultivating fungi in the backs of minivans. Nonbinary, and yes, it matters.
Fields has lived in Thailand, Ireland, Canada, USA, and spent extensive time in many more places. Their current research takes them to the Peruvian Amazon rainforest each summer, where they traumatizes students with machetes and tangarana ants while looking for rare pigmenting fungi. They live with their partner and child, and a very fabulous lionhead rabbit named Merlin.
Find It:
Ardulum – First Don: Goodreads | Bookshop | Amazon