Eight years ago, Sarah Wishnevsky was living in Las Vegas, stuck in a job at a “video clipping service” where she tallied the subjects of broadcast news segments—and even that fell through as the city’s tourist-based economy started wobbling after 9/11. Add a failing marriage into the mix, and when the fledgling author received near-simultaneous invitations to participate in a science fiction/fantasy writing workshop and to contribute a story to an anthology of Sherlock Holmes/H.P. Lovecraft pastiches, she grabbed at the lifeline. “As a coping strategy, I started writing 16 hours a day,” she recalled over a recent lunch at an Indian restaurant near her West Hartford home, not far from where she grew up. She credits an online writers group where she worked with other writers like Ilona Andrews and Charles Coleman Finley with helping her make the hurdle from aspiring writer to published author: “We all just got behind each other and pushed.”
That push had a lot of momentum behind it: Since Jennifer Jackson signed on as her agent in 2003, Wishnevsky—who took the pen name “Elizabeth Bear” as a reversal of her actual middle names—has published twelve science fiction and fantasy novels (with five more on the way) and a short story collection. This summer sees the release of “The Stratford Man,” a long story published as two novels (Ink and Steel and Heaven and Earth) that reimagines the mystery of Christopher Marlowe’s death as an event that raises the stakes a secret war between factions of the Elizabethan court and the kingdom of Faerie.
Oh, and Marlowe seduces William Shakespeare, inspiring him to write… well, that would be telling.
Bear says she got the idea for the story at a Christmas party six years ago, when a colleague of her then-husband was expounding upon his belief that Shakespeare couldn’t possibly have written the plays attributed to him. She decided to try writing a novel based on that theory, but soon realized that it was completely wrong. So she went in an different direction, and tried working out her plot as a straightforward historical novel. That plan fell apart when she realized she needed a narrative device that would explain Marlowe’s presence after the date of his historical death; the cheat code employed by other writers—that Marlowe faked his death and escaped to continental Europe—made it difficult to bring him back into England for certain scenes. (“And I realized I’d have to break into yet another genre to sell it,” she joked.) Thus, he became a captive of Faerie, able to travel magically between the two realms but subject to mortal danger if he lingered in London too long.
Bear cites the novels of Tim Powers as a model for her historical fantasy (to my delight, as I was just about to mention him; if you haven’t read Declare or The Anubis Gates yet, make it a priority). “You find all these pieces that fit together so neatly that you convince yourself the story you’re telling is real,” she said. So where did she get the idea for what I jokingly refer to as “the Marlowe/Shakespeare slash”? “I figured it out about where Kit does [in the story],” she laughed. “Often, when I’m writing, I have to go back and figure out what my characters have been up to, because they’re notoriously close-mouthed… But even Kit and Will didn’t recognize the growing romance between them in the early scenes.”
Two novels published last summer, Blood & Iron and Whiskey & Water, bring Bear’s magical battle to late 20th-century Manhattan; she says she has several other stories she could tell in the sequence, but is waiting to see if Roc is impressed enough by sales of the first four to solicit more. In the meantime, she’s “clawing my way out of the midlist by my fingernails,” she quipped. She’s in the middle of a science-fiction trilogy for Bantam Spectra and about to launch a heroic fantasy trilogy at Tor. The latter, which she described as “post-apocalyptic Norse steampunk,” begins in October with All the Windwracked Stars, and consists of the first three novels she completed when she committed herself to becoming a published author. There are, she says, story elements which date back to the early ’90s; then again, parts of Blood & Iron came from a graphic novel script she was working on a half-decade before that.
In addition to all the books she’s been publishing, Bear is also part of the creative team on Shadow Unit, which could best be described as the official website for a television show that doesn’t actually exist, sort of a cross between X-Files and Criminal Minds. The site includes “episode summaries,” which are novella-length stories by a “writing staff” that includes Bear, Emma Bull, Will Shetterly, and Sarah Monette; there’s also a wiki maintained by the show’s fans and an online shop where you can buy clothes and accessories with the Shadow Unit logo. After a successful “first-season” run, including some financial support from by contributions from readers, the site is currently featuring “DVD extras” until a new round of stories begins later this year.
BONUS: Elizabeth Bear’s “Tideline” won this year’s short story Hugo, and you can read it online.