Ask the Author: James Leth
Answered Questions (5)
James Leth
I chased it into my trap, yelling in victory, when the walls sealed shut around me. A hundred more of them slithered out of the corners, rushing to burrow into my flesh.
James Leth
I think I would have to say Henry DeTamble and Clare Abshire, from The Time Traveler's Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger. The story was brilliantly constructed so that each of them "first" meets the other in a situation where the other knows all about them. Clare, as a young girl, first meets Henry from the future, when he knows all about their relationship to be. He, in turn, first meets her as a young man when she knows all about their future, even though he hasn't met her yet. Terrific plot construction.
James Leth
I try to look for the other side to the story. For example, I wrote a short story several years ago about a beached whale, told from the perspective of the whale. We humans see such things as an opportunity to help an unfortunate animal caught in a deadly accident. But there are a number of reasons to believe that whales may be as intelligent as we are, and it seems highly unlikely that they wouldn't know more than we do about tides and currents. This led me to suppose that when whales beach themselves, they do so deliberately, with an intention vastly different than our interpretation. The resulting story is posted on my blog at jamesleth.com.
James Leth
The original idea for my novel, Phoenix Afterlife, came after reading Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained and Ray Kurzweil's The Age of Spiritual Machines. This started me thinking about the long term direction of the evolution of human intelligence. As I read other books about this subject, such as Accelerando, by Charles Stross, I realized that many people were thinking and writing about the long term, but few were addressing the short term. Where are we going today, and in the next few years? How do we get there from here? That's where I decided to focus for my first novel.
James Leth
I'll pass on the best advice I saw. Unfortunately, I do not remember who to credit with this, but it concerns the input you get from the readers of your drafts in progress: When they tell you what's wrong with your draft, listen to them; if it bothers them, it will probably bother other readers. When they tell you how to fix it, ignore them (politely); only you can fix it in a way that's true to the story you're trying to tell.
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