Outer Alliance Spotlight #37: Lauren P. Burka June 4, 2010
Posted by juliarios in : interviews , trackbackWelcome to Outer Alliance Spotlight #37. Each Friday, the Spotlight features an ally who writes, reviews, publishes, or is in some other way involved with LGBTQI speculative fiction. Our guest this week is Lauren P. Burka, writer and assistant editor at Circlet Press.
Lauren’s fiction debuted in 1992 with the collection, Mate: And More Stories from the Erotic Edge of SF/Fantasy. Since then she’s written several more pieces, both long and short. Most recently Torquere Books released her m/m romance, Wishbone, and her short story, “Double Edged Bomb” appeared in the collection of erotic superhero stories, Like a Mask Removed. As an editor, she works on single author projects and anthologies such as the transgendered themed Up For Grabs, the BDSM themed Kneel to Me, and the M/M SFF erotica collection, Wired Hard 4. She is currently editing the sequel to Up For Grabs, and writing a cookbook for people with Autism and Asperger’s Syndrome.
Lauren lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, near the Circlet Press headquarters. If you’d like to catch up with her in person, she’ll be attending Readercon in July.
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OA: Your first collection of stories, Mate, was first published nearly 20 years ago, and has a cyberpunk feel to it. How has your vision of the future changed since then? How has it remained constant?
LB: For me, science fiction is less about the future than the present. Cyberpunk was 1990 remixed, shinier, with room more room to play and new ways of looking at the world.
Then we met the future of 1990, and it’s not as fun to live in as we imagined. It’s made of ComCast and Facebook and Windows.
Now all the cool kids have gone steampunk–H.G. Well’s future, where science could solve all of our problems and men still knew how to dress. I’d like to build worlds that the reader has never seen before, and I hope they’ll stay for a while. “When” the world is may not matter to the reader as much as how well it is constructed and who lives in it. In that way my current writing most resembles the middle story in Mate. That story was told from the point of view of a straight young man in a world ruled by lesbian warriors.
OA: Circlet Press exists to fill a niche for erotic speculative fiction because the other speculative fiction publishers seem unwilling to take erotica. What draws you to the genre, and why do you think it’s a difficult sell for most houses?
LB: I’ve never understood why we don’t see more books that explore sexuality. Faster-than-light travel gets all the attention. I’m not sure why; when we get it, it will be just as buggy and overpriced as the internet. Sexuality, on the other hand, is something we think about all day, every day. I want to explore sex because FTL has been done to death.
On the other hand, what are my chances of being a break-out author in science fiction? Science fiction publishers are drowning in slush, and their sales are shrinking.
We joke that science fiction editors think that all their readers are fourteen year old boys, and that any sex will upset their mothers. It’s not a joke. Sure, we get some awesome exceptions, like Catherynne M. Valente’s Palimpsest. But they are exceptions, not the rule.
Meanwhile, the 14 year old boys are playing video games and watching DVDs, and women purchase more than half the books sold every year. But they’re not buying from science fiction houses. They’re buying romances, because they like fiction about relationships. If you look at a romance publisher’s catalog, you’ll see urban fantasy romances, science fiction romances, heroic fantasy romances, vampire and werewolf romances. You could certainly argue that romances are poorly-written and repetitive, but they’re what readers want. Or so says my last royalty statement.
OA: You’ve edited several anthologies for Circlet. What is the most rewarding aspect of the editing process for you? How does it compare to the rewards of writing?
LB: You know how excited you get when you sell something? When I edit an anthology, I get to make a bunch of people that happy. It’s just as much fun as you might expect.
Of course, the rejections outnumber the acceptances. Sending rejections is sad, because I know most authors sweat over their story every bit as much as I sweat over mine. The saddest part is that if everyone sent me a winner, I wouldn’t necessarily have to reject some of them. I could put out a second or third volume of stories, because e-publishing is flexible. That’s why it depresses me to get trunk stories from someone who woke up that morning and decided to submit to every publisher that starts with “C.”
Editing also requires a whole new set of skills. You’re still writing, but now it’s introductions and press releases. Some stories are good, but need re-writes to be better. I find it tricky to improve an author’s voice without imposing my own, but it’s worth the work. I think that being the editor who bought the first story from an author who subsequently takes off is as exciting as selling a novel. That makes up for all the rejection letters I have to write.
OA: You’re working on a cookbook for people with Autism and Asperger’s Syndrome. As someone with Asperger’s, you are coming at this from a place of personal experience. What sets this apart from other cookbooks?
LB: Recently I was making chicken stock. Stock takes all day. My last step is to reduce the strained stock by boiling it so it will take less room in the freezer. Then in the middle of the night one of our cats woke us up with that plaintive cry that says something is wrong with the world. I took one sniff and knew that I had left the stock cooking. It had cooked down and just started to burn. I spent a couple of hours the next day cleaning the pot.
Well, that showed me. I’d be more careful the next time. Except I did it again. The cat was too disgusted with me to bother, and I spent the next day cleaning the pot again.
And then I did it a third time.
After that, I set an alarm to go off every hour while I was making stock, so I would have stock at the end, not a dirty pot.
In my cookbook, recipes will include instructions for setting alarms, because I know I’m not the only Aspie who does silly things like that.
OA: In January, Torquere published your m/m romance, Wishbone. Can you tell us more about that? Do you anticipate writing more m/m romance books in the future? Are there any other genres you’d like to explore?
LB: I’m currently writing the sequel to Wishbone. However, I tend to get bored if I do the same thing over and over. My next work after that may be a traditional heterosexual romance, just to prove I can do it. After that I may go back to Wishbone’s world. It’s got a lot of room for stories.
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Thanks, Lauren! Join us next Friday for another Spotlight, and in the meantime, check out Wishbone.
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I’ve done what you did with soup stock, only it was with boiling down maple syrup
great interview!