Show Notes

• Kitemaster





• Rise of the Spider Goddess





• Libriomancer 





• Goblin Tales





• Goblin Quest





• Book Cover Poses





• Magnum Opus 





• They’re Made Out of Meat





• Fighting Kites





• DAW Books

Transcript

Generously transcribed by Michael Frank. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny. 

Chris:  Welcome to the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Chris, and with me is …

Oren: Oren.

Chris: And we have a very special guest today: Jim C. Hines. He’s published over twenty novels, over fifty short stories, and he won a Hugo Award for best fan writer after he took pictures of himself posing like the women on book covers!

Oren: That was great. [Laughs]

Jim: Thank you.

Chris: And apparently, as I recall, that gave you some back pain?

Jim: Some of the poses, yes. Trying to get both the chest and the backside on the same image. Um, yeah. You definitely need some ibuprofen afterward.

Chris: Of course. ‘Cause the reader’s gotta see both boobs and butt.

Jim: Well, of course!

Oren: Look, the spine must be sacrificed. That’s just the way it works.

Jim: Right.

Oren: Well, welcome to our podcast.

Jim: Thank you! Thank you for having me.

Oren: So, we have some questions that we’re going to ask because you have written a lot of books and you have a very cool writing career, and we wanna know what you’ve learned over that time, and we wanna share that with our listeners in the hopes that we will all benefit from your wisdom.

Jim: Wait, I was supposed to have learned something?

Oren: Yeah. You know, they tell you that at the end, right? They’re like, “Hey, can you come tell people what you’ve learned?” And you’re like, scrambling. Eh? Probably something, you know? 

Jim: So why didn’t you gimme a heads up about this thirty years ago when I started?

Oren: First we have a term that we use a lot at Mythcreants that we call ‘the magnum opus.’ We use it ironically. It kind of means a mega project that is also usually the writer’s first, or maybe close to first, book that they start on. It’s really ambitious that they aren’t prepared for. It seems to be pretty common. Have you done that? Did you–when you were first starting off–did you have a magnum opus?

Jim: Oh boy…

All: [Chuckling]

Jim: I had two, really.

Oren: Oh! With the Magnum Opi.

Jim: The first one, it was the first book I wrote. I was a junior in college and it was this grand fantasy adventure of my Dungeons & Dragons character.

Chris: Yeah! [Laughs]

Jim: His name was Nacor the Purple. He was just, very much the stereotypical cool elf character. And every night I would do classes or do some homework, and then go sit down and write more about this D&D character. And it was, looking back, terrible. It was full of cliché. It was sloppy, shallow world building. There was no real consistency. You know, he has a falcon companion that I think at one point becomes an owl. It was awful, but I didn’t know that. I just knew that I was having fun. I was loving getting into this character and writing all these cool action scenes and things that I thought were very dramatic and even emotional. And then –

Oren: Well, it sounds like you discovered that the owl familiar had shape-shifting abilities and could become a falcon. That’s cool! That’s like a, you know, an emergent property, I would say. 

Jim: Now, see, if I was writing it now, that’s exactly the BS explanation I would go for. It’s like, oh yeah, that’s totally, um … What I actually ended up doing with it, I think probably about ten years back, I had volunteered for a fundraiser that if, you know, if you raise this much or bid on this, I will read this awful fan fiction of my character while dressed as the character.

Oren: Oh wow.

Chris: Oh wow! That’s great.

Jim: And then when I read it and posted the reading, people wanted to know more, which is like, really? My readers are masochists? What’s going on? So I ended up self-publishing it. It’s called Rise of the Spider Goddess, and it’s annotated.

Chris: Oh.

Jim: It’s the manuscript exactly as I wrote it. But then twenty-years-older and more experienced me doing the mystery science theater treatment throughout. Just all the snide comments, all of the, “Oh God, what was I thinking?”

Chris: [chuckles] That sounds delightful.

Jim: It was kind of fun. And, you know, I do like putting it out there as just reassurance that we all suck when we start and we get better. But it’s okay to suck when you’re starting out.

Oren: This kids, is why you should never get rid of the novel draft, no matter how bad it is. You never know when you might need it for a fundraiser.

Jim: Exactly. People might actually pay money to suffer through that.

Oren: And you said there was another one?

Jim: There was. There was a book called Hamadryad that I was trying to be … You know, this was a few years later. It was more ambitious. It was dealing with female characters and how they’re written and sexism and objectification and just getting into a lot of cultural issues. And I was totally not ready to write it.

Chris: Mm-hmm. Oh man. We encounter so many writers that really wanna take on important issues, but you know, when you start writing, that’s the hardest time to take on something that’s, you know. It’s ambitious in its own right because it’s sensitive.

Jim: Years later, the character came back in part of the Libriomancer books. But yeah, that was like ten more years of learning how to write, learning how to get a little deeper with the themes, learning how to not be completely heavy handed about it all.

Oren: [satirically] I’m sixteen and I have just heard that religious discrimination is bad. I’m gonna write the quintessential novel about Islamophobia.

Jim: [chuckles] Yeah.

Oren: Right? Like, let he who has never done this cast the first stone.

Jim: And it’s – I mean, you don’t wanna discourage it because it’s great that sixteen-year-old you has discovered this, and I’m very happy that you’re exploring. But yeah …

Oren: It’s good that you want to, and then eventually you will learn the expertise and you can probably do something that will actually work a little better.

Jim: Hopefully.

Oren: Yeah. Like when I get clients who wanna do this, I always encourage why they want to and their motivations, and then I try to help them avoid the big mistakes that we all make. Right? 

Chris: I mean, I try to encourage people to start by depicting the world they want to see. Right? Instead of taking on all of those difficult topics when they start. But yeah, no. We’ve all – my magnum opus was overly edgy and not trying to comment enough. So I’ve definitely done worse. 

Jim: I think we’ve all been there, you know, one way or another.

Chris: So, your list of short stories is very impressive. And I noticed going through your bibliography that the earliest one I spotted was <