1078. Mary Robinette Kowal talks about going from writing magic-filled Regency romances to Hugo-nominated science fiction, what it's like to work with an agent, and how she keeps her career moving forward. Plus, she gave us three great book recommendations (and I've already read and loved one of them!).
1078. Mary Robinette Kowal talks about going from writing magic-filled Regency romances to Hugo-nominated science fiction, what it's like to work with an agent, and how she keeps her career moving forward. Plus, she gave us three great book recommendations (and I've already read and loved one of them!).
Find Mary at maryrobinettekowal.com.
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Grammar Girl, I'm Mignon Fogarty and just a heads-up that today's show was originally released a couple of months ago as a bonus segment for our supporters, our beloved Grammarpaloozians. It followed a longer interview with author Mary Robinette Kowal, and I thought it was so good that everyone should hear it.
And I've already read and loved one of the books she recommended in the book recommendations section!
If you like what we do every week and want to support the show — and get ad-free podcasts and bonus episodes like this right away — you can become a Grammarpaloozian! Just visit quickanddirtytips.com/bonus to learn more.
And now, on to the episode.
MIGNON: Greetings, Grammarpaloozians. I'm Mignon Fogarty, and I am here with your bonus segment with Mary Robinette Kowal, who we just talked about overcoming barriers to writing in the main segment. If you haven't heard that, go listen to that first because it's fabulous. It'll get you sitting down and doing the work you actually want to do. But Mary Robinette, you are just this amazing novelist. I have been enjoying your books for at least a decade.
MARY: Oh, thank you.
MIGNON: Yeah. And I don't know. I would, and I noticed they have changed over the years. Do you want to talk about your evolution from your first book, which was a Regency? The first book that I read of yours was a Regency.
MARY: Yeah, that was my first novel.
MIGNON: Was it? Okay. I read that. And …
MARY: Oh, wow.
MIGNON: Yeah, now you're doing this amazing sci-fi and other — the "Lady Astronaut" series. I'd just love to hear about the evolution during your career.
MARY: Yeah. I've always loved reading and writing science fiction and fantasy and when we sold the first book, "Shades of Milk and Honey," which is Jane Austen with magic, we had this conversation about if I wanted to write a series and try to solidify that audience, or if I wanted to write something completely different, we decided to do the series approach.
But I knew that I didn't want to be doing Regency forever. So what I did with the Regency books was each book was the set dressing. The tone of it was Regency fantasy, but structurally, I shifted genres with each one. So the first one is straight up romance. It's Jane Austen with magic.
The second one is secretly a military spy novel. The third one is secretly a courtroom thriller. And the fourth one is basically Jane Austen writes "Ocean's Eleven"; it's secretly a heist.
MARY: So I was doing that in order to train my readers that they could expect something different.
One of the things that you learn, actually I learned in puppet theater, was that people want the same but different. And that is also true with writing, the same but different. So in a normal romance structure, you keep the structure, normal romance series, you keep the structure the same, but you switch who the heroine is, like in "Bridgerton."
So I kept the same heroine, and I switched my structure. So my heroine was the same; the structure was different. So then after that, I did a book called "Ghost Talkers," which is World War I. So the same was, you're still getting historical. But my difference is it's a different era. And then the "Lady Astronaut" series — still historical, but my difference is now it's science fiction.
One of the things I also have that's always the same, so far, is a committed couple. And then "Spare Man" was me saying, "All right, everybody, it's not historical, but it has a historical vibe," because I was playing with the old silver screen legend, the "Thin Man" movies. So it's got that kind of but happily married couple, small dog, crime in space.
So again, trying to do the same, but different. So that was, and I was slowly edging into science fiction, full-on science fiction. And now I think I'm at a point where I can just go all over the map, we'll see, with the next book that we are shopping.
MIGNON: Yeah. And you keep saying "we." Who is …
MARY: Oh, my agent.
MIGNON: And you've had the same agent the whole time?
MARY: I have not. This is actually my third agent. The first agent never submitted anything, and sat on the book for a year. So my first real agent and I worked together for, I think, the first seven books. And then the direction that my career was going, the things we were interested in, it was clear to me that I needed to switch agents.
I still had a lot of fondness for my first agent, so I don't want people to think that was, "Oh no! Scandal!" My current agent is Seth Fishman, and we're a very good match. It's the Jerry Maguire. He completes me because he's a shark.
MIGNON: Help me help you.
MARY: Yes. Yeah.
MIGNON: Oh, he's a shark. Oh, that's interesting. I want that in an agent.
MARY: Yeah, exactly. I needed someone who was going to go in and say, "No." I love him because every time someone gives him, “Here's the amount we'd like to give.” He's "You're worth more than that." I'm like…
MIGNON: That's very nice to hear.
MARY: Yeah.
MIGNON: I'm actually really curious about how you work with your agent. I find that people have different kinds of relationships with their agents, and I love hearing about them. So how — like who takes the lead? How does it go?
MARY: It's very, yeah, for us, it's very collaborative, I think, in terms of thinking about career. The thing I love about Seth is that we think about the direction of the career. We think about not just the next book, but five books out. Basically, I have a running document that I call "The giant list of novels I want to write." And when it's time for a new project, I think about, “Do I have anything I want to add to that?” And then I show it to him and say, "Help me prioritize." And then he will say, "These are the things that we'll be easiest to market. This one looks like it's the one that is most you," which is really the thing that he's looking for.
And so we do a little bit of back-and-forth conversation on that, and then I'll sit down and start working on something. Sometimes it is a piece that already has a home. When I'm under contract with Tor, my current publisher, sometimes it's something that I'm like, "Funsies! Whoops, I just accidentally wrote a novel. What do we do with it?"
MIGNON: And does he review your manuscripts and give you edits?
MARY: He does. He gives me, he doesn't give me edits, but he gives me an edit letter. So he thinks about really big picture stuff. So it's a developmental thing, the, I've got a book that I'm. I just got an edit letter from him yesterday, and he basically gives me a big picture overview of how he's seeing the book.
And then there's two major changes that he's suggesting. One of which is add some stuff in, and the other is here's some spots where you can take stuff out to make room for the stuff that you're adding because it's on the long side. And then the bottom part of the letter is here's how he's thinking about positioning it.
Here's where he's thinking about, when he's thinking about sending it out because sometimes we sit on a book for a while because the timing isn't right.
So, it's called "The Dragon Question." I joke that it's Alfred Hitchcock presents "The Dragon Riders of Pern."
And it feels like Hitchcock noir, but it's got dragons occupying the social place that racehorses do. And there's murder, but when I wrote it, which was 2017, the "Lady Astronaut" book was just — we had just sold that — and so he was interested in sending this out, but where the market was, he thought that it was probably better to position it as a YA.
And so I did a revision of that, but when I finished that revision, the "Lady Astronaut" books had really had, that was when I had just suddenly won all of those awards for them. And he's "We should hold this and do more science fiction right now. And, then we'll send it out after that, just like one or two more science fiction books, then we'll send it out."
But then meanwhile, the bottom fell out of the YA market, and it just went weird and sideways. So he's "Okay, so we should not do it as YA, but you did do that YA shift. Can you move it back to adult?" And I was like, "Yeah, I can do that." And then as I was working on it, Rebecca Yarros and "Iron Wing" really took off, and he's and I was actually, I think I was the one who went to him and said, "So I have this dragon book."
And he said, "I have literally never given," this was actually the note in that, that I just got. He said, "I have literally never given this note before, but more sex." It's got sex scenes. I went in, and I had to add those back in. I had to make it steamier after I was making it not YA, but it's that kind of thing.
It's like, when is this going to be in its best position for my career and for what else is happening out there in the world? I have no idea what's going to happen with this, because I do have to add in a little bit more sex. Not a whole lot.
MIGNON: Now, I was going to ask you how long it takes you to write a novel, but hearing the process, it's like you're writing, and then you're rewriting, and then you're unrewriting.
MARY: This one is weird. This one's a weird one. Most of the time, like "The Calculating Stars." That was like six months. And most of the time it's about a year.
MIGNON: Yeah. Do you typically do one at a time or do you have multiple things going?
MARY: I usually have multiple things going for over the course of the year, but the actual like, my head is down, and I'm writing, I usually only have one novel at a time. Again, this is one of those, in hindsight, ADHD. I was always, like all of the novels I had written during NaNoWriMo (alas).
But the thing that I realized in hindsight was that the reason that worked for me is the same reason that a life in theater worked for me, which was that it teed up the four things that really drive an ADHD brain. It was novel, interesting, challenging, and urgent. It's "Ooh, new project that's interesting to me.”
“Oh, it's a challenge to see if I can get this done in this short time.” And, it's "I have to do this by the end of the month." So in hindsight, it's "Oh, that's why that was working." But basically, what I like to do, my preferred mode is to be able to hyperfocus on a book. And so I tend to crank out like the first three quarters of it in about a month.
And then I sit down, and I read through what I wrote, see if I was headed the direction that I thought I was headed, make adjustments, and then write that last third, last quarter to third, over about another three months. And there's a lot of prep that goes around that. And then once it gets into a kind of the revision stage, that's when I can be working on something else at the same time.
MIGNON: Yeah. I could talk to you all night, but we should get to your book recommendations because I know it's late where you are.
So what I'm looking for is books that you would recommend to a friend. What are some of your favorite books right now?
MARY: So I'm going with recent reads. And I'm going with ones that I found comforting in some way. One of them is, it's a very seasonal book, but I don't care; you should read it anyway. It's called "O Little Town of Bethlehem" by Elizabeth Boyle. It's a portal fantasy. But it's a portal fantasy for adults, and the portal is through time. So basically, this actress, on Thanksgiving, winds up dropping back in time to this little town called Bethlehem, and Bethlehem is a town of second chances.
So everybody who's in the town is someone who has also come through this portal. It's that Brigadoon sort of thing.
And so it's about finding second chances, and the whole book takes place between Thanksgiving and Christmas. And there's so much warmth in it. There's so much of people, all of these different characters coming to understand who they are, how they fit together.
The shaking up of their own assumptions about themselves, this and talking about how the story that we tell about ourselves can be as damaging as the stories that other people tell about us.
And so it's just, it's lovely. It's heartwarming. It's like having a cup of cocoa while you sit by the window, and it's snowing, and there's a fire, and you've got warm socks.
It's just delightful.
MIGNON: Okay. Now I want to just stop talking to you right now and go read that book. That sounds wonderful, but what else do you have?
MARY: Okay, so the next one is called "The Champagne Letters" by Eileen Cook. [Editor's Note: I believe this is really by Kate Macintosh.] It is not science fiction or fantasy in any way, shape, or form. In this, I want to be a little careful with this one because you start it, and it feels like one book, and then it becomes delightfully a different kind of book.
It is a divorcee, 50 years old, caught her husband cheating, and decides to go to Paris — just "Screw this. I'm going to Paris." And this is someone who is like an insurance evaluator, risk management evaluator. And this is very out of character. She just goes, and when she gets there, she has … this is like first or second, this is very early in the book, so this isn't a spoiler, but she's checking into this hotel and has a little bit of a breakdown in the lobby, and they all think that she's a widow.
So she's in this situation where people are being really kind to her because of this, and her world does actually feel like the man that she thought she knew is dead. And then some things start happening that are … the book becomes delightfully twisty in ways that you are not expecting it to go, that are full spoilers.
But it's one of those books that you keep — you're like, “This is a very empowering book. I feel, what just happened?” Like you, I spent so much time going, "Oh my, Oh," and then this is really empowering. So it's a love letter to Paris. It's an absolute love letter to any postmenopausal woman who is trying to find herself. And it is also not a finding yourself kind of book. It is just deliciously unexpected.
MIGNON: Oh my gosh, I'm very curious now to read that one too. Okay. So what? Give me the third book that's going to be my reading list now.
MARY: Okay, so the third one is called "Someone You Can Build a Nest In" by John Wiswell.
MIGNON: Oh, I've heard of…
MARY: Oh my gosh, it is a book that is one of those, it's like, why do we have genres? Why do I have to pick a genre for this? It's technically a horror novel, but if there was a genre called horror cozy, it would be this.
The main character is a literal monster, and this is 14, 1500s ish.
MIGNON: Okay.
MARY: It's also a love story. It's also a coming-of-age story. It's also a murder mystery. It's also an overthrowing of the ruler. It's all of these different things. But really, I started recommending this book to people before I had finished it.
Because what it really is, at its core, is a book about what it's like to have to pretend to be human, which we all have to do at some point in our lives. And it's just absolutely — it's so beautiful. John is a brilliant short story writer and is bringing all of those skills to bear on the way he's delivering scenes on the nuance of the character relationships.
It's also funny.
MIGNON: Yeah.
MARY: It's so hard to describe this book, but it's something that I think everyone should read, especially people who are neurodivergent. You will feel so seen when you read this book.
MIGNON: That's amazing. I remember now why it's familiar to me because I follow him on social media, and he seems great.
MARY: He is great.
MIGNON: And I went and I looked because I was like, "Oh, I should read his books because he seems so wonderful," but I don't read horror. I never read horror.
MARY: I don't either. And this is fine.
MIGNON: Yeah. Okay, that's great.
MARY: Yeah.
MIGNON: I will read. That's wonderful. Good. Mary Robinette, thank you so much. For the Grammarpaloozians who maybe didn't hear the main show yet, where can people find you?
MARY: The easiest thing is to check out my website, maryrobinettekowal.com and sign up for my newsletter. It will tell you all of the things about where I am, what I'm doing, when the next book comes out (March 18th). And you get occasional pictures of my really cute cat.
MIGNON: Yeah, and check out her Patreon and the Writing Excuses podcast and, oh heck, just follow her on social media too. Thank you so much.
MARY: Thank you for having me. This was delightful. I could talk to you all evening.
MIGNON: I know.
I hope you enjoyed that. I did end up reading "Someone You Can Build a Nest In" by John Wiswell, and absolutely loved it. As I was reading it, I thought "This should win awards," and then it was nominated for a Hugo Award, so yes, I recommend it too.
And Mary Robinette's new book that came out in March — we strangely didn't say the name in the interview — is called "The Martian Contingency," and I haven't read it yet, but I'm sure I will because I love all her books.
Also, if you missed it, the longer interview I did with Mary Robinette back in February about overcoming barriers to writing, was filled with great practical advice to get you back on track when it feels like there's too much going on and it's hard to concentrate. That was episode 1058 back in February, and you can find that wherever you listen to podcasts.
Finally, thanks to all you Grammarpaloozians who support the show! You're the best!
That's all. Thanks for listening.