In this episode of Strange Horizons at 25, editor Kat Kourbeti talks to Charlie Jane Anders about her Strange Horizons publications dating all the way back to 2002, charting her journey as a writer and her experience with the magazine over 20 years, as well as her love for community events and bringing people together.

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Episode show notes:

• Read Charlie Jane's stories in our archives
• Visit Charlie Jane's website, or follow her on Bluesky
• Pre-order Charlie Jane's upcoming novel, Lessons in Magic and Disaster.
• Find more links to her work, along with everything else we talked about today, peppered throughout the transcript below.

Transcript

Kat Kourbeti: Hello Strangers, and welcome to Strange Horizons at 25, a 25th anniversary celebration of Strange Horizons. I'm your host, Kat Kourbeti, and it is my privilege today to welcome you to another episode that looks back at the history and impact of Strange Horizons on the speculative genres.

Today's guest is Charlie Jane Anders, who was first published with us in 2002, and has since gone on to publish a huge number of short stories, numerous novels, win several awards including the Hugo, the Nebula, the Sturgeon, the Lambda Literary, Crawford, and the Locus Award, as well as having an extensive career in SFF and digital journalism.

It's great to have you here, Charlie Jane.

Charlie Jane Anders: Yeah, it's good to be here. Thanks for having me. It's just, I'm so excited to celebrate Strange Horizons. I'm glad it's still going strong.

Kat Kourbeti: Oh, thank you so much and we're happy too. Frankly, I feel like could go on and on by listing everything you've done and achieved, but we'd be here all day. I am in such awe of you and your squiggly career. I have been really excited about this chat, and to just dive into everything that's been part of your journey, 'cause a lot of authors, aspiring authors especially, expect a kind of linear trajectory. And it's great to see people thrive who like just do all the things. It's really beautiful.

Charlie Jane Anders: Yeah. Thanks. Yeah, I think that's a good thing. I don't know.

Kat Kourbeti: I think so. It's a world where writing, and especially short form, has never quite been like the lucrative world that we'd like it to be. And so, you know, we pivot and we find things, and/or we're also interested in various stuff, and we want to explore all the things and we can't sit still. Both things can be true.

Charlie Jane Anders: Yeah. Yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: Well, first of all, how did you come across Strange Horizons in the first place, to submit to us?

Charlie Jane Anders: Gosh, casting my mind back almost 25 years. Yeah. I knew about Strange Horizons a few different ways, I knew Mary Anne Mohanraj back then, who was the founder of Strange Horizons, and before I was published in Strange Horizons, I was published in Clean Sheets, which was an online erotica magazine that Mary Anne Mohanraj founded. I think Clean Sheets came first. I think she founded Clean Sheets and then she founded Strange Horizons. And it's amazing that Strange Horizons has had this amazing run. I think Clean Sheets only lasted like a few years maybe. It's all down to all the incredible volunteers that have worked on Strange Horizons who took Mary Anne's vision and ran with it.

So I think I had already been published in Clean Sheets. I actually wrote this very weird science fiction erotica story for Clean Sheets about a person who is married to three identical clones, and then cheats on them with a fourth identical clone. Basically they're living in a world where everybody is a clone of their three husbands. And so, they're the one person in their world who isn't a clone of this one guy. And so they cheat on their three husbands with another clone that's exactly the same as their three husbands. I can't remember if it was a story about like nature and nurture, or just about the nature of infidelity and like, why you would wanna have sex with a fourth clone when you're already married to three clones of the same person and just, I don't know. It was a weird story.

And so that was published in Clean Sheets, and so I think I knew that Mary Anne was also launching a science fiction magazine. I guess it was later that I started going to Wiscon, and there was always a Strange Horizons party at Wiscon, but that came later that I would hang out with the editors. So that was probably how I found out about it.

Also, I was haunting all of these forums for aspiring science fiction writers and it was like, oh, there's a pro market that has opened up. And at the time there weren't that many pro markets in science fiction and fantasy. There were the big print magazines, and then there wasn't really a lot of online pro magazines in 2000 or 2001 that were open to submissions, and that would actually consider new writers. That was a big deal.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, there was an interview with you on Lightspeed, where I think you mentioned Strange Horizons as like one of the few places that took chances on new writers, like looking to learn. And that was like 10 years ago or something, and I'm like, yep, we're still doing it.

Charlie Jane Anders: Yeah. I mean I think that's a really great thing that a magazine can do. It's actually really awesome.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. I couldn't believe it. Part of why this podcast exists is, I was at Worldcon with my producer Michael last year in Glasgow, and we're just hanging out and we're noodling, you know, like what can we do on the podcast that's new, and by the way, it's 25 years next year.

It is what?

Charlie Jane Anders: Oh my gosh. That's wild. That is so wild.

Kat Kourbeti: And I just had this moment where I was like, surely that's nuts. And I started going back through the archives and like, seeing names of folks who like, either I knew or knew of, and I was like, did you know we've published all these people?

Charlie Jane Anders: Yeah!

Kat Kourbeti: Crazy.

Charlie Jane Anders: I feel like John Scalzi got his start there.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah.

Charlie Jane Anders: It's a lot of people got their start at Strange Horizons. The thing about Strange Horizons is that it had a reputation for really strong editing. The crew who were the editors back then were really conscientious and would put you through your paces, and they would challenge you. And that was something that happened with me, with a bunch of the stories I published at Strange Horizons.

Kat Kourbeti: That's very interesting. I think you're in a unique position to tell me about this, 'cause a lot of the folks I've been interviewing were newer additions to the roster if you will, and different editors work in different ways. Let's talk a little bit about your first Strange Horizons story which is called, Not To Mention Jack.

Charlie Jane Anders: Yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: January, 2002. Which is a phenomenal, really fast paced, loads is going on, and it's about a man with a strange power, and a woman who gets involved with him and uh, hijinks.

Charlie Jane Anders: Yeah. I should just mention something right up front, which is—nobody knows this, this is kind of a big reveal—I recently went back and wrote a new version of that story, which I've actually sent to my publisher as a novella. I expanded it and built it out. I feel like it's such a fun concept for a story, and looking back at the version I wrote back in 2001, I wasn't happy with it at all. So I actually have written a new version of it, which I'm really hoping that Tor or Tordotcom will wanna publish as a novella. So fingers crossed about that. Like, that's kind of a big secret that I'm revealing for anybody listening to this podcast. I'm so much happier with the new version.

That was a fun thing where I had this really neat concept of, there's this guy who has one of the powers of Satan, which is that if you say his name, he appears. And this is really inconvenient for him because, he can't get a moment's peace. Anytime somebody mentions him, even if they just mention his first name and it's clear in context who they're talking about, he will just appear. And he can't really control this except to try to keep people from talking about him.

What I will say is that when I wrote that story, like it was one of the better stories I'd written at the time, I was still very new and was figuring out my craft and it was like, I was a very silly, funny writer who wasn't good at characters or the shape of the story or plot or emotion or any of that kind of stuff. I was good at being random and silly. And I feel like the folks at Strange Horizons really were very patient with me. I think it was mostly Jed Hartman worked with me to make the story work better, sharpen it and to make it hit harder and flow better, and I remember just a lot of really intensive editing on that story. There were a couple rounds, I think, of going back and forth and just really reworking it. And so the version that was published in January 2002, was by far the superior version to like what I've been writing before.

It's no reflection on them that I now look back at it and I'm like, "oof, yeah, that's not as good as it could have been." I think, in terms of how they helped making it better, the central relationship between Jack and I've forgotten the name of the female character,

Kat Kourbeti: Carol, I think.

Charlie Jane Anders: Carol, yeah. Their central relationship is a lot stronger. Carol gets a little more agency, is a little bit more— I think we played around with the order of events and how things are presented.

But yeah, I mean, I think what's wrong with that story that I was aware of now is that it's a little bit misogynistic. It treats Carol really badly. She eventually gets her revenge, but the whole central conflict of the story is that she's clingy and annoying and that she's somehow gotten a crush on this guy and is making his life hell by saying his name all the time. It was kinda the laziest thing you could do with that concept.

And also the story makes no sense if you think about it, because he's this guy who has this thing where if you say his name, he appears, and it's in his interest to never be spoken about, but he's out there basically being a con artist and ripping people off, how is that gonna work out for him? It's gonna be a disaster. That's like, the least plausible thing he could be doing in that scenario. And it just doesn't make any sense if you think about it.

So that was an example of coming back to that story like 24 years later. It was just so obvious that I hadn't thought it through well enough, there were parts of it where I was just being lazy in terms of the dynamic of Jack and Carol and like the way that I write their relationship. I just like building out Jack's world. There was a lot of really interesting stuff there, but (there) was also a lot that I left on the table, that I was like, oh, this is a thing that would've been really juicy to explore that I didn't explore at all. And meanwhile I'm doubling down on this dynamic that's misogynistic and kinda lazy, and nothing about this really makes any sense.

It was an interesting metaphor for like a toxic relationship because basically what happens, we just gonna spoil it, is that Jack can't stop her from having a crush on him, so he eventually traps her in this weird building that crushes her spirits and dampens her emotions so that she can't summon him anymore. And so that was an interesting metaphor, but it's not worth it. And it's just, Jack is a horrible person; she's a horrible person; why do we care about either of them? It was funny, but it also wasn't funny enough to justify how lazy it was.

But again, I wanna say that the folks at Strange Horizons made it a lot better than it originally had been. I think that they recognized that there was something cool there and they tried their best to bring it out, and it was my shortcomings as a writer that kept it from actually working as well as it could have. So I'm really hoping at some point people get to read the new version, which I'm so much happier with.

Kat Kourbeti: Oh, I would read that like right now. Oh my gosh. The concept I think drew me in. You're not wrong in looking back at your own writing and kind of recognizing, with hindsight and with the improvement of decades of more writing experience and life experience, to go, "ah I would've done this differently now."

But at the same time, like, the world building and the way that some of that magic works, and the humor, I think those bones are strong. I enjoyed reading it now, but I would love to read the new version, so Tordotcom, if you're listening...

Charlie Jane Anders: I think it's sitting on my editor's desk. There's a lot going on but I'm excited for it to see the light of day at some point, hopefully, because it was fun to go back to it.

Kat Kourbeti: And what about like, the British component of it? 'Cause it's set in London, where I live incidentally, and because I live in London and because I know some people who are, you know, their accent has like hints of Essex, but they try to hide it—

Charlie Jane Anders: Oh, I forgot about that.

Kat Kourbeti: There's some lines in there that I was like, ooh, love that. How did you decide for that to be an English story?

Charlie Jane Anders: That's a good question. I mean, I lived in the UK for many years. I went to university in the UK, and so I have that kind of background a little bit. I think it just felt at the time, it fit with the kind feel of the story. It fit with the humor of it. Like I guess I was trying to do a very, you know, British farcical, wry humor there.

I think the new version that I just wrote is set in New York, though, actually, I think I moved it to New York. I forgot about that. I also think, when you're writing about—no offense, when you're writing about repressed people who are being toxic to each other, I do think of the Brits a little bit sometimes.

Kat Kourbeti: None taken. I'm not a Brit, so like, yeah. For some reason I've chosen to live here. That's a separate story.

It's just very interesting to hear that the editors back then had a more hands-on, kind of like intensive approach, 'cause I think as the years have gone on and the department has changed hands, I don't think that they put so much like a heavy hand onto stories that come in. I think they just kinda let the story speak with not so much, at least from interviews that I've done so far.

So this is very interesting and very different.

Charlie Jane Anders: Yeah, I was probably at the, gosh, this is probably the fifth anniversary party of Strange Horizons at Wiscon. Might have been 10th anniversary. God, it was an anniversary party of Strange Horizons at Wiscon. The original crew were there, I think they were still running the magazine at the time.

And we were all kind of speaking about like, what Strange Horizons had meant for us and how it had changed our lives, and it was actually a really sweet gathering. Like every year at Wiscon, they used to do a Strange Horizons Tea Party, and the crew would be there, and I think sometimes John Scalzi would show up because he's very upfront about how Strange Horizons helped to launch him.

But I remember Ben Rosenbaum saying something that really resonated with me, that felt true to me, which was that, they were tough on you, the editors were, and that if they published you once and you came back a second time, they'd be tougher on you the second time. And actually feel like I got more rejections from Strange Horizons after they published me one time. Like they would just reject more of my stuff. And that was something Ben was saying as well, is that it was actually harder and harder to get published, the difficulty level would go up because they would be more picky about your stuff.

And also if they accepted your stuff, they would really put you through your paces. They were very intense about wanting to make it the best that it could be, and push you to be the best that you could be. It was not a thing where once you're in they just are like, oh, we know you could do this and we're just gonna let you do it. But instead it was like, you had to really bring it.

One of my favorite stories I've ever written was actually rejected by Strange Horizons. I shouldn't bring that up. But yeah, it was like a story that I was really proud of and that has like, gone on to have a huge life since it was published somewhere else. And they were just like, no.

Kat Kourbeti: Interesting. At the same time, it's not necessarily about it being bad, just that it didn't click for the folks there at that time.

Charlie Jane Anders: They just wanted something that they're really passionate about and that they're like, yes, I see this, I can make this better, I connect to this, and I feel like that's the way it should be. I don't think you should accept everything that comes over the transom, even from an author that you've published before or whatever.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, no, absolutely. Like it needs to be of the quality and of the standard that you want on your magazine. Nothing more, nothing less.

So, the next story we have from you then is from 2007, and it's about sentient cryptocurrency, I think?

Charlie Jane Anders: Oh yeah, oh wow.

Kat Kourbeti: Question mark?

Charlie Jane Anders: It's not crypto. This was before cryptocurrencies existed.

Kat Kourbeti: That's why I was like, oh my God, these currencies are sentient. How did she know this?

Charlie Jane Anders: I think at the time, like, for my day job, I would just write different publications about mostly healthcare stuff. I wrote a lot of stuff about healthcare back then where I would write about here's how things are working in the healthcare sector, or here's how to navigate this complicated legal thing around HIPAA or whatever. That was like, legal compliance publications aimed at people in an industry, or like B2B kind of publications or, just news about like regulation and stuff. I love nerding out about complicated stuff.

For a year or two around that time, I was shunted over to working on a publication about online banking, so I got to learn all about the regulations around banking and how they were applying to the internet and like, all the different complexities of banking online, which at the time was a huge, deal. Like all these banks were moving online and doing a terrible job of it.

So I was thinking about those issues and I I liked the idea of currency that is given sentience so that it can look out for fraudulent transactions or fraud or whatever, currency that thinks about how it's being spent. But then obviously once that happens, it starts to think about like wealth inequality, and all the ways that our economy makes no sense because it's engineered for the comfort and happiness of like a minority of people. That was fun because it was a fun thought experiment.

I'm still really happy with that story. I would like to reprint it one of these days.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah.

Charlie Jane Anders: But ultimately it's about confronting wealth inequality, which wasn't as big a topic in 2006 or 2007 as it is now, but already felt like a huge big deal to me. And finding a new way to talk about something like that is always a gift because there's only so many ways that we can point out the sheer obvious fact of like, how unfair our economy is, and how rigged it is for the wealthy.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. And it manages to do that with a big dollop of romance. It spoke to the idealistic romantic in me who's like, oh but I want them to do well, I want them to manage to like, be together. These two currencies who like, have some thoughts about the world.

Charlie Jane Anders: Yeah, that was fun. I feel like that was maybe an example of me having gotten slightly better at writing since I wrote that first story, because it's another story about kind of a romance, kind of a relationship. And I feel like it doesn't take quite as many lazy shortcuts. It's still not my best work in terms of how it portrays the relationship, but it does at least treat the relationship with respect, and give agency to both sides of the relationship in a way that feels natural. It's not just oh, hahaha, everything sucks. People are garbage. LOL.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, the story manages to capture all of these feelings and really kind of have an argument with capitalism, but like, in a really interesting digital way. I love how you found a way to turn what was probably really dry reading about online banking, into something profound.

Charlie Jane Anders: Yeah. I just like taking things apart and finding out how they work. I think that's a really fun, like I actually kinda miss doing that for my job. It was weirdly relaxing. It was like needle point, especially if it's not like life or death for you personally to figure out all this weird, bureaucratic, legal stuff. It can be super interesting. I don't know.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. Did you take any of that with you into your subsequent journalism career? 'Cause you and Annalee Newitz co-founded io9.

Charlie Jane Anders: Yeah, Annalee really founded it, and I came on board sometime after. It was really Annalee's baby. But journalism, like everything I learned, I brought with me and was useful in some way. I feel like the main thing you learn is skepticism and, understanding that things in capitalism are always gonna be messed up and wonky and that you're just, I don't know.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah.

Charlie Jane Anders: I feel like a certain amount of skepticism, like I think coming from like business journalism or like economic journalism to entertainment journalism, I was maybe a little bit more skeptical about stuff than people who had come up in entertainment journalism.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, you guys were kind of at the forefront of what was a burgeoning ecosystem of writing about geeky things and science and, just the complicated Venn diagram of things that nerdy people are interested in. And yeah, of course you bring your background with you, but that's only a good thing when you've got to look at the news and dissect and find what's interesting in there.

Charlie Jane Anders: I think so. Yeah, for sure.

Kat Kourbeti: Now, there was a bit of a gap in your Strange Horizon's history, and the next story I've got from you, there's romance in it, I think, but again, perhaps an exploration of toxic relationships, but from a very different perspective, very different dynamic.

It's called Source Decay, from 2011.

Charlie Jane Anders: Oh wow, okay.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. Taking you back through memory lane.

Charlie Jane Anders: Yeah, that one was weird. That was interesting. There was this TV show that we used to watch sometimes 'cause it was just such trash, called Cheaters. It was such a terrible TV show. It was so awful. Basically, it was like a reality TV show where somebody would come to these producers and be like, " I think my spouse is cheating on me or my significant other is cheating on me." And so they would try to catch them cheating, and then there would be a confrontation. It was terrible, it was a terrible show. It was on for a long time.

And so basically it was just a thing of what if an episode of Cheaters, or like a show like Cheaters— it's not Cheaters, but it's sort of Cheaters-esque— what if a show like that is like one of the few artifacts of our culture that's preserved in the future? Which I feel like that's a whole genre.

There's some science fiction story that's super famous where future archeologists find like a Mickey Mouse thing and they're like, I can't remember who wrote that story, but it's like a famous science fiction story. And it's like, was this a god? They don't understand what Mickey Mouse was and they're just confused. [Editor's note: it's History Lesson by Arthur C. Clarke.]

And I feel like that is a trope, that's a very common trope in science fiction. When that story came out, not that many people read it to begin with, but the people who read it, some of them were like, "oh, this is just doing that trope, whatever, I've seen this before." And I think I was trying to do more than just invoke that trope, I was trying to like, think about how this really messed up situation, with this reality TV show and this couple just like lighting everything on fire, took on different meaning, and how our stories can change meaning over time.

The other thing about this story, and it's also true of the fourth story that I sold to Strange Horizons, I think it was me experimenting with form a little bit and trying to like, do something a little bit weirder and be like, "okay, let's play around with what a story can be and like how a story can be structured," and so this was very much like, we're gonna start out with this very grounded situation and then we're gonna take it into the distant future, and show how it's become this piece of culture that's preserved in the future and how the meaning of it has changed and stuff.

Honestly, I'd have to reread that story because it's not as clear in my mind, ironically, as the two earlier ones. Like I remember it pretty clearly, but it's also just, it was an experiment that I was having a lot of fun doing, and I felt like I was trying to comment on how stuff sticks around and gets amplified and stuff.

Kat Kourbeti: It is a trope, yes, and I'm sure I've read other stories that posit that question, but I feel like every story that does that, answers the question a little differently and/or asks it a little differently. What does it say about our culture, our fascination with these things, or, just the tendencies in our relationships maybe, or the dynamics and it's all very, you know, emblematic of a certain time and whatever.

But yeah, trash TV. What does that say to someone, thousands of years later? I think it's a fair question to ask. I enjoyed this one a lot. I think it's very funny. Yeah.

Charlie Jane Anders: I should reread it. I'm sure it lands differently now, because now we are living in a world shaped by reality TV.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah.

Charlie Jane Anders: Everything in our culture is reality TV, and that wasn't as true when I wrote that story. So I think I should probably, I'm curious to see how it holds up.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. That's what's interesting about science fiction is, the genre tends to look ahead to try and catch a glimpse maybe of the future. And a lot of the time it gets it scarily right. And then you're like looking back at the thing and you're like, how did I envision this so clearly, and that's the way things went? But it's also a trap for a lot of authors where near future is a little too near, and it's difficult to cast your gaze like far enough where that's still fiction, if that makes sense. Social media had only just started at the time that you wrote this and, yeah, we had a lot of reality TV, but nothing like right now.

Let's talk a little about your fourth story, which again, you play around with some things and it's very interesting. It's called Complicated and Stupid, and it's from 2013.

Charlie Jane Anders: Oh, wow. Yeah. I didn't realize it was that recent. That's a story, again, I'm experimenting with form. It's a story where I tried this thing where like, each section of the story is a different POV and it's like a relay race. Each POV hands off to the next POV kind of, and we don't repeat any POVs, which was something that I was really enjoying messing around with, and I don't know if I pulled it off or not.

It was a story that was deliberately very weird and strange and silly, and I think there's like concussion porn and there's this scientist who's gonna try to release something into the water to make people have more empathy. It was again about toxic relationships, but also thinking about like how people could be better, or how we try to be better and how it's just really hard.

I remember that the title of that story, Complicated and Stupid, is a quote from a Lady Gaga song. I feel like I @'ed Lady Gaga a few times on Twitter asking for her permission to use that phrase, and she never responded, of course. And I was like, if Lady Gaga sues me, I guess that'll be really good publicity. Like it would probably suck, but also like, I'd be instantly famous. So that would be something.

Kat Kourbeti: I don't think that she could trademark—

Charlie Jane Anders: No.

Kat Kourbeti: —this, necessarily.

Charlie Jane Anders: Song lyrics are this weird kind of extreme area of copyright law or whatever, where song lyrics, if you quote three words from a song, you could be. So I shouldn't say that because now I will get sued by Lady Gaga, and that would suck.

But yeah, I don't know.

Kat Kourbeti: We will scrap that.

Charlie Jane Anders: I think she's probably a little busy. I think she's got other stuff on her plate and she probably doesn't need the 37 cents that she could get from me, if she sued me over that. Plus, like, she might've waited too long.

I feel like that story is like dripping with irony, but also there is like a center of genuine sadness or like wanting human connection and feel like human connection is important and, I guess I was working on that story at the same time as I was writing All the Birds in the Sky, where there's like a thread running through it of like empathy and, whether people are able to connect to each other or not, and human connection being this important thing that different entities in different ways are trying to foster. And so I think that was on my mind.

But yeah, I feel like Complicated and Stupid was probably one of the later stories I wrote where I was trying to experiment a lot with form. There's one or two after that. Like I wrote a story called Captain Roger in Heaven, which was in 2016 or 2017, which is another story where it's like different POVs and we never repeat the same POV. So that was a clearly a thing I was trying to like mess around with. But I feel like this was, in terms of me writing short stories that were like, more experimental, this was definitely towards the end of me doing that. Not because I don't like experimenting anymore, but just because I got really busy and oftentimes when you write a really experimental short story, people don't know what to do with it, and so they just ignore it.

There's always the possibility that you're gonna do short fiction experiments, and people are gonna be like, oh my gosh, this is resonating in some way. And, it's like anything else. Most of the time it just kinda slips through the cracks and it's hard to justify doing that, especially when it's conceptually hard to pull off.

Kat Kourbeti: It's the challenge of the genre and at least short form gives you an opportunity to mess around and play with that, without dedicating yourself to 80,000 words of that. It can be 4,000 words.

Charlie Jane Anders: Totally.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. So that kind of segues into my question about moving around with formats. 'Cause you've written things of all kinds of lengths which is very interesting. And how would you say did the evolution of that transpire? 'Cause you were writing All the Birds in the Sky, you said, around that time. So walk me through like your novel writing journey a little bit.

Charlie Jane Anders: Yeah, I was writing novels I guess the whole time. My first novel, that was a long time ago, and that was super experimental and weird. My first novel I wrote in the early two 2000s, and it was published in like 2005, then I wrote like a bunch of other novels after that, that didn't ever see the light of day. One of them, eventually I turned into a novella, Rock Manning Goes for Broke. But there are a few others that I revised them and polished them and reworked them and had beta readers and everything, and then they just never appeared.

So the whole time I was writing novels and it was just like, All the Birds in the Sky was the one that finally made it over the finish line and got a big publisher and got some more attention. But yeah, I feel like I cut my teeth writing short stories for sure. Feel like that's a common pattern, at least it was a common pattern when I was starting out. Strange Horizons was great because it was like, a pro market that was open to newer writers, it was online rather than in print. So it felt more accessible in various ways. Like anybody could read it. It was this really cool thing that kind of came along.

It wasn't the first online pro market that I was aware of. I don't think it was even the first online pro market that I was published in. I think that might've been this magazine that nobody remembers, called it Speculon. Which I always think in retrospect, that sounded a little too similar to speculum—

Kat Kourbeti: Yep.

Charlie Jane Anders: —but Speculon was like a magazine in the late nineties, maybe 2000, 2001. I don't know when it went under. and they published one of my stories before Strange Horizons. And so that was my first online pro SFF sale. But Strange Horizons felt like it was this really unique part of this short story ecosystem at the time. It was great because I was learning so much about writing and getting the kind of editorial feedback that you got from Strange Horizons was worth its weight in gold. It just made things so much better.

And what I always say about writing short stories is that it forces you to get better at writing endings, which if you only ever write novels, then you only write a very small number of endings. And endings are hard, like beginnings are also challenging in a different way, but I think endings are a little magic trick where you have to make everything come together, make all the pieces fall into place, or at least enough of the pieces fall into place that it feels kinda satisfying and that, you know, rigging everything to a graceful stop or leaving things in an interesting place.

And so endings are hard, and just having practice writing a ton of endings was really good. There was that period when I tried to write a short story a week for a few years there, and didn't ever really achieve that, but I tried, and in retrospect I probably should have written fewer short stories and spent more time on each of them, but I was just like, I'm just gonna get better at this and I'm gonna just do it by doing it a lot. When I first sold a short story to Strange Horizons, it did feel like I had kinda leveled up, and then I kept leveling up by being part of Strange Horizons, and I was so proud to be part of it 'cause it was such a cool magazine.

Kat Kourbeti: I think that even from the earliest days, I think your superpower is dialogue. Like your characters feel alive, you know?

Charlie Jane Anders: I really appreciate that. I feel like dialogue is something that I, as a reader, I will often find myself skipping the long descriptive paragraphs to get to the next piece of dialogue. 'cause I just where I feel anchored in the story kind of, so I think that comes out in my writing. I like writing dialogue. It was definitely during my forays into writing for television, or actually a comic script to some extent too, to just be more focused on the dialogue is actually like, oh, this is actually fun because I don't have to like, you still do have to write some descriptive stuff, but it's more dialogue forward kind of.

I do enjoy that. For me, the easiest way to be anchored in the scene and also get the character's voices like literally happening. So I don't know. Yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. It's early in the interview series we had Arkady Martine on, and—

Charlie Jane Anders: Oh yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: She and I were on a Worldcon panel years ago, and she said something that stuck in my brain and that I've been disseminating since. And it turns out that she took it from someone at Viable Paradise. It's this adage that "every writer gets at least one thing in their toolbox for free."

Charlie Jane Anders: Oh!

Kat Kourbeti: Then everything else you have to work at.

Charlie Jane Anders: Oh, that's interesting. I like that.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, Arkady said her thing is settings. She can come up with a world and a city and its culture like immediately, no problem. Sit me down and in 15 minutes I'll have something for you. Everything else she has to work at, but yeah.

Like character, dialogue, these things that some people struggle with, I think your stories really feel like—these people feel lived in and real. Or at least to me anyway as a reader.

Something else that I really love that you do is all of your community organizing, all of the stuff that you do for the people in San Francisco and just generally, that you have this pull to like, bring people together. So I wanted to ask a little bit about that, how you got involved in that to start with, but yeah, just kinda what it means to you.

Charlie Jane Anders: When I first moved to San Francisco over 25 years ago, I just got involved in volunteering for stuff and in time turned into organizing stuff because that's just what happens. And I don't think I've ever had a division in my head between, oh, there's the part of my life where I'm writing and it's just like me sitting and writing there's this part of my life where I'm doing community stuff.

I think they always blur together because I think of writing as being—this sounds cheesy, but being in community with people. Like, writing doesn't exist in a vacuum. Writers are in community with each other, authors are in community with readers. We're all in community with each other.

And so when I'm organizing a literary event, like I'm organizing a reading, and we're bringing together authors who are sharing their work, and yes, of course that's fostering this kind of community, but also when I'm organizing like the Trans Nerd Meetup or the Bookstore and Chocolate Crawl or other stuff I've helped to organize, it's all about like hopefully strengthening community and bringing people together.

And again, that was the thing about Strange Horizons, it was so great, is that it did feel like a community. Especially when you would go to these tea parties that they would have at Wiscon, or when you would like interact online with a bunch of the other Strange Horizons contributors and with the crew at Strange Horizons. It felt like a little family, it didn't just feel like, oh, this is a magazine that published me one time.

It felt like, oh yeah, I'm part of something really cool.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, absolutely. I think there's like a—my husband is a San Francisco Giants fan, and there's a saying in the Giants where it's like, "once a Giant, always a Giant," and I feel like that's a Strange Horizons spirit as well. Once you're in this family, you're always part of this.

Charlie Jane Anders: Ah, I love that. That's great.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah.

So thank you so much for joining us. Before I let you go, is there anything that's new or forthcoming that you might wanna plug or promote?

Charlie Jane Anders: Yeah, I have a novel coming out in August called Lessons in Magic and Disaster. It's about a young witch who teaches her mother how to do magic. She teaches her mom to be a witch, and she's also a grad student who is uncovering the secrets of a mysterious book from 1747.

It definitely uses a lot of the muscles that I developed writing for Strange Horizons. It has that intense focus on relationships, and on how stories change over time. So yeah, I'm excited to share it with the world. Lessons in Magic and Disaster, August 19th.

Kat Kourbeti: Awesome. We'll look forward to that and thank you so much for taking the time to chat to us.

Charlie Jane Anders: Yeah, it's my pleasure. Have a great rest of your day.