Author! Author!

Innerview
with C.A. Scott

What is your ideal writing environment?

My home office, my own sanctuary, with no one else around and just the right music playing for the scene/story. Solitude is vital; I don’t work well with an audience. I have one of those Ray Bradbury style offices just full of artwork and books and toys and things, and my iMac on this very skiffy corner desk made of metal and black panels. And whether it’s Nine Inch Nails or Morcheeba or Audioslave or Steely Dan, well... I’ve got something like 6000 songs on my hard drive, all different genres, and I was raised on movies and MTV, right? So everything’s got a soundtrack in my head. And music really gets me into the right frame of mind to write.

What authors inspire you most?

Anyone who writes for some reason other than just to entertain. I’m interested in authors who have something to say: George Orwell, for example, and Alan Moore. I don’t necessarily read a lot of other people who are writing in a similar genre to my own -- mainly because if anyone out there were putting out the kind of story I want to read, then I wouldn’t have to write it myself!

That said, I am also a fan of Neil Gaiman and Jonathan Letham, Reinaldo Arenas and Theodore Sturgeon... guys who can do the kind of linguistic acrobatics I feel like I’ll never be able to pull off. You know: people who write in that style you have to read out loud because of how awesome the words feel in your mouth.

I am a huge fan, to this day, of the sci-fi grandmasters: Heinlein, Ellison, Silverberg, Frederick Pohl... Even when they’re bad, they’re good. And when they’re good, watch out!

What do you do when you aren’t feeling inspired or motivated to write?

Music does it almost every time. The right soundtrack will take you where you need to go...

I’ve found that generally writer’s block is my subconscious mind’s way of saying, “Hey, you’re going the wrong direction in this story, here.” So if I back up and listen to the story, the characters, etc. they’ll tell me what’s wrong and we can move on. Or I switch from one story (better yet, one kind of thing entirely) to another for a shot in the arm. I finished two lousy novels in college that way, one fantasy and one science fiction, by jumping back and forth between them. They weren’t any good, but they were complete stories, and that’s something...

I’m a perfectionist (an editor by profession), so I’m not going to put anything out before the world unless I feel like it won’t embarrass me or the characters in it. So when I can’t come up with something new, I’m usually editing (what some authors call “rewriting”). I read over and over, sometimes out loud, and fix what doesn’t work. That’ll often jumpstart me into the next scene.

Talk a bit about Diego Lee – the character that haunted you (and prompted you to write Racing History)?

He’s in many ways my alter ego, I suppose. Here’s this guy who just wanted to live a simple life doing the stuff he loves -- contributing to the world in the way he was born to do. But the civilization he lives in values other things more, things like conformity and following the rules and learning how to be a good salesman. So he’s kinda’ forced by circumstances to become what some people might consider a bad guy. A criminal. But iconoclasts are the only people who really ever change the world for good. And the society he lives in really needs changing.

We have a love/hate relationship, Diego and I. He surely got tired trying to talk to a silly teenage girl who thought he was nothing but a cool Han Solo rip-off, so he went away in disgust for a few years. When he came back, he was so impatient to get his story done that he turned me into an obsessive-compulsive nutcase for several years. I love spending time with him, and I’ve found so do most other people who get to know him. He’s like one of those guys you love to party with, even though you’d be scared to actually live with him.

But over the course of the story, he does work out some of the insanity. Enough at least to function on a more ordinary level. Unfortunately for him, the Universe needs him the way he is, and that’s not necessarily good for the psyche. But it does make for rollicking fun in fiction form. Let’s face it, happy and contented people make really boring characters anyway...

There are 7 episodes in volume I, 5 volumes in the Racing History series. What is the magic that keeps that story going for so long?

I think it’s is the continual change of venue, style, characters, etc. From episode to episode, and especially from volume to volume. Each has its own mood and theme. Diego’s really the only constant in this story. He’s like the car you’re riding in on this long, crazy road trip. And you’re never quite sure whether the car’s going to break down or not. Sometimes it does. And that in itself becomes part of the adventure.

If you want to tell the story of how some apparent nobody can literally change history, it’s inevitably going to be a big one. If Diego were some military dude or something, maybe he could jump right out of officer’s training and into the world-saving business. If he were some freakin’ nobleman, he’d have it all in the palm of his hand to start with. But I have to take this total lowlife and put him in a position of power -- and if you do that with any realism at all, it’s going to take a lot of twists and turns to get him there.

I’ve had friends like him, too. People to whom more seems to happen in just a few years than goes on in most people’s lifetimes. They’re the most interesting folks I’ve ever known. So there ya’ go.

I love this description about Racing History: “space opera with a cyberpunk attitude and a touch of film noir.” Can you speak to that a bit? What is the best definition, in your opinion, of cyberpunk? And explain how the three genres mix.

Well, space opera nowadays almost exclusively means war stories set in space with great generals and things as the main characters. You know the type, they usually start, “Fleet Admiral Goran Xeitgeist strode confidently across the spacious bridge of the Imperial Ship of the Line Interceptor...” Now, I realize there are people who like that sort of thing, but to be honest, my reaction is, “Blyeach!”

And cyberpunk has been defined a dozen different ways by a hundred different people. But I think of it as technology-obsessed dystopian fiction that tends to be rather insular in its venue. In the cyberpunk future, very often people haven’t made it off Earth yet; they’re much more interested in virtual entertainments... And that hits a little too close to home for me; I still believe in the dream, y’know? I was born in the year of the first moon-landing, after all.

Character tends to fall by the wayside in a lot of these things. People are stereotypes or at the very least slaves to their plot devices. I loved Neuromancer (talk about amazing feats of language!), but really when you get to the end, what’s changed? Nothing. The characters haven’t learned a thing from their experience, and they just go back to their crappy little lives.

Film noir is all about character. It’s about psychological weirdness, the dark side of life, and people just trying to get by. It’s gritty and full of fantastic dialog. The people in those stories are seldom “important” in any real way. And they either learn from their mistakes or die.

So I call my work “space-punk.” You got the epic adventure of space opera with cyberpunk style characters who live in a film-noir-ish world. It’s intensely character driven, heavy on thematics, and cool as hell. I think it would make a great comic series, actually. But that’s for later. Right now, it’s prose fiction as addictive drug: Once you try it, you can’t help coming back for a fix over and over again.

Got a favorite quote?

Not sure whether you mean in general or from RH. In general, my favorite of those I’ve come across lately is this thing from Henry David Thoreau: “The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well?”

An appropriate quote for Racing History might be “People shouldn’t be afraid of their governments; governments should be afraid of their people.” Unfortunately, I didn’t write that.

You can imagine that from a series as hefty as RH is, there’d be quite a few favorite quotes... I enjoy dialog probably more than anything else in writing. That’s part of the film noir thing, I guess. So let’s end on this one:

“Some days I feel like my life is just one big painting full of melting clocks and giraffes on fire.”
—Diego-Alain Lee, 2255

Racing History is an ambitious, sci-fi series that proudly flaunts its appreciation for pop culture: music, film, comics, television, videogames, and yes literature of all kinds. In her episodic series, C.A. Scott dares to challenge many of today’s boundaries in science fiction. This is the full story of a singular moment in history, not Earth history or human history but all of history — the story of everybody — and the how and why that make all the difference. This is epic space-punk: space opera with a cyberpunk attitude and a touch of film noir.

“Scott is an excellent storyteller,” says DPP critic Jacki Buck. “The settings are fascinating –rich and intricate, and the characters are well thought out and completely believable even within their fictitious scope.”

A scientific journalist and editor, C.A. Scott is author of many articles and magazine supplements covering biotechnology. As a technical editor, she has been a guest at several west-coast science fiction conventions. Science fiction is her passion.