Episode 54: Yoon Ha Lee Interview

Travis interviews author Yoon Ha Lee about Phoenix Extravagant, his latest novel from Solaris Books. This standalone story follows a nonbinary painter as they team up with a pacifist mecha dragon against an evil empire, and it takes place in a magical version of Korea during the Japanese occupation.

Yoon and Travis discuss Yoon’s experience with watercolor and animation, the important role of art in culture, and how colonization seeks to undermine and destroy that role.

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About Yoon Ha Lee

Phoenix Extravagant

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Transcript:

The transcript for this interview was generously provided by the wonderful Jacqui, who you can find on Twitter as @Blackwingjac.

[intro music begins]

Travis: Welcome to The Fantasy Inn, where we share our love for all things fantasy and discuss the broader speculative fiction industry. I’m your host, Travis Tippens. This week’s intro is a bit different, because our guest is a talented composer as well as a fantastic author. He’s graciously allowed us to feature his music in this episode.

In this episode, I’m speaking with author Yoon Ha Lee. His latest standalone novel from Solaris takes place in a fantasy reimagining of Japan’s occupation of Korea and follows a pacifist painter and a magical mecha-dragon. Yoon and I discussed his experience with watercolor painting and animation, the important role of art and culture, and how colonization seeks to undermine and destroy that role. I had a wonderful time speaking with Yoon and I hope you enjoy the interview.

[intro music fades out]

Welcome to The Fantasy Inn, Yoon. It’s so great to have you on the podcast.

Yoon Ha Lee: It’s my pleasure, thank you for having me.

Travis: Yeah, of course, and I have to admit that before we scheduled this interview, I had no idea that you were a musical composer, so how did that come about?

Yoon Ha Lee: Actually, I wanted, I got into music before I got into writing. I was always listening to my dad’s – my dad raised me on classical music and country, because we were living in Texas. And I would just sit there and listen to Tchaikovsky and nobody tells you when you’re six years old that normal people don’t compose, like that’s not one of things they tell you. So, I thought that obviously music exists so it is something that I can learn to do, and when I started taking piano lessons I would naturally, I guess, kind of like writing fanfic but for music, like if there was a piece that I enjoyed I would mess around with it and change it and try to make it my own, and eventually I started writing my own pieces.

Travis: Wow, so you were writing your own musical pieces when you were six years old?

Yoon Ha Lee: Um, more like eight years old, but yeah. Because, it’s like, children naturally do what they’re interested in. I was interested in music and nobody told me that I couldn’t, so I went ahead and did it. I actually thought that everybody composed, they just didn’t talk about it, and then when I grew older, I learned that was not the case [laughs].

Travis: Yeah, that’s amazing. I know, I took piano lessons from a young age, but I don’t think I ever had, like, the idea that composition is something I could actually try.

Yoon Ha Lee: I think it’s kind of a shame, because really, it’s just playing with music. Everybody knows what kind of music they do or don’t like, and that’s really the starting point is ‘What do I like? What do I want this piece to sound like?’

Travis: Yeah, and I guess, so my understanding is you’ve continued your music hobby for a while, so you still compose now?

Yoon Ha Lee: Yeah. Lately, I’ve been doing sort of neo-classical stuff. I experimented with electronica. This can be a very expensive hobby because sampled instruments that are based on live orchestral instruments can become very expensive, but there are also very accessible ways to do it, which I like about modern technology.

Back when I was writing orchestral music in high school for music class, I used the music department’s computer and the software was extremely expensive, very buggy, and now if you have GarageBand or, what’s that free one called? Audacity, or just like a ten-dollar app on your phone, you can create music. It might not be orchestral music, it might not be exactly the kinds of things that you hear, you know, on the top 40 charts, or in a movie score, but you can make your own music of a sort, and I just really love that more people have the opportunity to engage in this.

Travis: Absolutely. I think the software, I took band in high school so I did noodle around a little bit then, I think it was Finale, if I’m remembering that correctly, but that might have been more for actual sheet music than creating the electronic music. And so, in addition to writing and music, to sort of complete your triple threat artist status, I saw that you also draw. So, I did find your ArtStation page with it looks like lots of drawings of your Machineries of Empire series. So, how do you manage your time to pursue all of these artistic hobbies?

Yoon Ha Lee: My husband looked at this question when you sent it to me and he’s like ‘Yeah, Yoon Ha, how do you do it?’ [laughs] I actually don’t spend that much time during my day writing, so I try to write 2000 words a day and I don’t write every day, it’s more like three to four days a week. I write 1000 words per hour or per hour and a half, so that’s two to three hours a day doing writing. Which leaves a lot of free time for other things. I could be writing more if I decided to, you know, spend four hours a day writing or five hours a day writing, but I would really be miserable doing that, because what feeds my writing is the ability to explore the world and create other things.

For example, with the art, I like to draw illustrations of my characters, because it helps me to visualize what they look like or get a sense of their personality, and I’m also one of writers who, like, I type a hundred words per minute, so you would think theoretically I could be churning out tons of words, but in reality I need time to think over my plots and characters, and really, you know, just sort of get to know them and figure out what I’m doing. So, I like to take it easy I guess [laughs].

Travis: Yeah, and I know from the one writing attempt I’ve made so far, the actual physical typing speed is really not the limiting factor for the most part, it’s everything else.

Yoon Ha Lee: No, it’s how fast you think. It’s like, I don’t think at a hundred words per minute. I used to write longhand with a fountain pen and people asked me ‘How can you stand writing so slowly?’ and I would tell them ‘Well, that’s about as fast as I think, so it really doesn’t make a difference.’

Travis: Yeah, I know a few people who like writing longhand as well and that’s what I’ve heard.

Well, sort of taking things back a little bit, can you remember what first made you fall in love with science fiction and fantasy?

Yoon Ha Lee: It was Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonflight from her Dragonriders of Pern series. I had a friend who, in fourth grade, who really got into Anne McCaffrey’s books, because, I don’t know, we were kids and kids like dragons. I guess everybody likes dragons. And so, she got into McCaffrey’s books and I decided that I wanted to try the book because my friend liked it, and I hope it’s okay to spoil a book that came out before I was born [laughs] but Dragonflight has as a plot point the fact that dragons can teleport, and they can teleport not only between locations and space, but between times.

So, my mind was just completely blown because I had just never conceived of time travel being a thing, it was my first encounter with the trope, and after that I was just hooked on science fiction and fantasy, because it had these exciting ideas that I had never seen before.

Travis: Right. I didn’t discover Anne McCaffrey’s work until much later in life, only in the past couple of years, but in general that was my same experience. Just … there’s really no limit to what you can achieve in those genres.

Yoon Ha Lee: Yeah, it’s the imaginative aspect that I find really attractive. Like, I do read in other genres now and then, but I always come back to science fiction and fantasy because just the sheer scope of imagination on display.

Travis: So, is that sort of what made you want to become a writer as well? Or how did that happen?

Yoon Ha Lee: That was actually due to my third-grade teacher, Mr. McCracken. Basically, up until that point I thought that books just sort of magically dropped out of the sky, like I didn’t have any concept of where books came from or that they were written by authors, by human beings. But Mr. McCracken, once a week he would get into this, actually I don’t know where he got the costume, it was this spandex superman-type costume—

Travis: [laughs] That’s amazing.

Yoon Ha Lee: —and he would call himself Story Man, and he would teach us about creative writing, and that was when it dawned on me that actually, books are written by people and I’m a person, so I could write a book too, and that was really when I became determined to someday write a book.

Travis: And so, I find it interesting that as someone who, as you said, all the way back in that third grade, kind of had the idea to write a book, that you then went on to choose studying math and math education. So how did you choose that path?

Yoon Ha Lee: That’s slightly convoluted. I entered college as a prospective history major, because at the time I wanted to write fantasy, you know, medieval fantasy, and I thought that history would be a good foundation for that. And then I sort of looked at the job market and went, “Wow, I really want to be able to eat and pay the rent, and a history degree seems like a really bad way to do that.”

So, I switched to math because I enjoyed it and it seemed like a more practical degree. I didn’t want to do a doctorate because it would be seven years of just grinding work, not really having the leisure to write, and I thought, “Well, you know, if I taught high school math, I would be working hard during the school year, but I would have the summers off to write.” That was the original plan.

Travis: So, I guess, do you teach high school math then?

Yoon Ha Lee: No, I write fulltime now. I actually did not last very long as a high school math teacher partly because of health reasons. I had to leave the field.

Travis: Okay, fair enough. Now is probably an especially difficult time to be in education as well.

Yoon Ha Lee: I have a lot of respect for teachers, what they’re going through right now, it’s quite an adjustment I believe.

Travis: Yeah, absolutely. But yeah, on the note of the math, I saw in your author bio that it says you find it a continual delight that math can be mined for story ideas, and I think many people might have this idea that math is like this purely logical thing and writing is this purely creative thing, so how do you bridge two passions to come up with story ideas?

Yoon Ha Lee: I want to question the idea that math is pure logic and writing is pure creativity. I mean, certainly those are components, but math is actually extremely creative. The kind of math that I was doing was more on the pure math side, where you create theorems, and literally you are building structures out of ideas in that kind of mathematics. You start with the axioms and then you investigate where they lead, and what the ramifications are. It’s kind of like worldbuilding, but in a very abstract sense.

And writing also has logic to it, when you look at things like the structure of a story, or, you know, the three-act structure or the hero’s journey or what a character arc looks like. Writing has patterns and mathematics is about patterns, so they actually do end up having similarities in how you approach them.

Travis: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. My math never really made it all that far past calculus, so I didn’t quite get into that purely theoretical side of creating things, but I can definitely see how there would be kind of limitless opportunity to explore there.

So, I guess, when you’re coming up with stories, is there just kind of like a spark where there’s this mathematic concept and you’re just like, “Well, I wonder how this could be applied to something else?” or does it just randomly come to you?

Yoon Ha Lee: I think for a lot of stories, for me, I will have one idea and that’s not enough to start the story, it has to be kind of cross-bred with a completely different idea from a different direction, and that’s what the spark is for me, these two disparate things coming together, and how to reconcile them and bring them into the same world. 

Travis: Right, that’s something that, when I started paying more attention to writing craft and speaking with more authors, is an idea is not the same as a story. So, stories have multiple ideas and then you also have to, like, weave them together somehow.

Yoon Ha Lee: Yeah, absolutely.

Travis: So, when I was looking through your past stories, I saw that you actually have over seventy short stories published in the last twenty years, at least, just from what I can find on your website. So, how did you get started with short fiction?

Yoon Ha Lee: I started writing short stories for my sister, like, literally I would take type-writer paper and fold it in half and staple it, and write a story for my sister. That was really where it started [laughs], but I started submitting to magazines in sixth grade, which was a terrible idea because the stories that I was writing back then were really, really awful stories. But it was good practice, I guess. Like, I learned about standard manuscript format. I learned how to address a cover letter. I learned to grow kind of a thick skin about rejection slips. So, it was good practice for what it’s like to be a working writer, I guess.

I sold my first story freshman year of college and I had actually sent it out at the end of twelfth grade from South Korea where I was living at the time, and the acceptance letter went back to my parents and then they had to send it, they had to forward it to me in college in New York State. It was just kind of funny.

Travis: Oh wow. But that’s really impressive though, to sell a story that, I guess, you wrote and submitted when you were still, not even in college yet.

Yoon Ha Lee: I think what I learned from starting so young was that it’s really about persistence. I’ve had friends who have been trying to sell stories, and it can be kind of grinding and miserable when you get that rejection slip again, but, I mean, I went through so many rejection slips, even after I made my first sale, I didn’t always sell the later stories that I wrote.

They would make the rounds and there would be more rejection slips, and then once in a while someone would accept it. Like, you just have to keep trying and keep learning. The only difference between an unpublished writer and a published writer is really persistence and experience. As long as you keep trying and working harder and don’t give up, I believe that most people will eventually get there.

Travis: And it really does seem that, like, a lot of writers that appear to be these, sort of like, magnificent overnight successes, there’s actually, like, decades or at least years or months of really hard grueling work behind it, where they are getting a lot of those rejections.

Yoon Ha Lee: Yeah. I think even with writers who succeed very early on, they have some kind of track record or practice writing even if they’re not necessarily sending those stories out. So, yeah, you have to learn to write somewhere.

Travis: And then so from short stories. How did you transition from writing short fiction onto longer form like novels?

Yoon Ha Lee: I wrote my first novel in middle school. It was terrible, no copies exist anymore. I wrote another novel in high school, also terrible, no copies exist anymore [laughs]. Really, what I found out was I, it’s easier to practice writing a short story simply because it’s shorter. You can write numerous short stories in the time it takes you to finish a single novel, and so it’s easier to kind of pick up mastery of the basics of the form.

And there are things about writing a novel that you can’t learn from writing a short story, like how do you handle deeper characterization, how do you handle a big character arc, how do you handle multiple plot strands. So, there were definitely a lot of stumbling blocks as I tried to figure out how to write novels [laughs]. But I did find that with persistence I eventually got better at it and also, to be quite frank, novels pay than short stories.

Travis: Yes, I can definitely imagine that. And so, I believe in addition to short stories and novels and all of that, you also write some poetry. So, I was wondering, how did you get into that?

Yoon Ha Lee: I got into poetry because I fell in love with it really, an embarrassingly the poetry that I remember from my childhood is like, did you ever read the Dragonlance books?

Travis: I read a few of them. I’ve definitely not read all of them.

Yoon Ha Lee: The Dragonlance books had poetry in them, and not all the poetry was good but I was a super fan of the series so the poetry associated with the books was just something that I really got into, and then I started reading, you know, Poe, Sylvia Plath, I don’t know. Eventually I found my way to Audre Lorde, some of Arthur Waley’s translations of Chinese poems. I used to sit in my high school library and read poetry off the shelves, because it really forces you to pay attention to word choice on a very fine level.

Like, when you have a 200,000-word gigantic doorstopper novel, each word is proportionally less, like, it’s a tiny part of that novel, but if you have a haiku, a single word counts for so much more, it has just that much more weight. And so, I found that studying poetry and trying to write frequently very bad poetry of my own really helped me learn how to fine tune my appreciation of word craft.

Travis: Yeah, I can imagine that definitely would apply towards writing longer form prose as well.

Yoon Ha Lee: I also want to add that it, you know, not all people like poetry, but it doesn’t have to be poetry per se, like, you could study song lyrics, there are some really good song lyrics out there, or, I can’t listen to all rap because I get headaches from loud music, but there is some rap that has extremely clever, beautiful wordplay, and so there are just ways of studying word craft that don’t have to be literally poetry.

Travis: And then on a slightly different note, I see that you’ve been fairly productive and created quite a few interactive games this year, so what do you find appealing about creating games?

Yoon Ha Lee: I think it’s really the interactivity that makes it for me. So, when you read a story, it’s not completely passive because you’re interpreting what’s on the page, but at the same time you’re being carried along the author’s plot and their characters. In an interactive game, like a Twine game or an Inform game, or even some of the video games that have branching storylines, you get to interact with the storyline and make decisions, and that changes the dynamic between the author and the audience.

There’s this one interactive game, I think called Changeling, and it was an extremely powerful but extremely disturbing experience because you were put in the shoes of this viewpoint character who was mentally disturbed. They thought that their baby was an evil changeling. And so, at one point in the game you have the option of killing the baby, and I was like, “No, I’m not going to do this. I’m not going to type ‘kill baby’ into the command line.’” I can read books about babies being killed and, I mean, it’s horrible, but it’s not the same as taking action myself to move the story in that direction.

Travis: Yeah, that’s fascinating. I really don’t have a lot of experience, to be honest, with interactive games like that, but they seem fascinating.

Yoon Ha Lee: And I should add that, you know, you can generate powerful emotional experiences and they don’t have to be horrible experiences, they don’t have to be about killing babies. There’s this one game by Adam Cadre called Photopia and there’s this beautiful moment where you discover that your character can perform an act of magic, and it’s really sense of wonder in one of the purest forms, so it depends on how you use that power with the audience.

Travis: Right. That sounds really interesting, I’ll have to check out Photopia.

Well, we’ve been talking for a while now and we have yet to get to your latest work, so: Phoenix Extravagant, do you have a pitch for us?

Yoon Ha Lee: I do. It’s a book about a non-binary artist teaming up with a pacifist mecha-dragon against an evil empire.

Travis: Yeah, that … that is just such a fascinating pitch. I have to say that has so many things that I don’t frequently see in fantasy, and all of them together is just wow.

Yoon Ha Lee: I had fun with it [Laughs].

Travis: [Laughs] So, when I was reading this story, one of the things that definitely stood out to me upfront was it’s kind of a fantasy analogue for Japan occupying Korea. So, why did you make the choice to set the story in that world?

Yoon Ha Lee: You might be interested to know that my rough draft was not set in Japan occupying Korea.

Travis: Really?

Yoon Ha Lee: I wrote 40,000 words, like half the novel, in the first draft, and it was set in fake renaissance Europe and it was not working. And so, after several months of work, I made the hard decision to throw out those 40,000 words and start from scratch, and I said, “You know, this needs to be a setting that I feel a personal connection with.” And obviously I wasn’t alive in Korea during that time period, that was 1910 to 1945, but my parents would tell me stories about what that time period was like for their parents, and it has certainly shaped the way Korea feels about Japan.

I learned a lot of things reading about the Japanese occupation, specifically with regards to art. The Japanese actually did destroy Korean artworks and one of the things they did in landscape architecture – there’s sort of a Korean belief in Fung Shui that is very similar to Chinese Fung Shui, we actually stole it from the Chinese, and the Japanese came in and they relandscaped the gardens to interrupt the Fung Shui of Korean gardens. There were just all sorts of things like that.

Travis: Wow, I was unaware of that, but that doesn’t really surprise me all that much. I guess one of the messages that seems very powerful in your story is sort of the destructive power of colonization and particularly how that can play out on the culture and the art of the occupied country.

Yoon Ha Lee: One of the reasons I wanted to focus on the cultural impact is that it’s so easy to think of colonialism in more physical terms, more military terms, and I really wanted to look at the destructive impact on culture and society, things like Koreans not being able to use their own names or having to learn Japanese language. My mother’s father, my grandfather, actually was a collaborator. He went to university in Japan and he learned calligraphy from the Japanese, and he was fluent in Japanese. So, it’s family history like that that I thought about when I was writing this book.

Travis: Yeah, and you can definitely see that influence. I had not heard this spoken out loud, is the main character Jebi? Is that how you say the name?

Yoon Ha Lee: Yeah.

Travis: Jebi. Yeah, you can definitely see the parallels with that in Jebi’s story. Also, I was wondering, with the fact that you do draw as well, so how does your artistic background influence this story and then also Jebi, the main character?

Yoon Ha Lee: I chose Jebi to be a painter specifically instead of a different kind of artist because I’m a watercolorist and I work in ink. My style is western so I’m not familiar with Korean or far Eastern painting techniques, but I decided that it would be easier to write about a painter because that’s something that I know a little bit about. I think most people who know about Korean art are most familiar with pottery. Korea was very well-known for its pottery, but I don’t know anything about pottery or clay-working and remember, I already had to throw out 40,000 words so I was under a bit of a time crunch.

One thing that did influence me in creating the magic system with the magical paints was that the shortage of paint pigments came from my experience with a watercolor pigment called PO49, Quinacridone Gold, and this paint pigment physically ran out, like, they manufactured a quantity of it, they stopped manufacturing it for various reasons, and then it ran out. I think you might be able to get lit, like on eBay if you’re lucky and you’re willing to pay 200 dollars for like a pan of paint, but back when I was, you know, playing around with my Crayola markers, I never thought that you could run out of a color.

The thing is, paint is a physical material, you know, you have to have the chemicals or whatever in order to be able to make that paint and no physical material is infinite. It’s not like digital art where, you know, if you can pick it on a color picker on Photoshop, you can paint as much of it as you want. If you use up all of a physical paint, it’s gone.

Travis: Right. You know, that’s honestly not something I’d ever considered before, but it’s hard to not think about that now, like it makes a lot of sense. And speaking of art also, I absolutely love the cover art for Phoenix Extravagant, and in addition to just being gorgeous, I love how, like, the vivid red and blue seems like it might be intended to be symbolic of South Korea’s flag?

Yoon Ha Lee: I think that was the artist, I mean, you would have to go ask the artist themselves, but yeah, I was thinking of the South Korean flag with the red and blue Taegukgi.

Travis: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, and I think that the South Korean flag is even the inspiration for the Hwagugin?

Yoon Ha Lee: Hwagugin, yeah.

Travis: Okay, yeah, sorry, I butchered that.

Yoon Ha Lee: No, that’s okay, I mean, I didn’t put in a pronunciation guide [laughs].

Travis: [Laughs] Well, so, another thing I was wondering about is, with so much of this story being centered around that visual art medium and spectacular visuals like a giant magic mecha-dragon, I was kind of surprised to learn that you have aphantasia. So, as a reader with aphantasia myself, I thought you conveyed the emotional aspects of these very well, but I can imagine the actual visuals can’t have been all that easy to get across. So, I guess my question is: how did you approach conveying those visuals to readers when you can’t necessarily see them yourself?

Yoon Ha Lee: When I was writing this book, I would always have a stack of books on Korean art history or Korean culture next to my desk, and if I got stuck, I just opened a book and looked at the pictures, and that really helped get me through, because I can’t visualize things but I do see, so, you know, if I have a picture in front of me that does help me describe what’s going on.

For the mecha-dragon, I would do what anime – and I know anime is Japanese, but that was my big introduction to animation [laughs], so that was what I had in mind when I came up with the mecha-dragon. I also have beta readers who are more visually orientated and they would help me out by saying, “Hey Yoon Ha, you haven’t really described what’s going on” or “You only spent two sentences describing the dragon, and the dragon’s a big deal, you should spend more time on that description.”

Travis: [Laughs] Yeah, the dragon’s definitely a big deal in this story and I think it’s great that Japanese anime was sort of an influence for that, given the sort of fantasy version of Japan that is the colonizing force in the book. And then so, another major theme in Phoenix Extravagant is just the importance of culture and art, so with today’s world being what is it, what do you feel is the importance of art, whether it’s visual, written, musical or otherwise?

Yoon Ha Lee: I think for me, art is about expression, and because human expression covers the entire gamut of emotions and experiences, it really depends on – it’s in the eye of the beholder. Some people write or paint because they have a message to convey, and other people do it because they want to provide escapism or they just want to have fun with an idea, and I personally don’t think that one is better than the other. I think that there’s room in art for all of these different approaches, that it’s healthy to have a kaleidoscope of different approaches to art, because every reader or every viewer has something different that they need. I’m reminded of, do you know what ball jointed dolls are?

Travis: I do not.

Yoon Ha Lee: They’re sort of a fancy, expensive collectable doll, and there have been arguments in the community about modding the dolls to represent characters who are disabled or fat or, you know, not conventionally visually appealing, and I remember one very interesting post from a woman who was, she was a nurse and she spent her days working with people who were burn victims or otherwise, you know, extremely disfigured because of medical reasons, and she said “I do this in my real job, this is the work that I do, I need an escape” and so all her dolls were extremely beautiful, you know, conventionally beautiful, because she needed to have an escape from the very important real work she was doing, and I’m like, I can’t – I know that it’s important to have representation of different body types, of different types of beauty, but when I think about that woman’s story, it’s like, everybody needs something different and there has to be art for everybody’s different needs.

Travis: Right, yeah, absolutely. And then, so, I know readers will all take away something different from your story, but if you could choose one thing from Phoenix Extravagant for readers to take away from your story, what do you hope that is?

Yoon Ha Lee: I would hope that they would think about, gosh, I would hope that they would think about what it costs us when culture is destroyed, and not necessarily specifically Korean culture, that’s the kind that’s in the book, but just culture in general.

Travis: Yes, absolutely. And I think these days more and more, I think that’s an important take away that readers can have. Well, looking forward, is there anything that you’re working on currently that you can tell us about?

Yoon Ha Lee: Sure. I’m working on the sequel to Dragon Pearl, which was my middle grade Korean mythology space opera. This one is about a non-binary tiger spirit, who finds themself in trouble because the ship they’re on gets hi-jacked.

Travis: Yeah, that sounds fascinating. So, that’s with the Rick Riordan Presents brand, right?

Yoon Ha Lee: Yes, that’s correct.

Travis: Okay, that’s really cool. That’s actually not a brand that I realized existed until earlier this year. How did you get involved with that? Did you apply or did they approach you?

Yoon Ha Lee: My agent at the time, Jennifer Jackson, got wind of the project and she was like, “Yoon Ha, you’re Korean, could you write a Korean kids book?” and I said, “Well, I’ve never written a kids book before, but I can sure try.” So, I wrote a proposal for it, a synopsis and three chapters, and I said to Jennifer, “I bet nobody else is going to pitch Korean mythology space opera.” And I was right. 

Travis: [Laughs] It does seem like a fantastic combination that we could probably use more of.

Yoon Ha Lee: It was a lot of fun. It’s basically, you know, you have fox spirits and tiger spirits and goblins, but you also have space ships, and I enjoy blowing up space ships, so.

Travis: [Laughs] And so this is actually not your first space opera, because you’re probably very well known for your Machineries of Empire series. So, how different was it, I guess, writing a space opera that was targeted at a middle grade audience rather than an adult one?

Yoon Ha Lee: The two big things, one was sort of logistical. So, when I write for an adult audience, there’s no real convention on how long a chapter has to be, but I write 2000-word days so I naturally write 4000-word chapters, and I asked my editor, Steph Lurie, how long a chapter should be for middle grade, and for some reason they want chapters to be 3000 words long. I think it’s a good length for reading out loud to kids, like in a classroom or at bedtime, and for whatever reason I found it so difficult to adapt to writing chapters that were 3000 words and not 4000 words, like, I would get to the 2000-word point and go, “Oh whoops, I only have 1000 words to wrap up this chapter.” and have to squeeze in everything. So, the pacing was a little difficult at first.

The other obvious thing was that Machineries of Empire has a lot of cuss words [laughs] and I could not use any cuss words in the middle grade book, because middle grade in publishing is defined as ages eight through twelve and, of course, the kids don’t care, the kids are fine with cuss words generally, but they’re not the ones with the credit cards. It’s the teachers and the parents and the librarians, so you have to be careful what you put in there. I got into so much trouble because I had sort of a homage to the Mos Eisley Cantina from Star Wars, I had a gambling den, and my editor was like, “Oh gosh, you can only put in gambling if you make it super crystal clear that gambling is bad and evil.” And I just, it just blew my mind that this was such a big deal.

Travis: Yeah, especially because, thinking back on some of the middle grade stories that I grew up reading, it’s not like everything is sunshine and rainbows, and like very clear cut difference between good and evil. I mean, probably for sure more so than adult fiction, but there’s still a lot of room for complexity.

Yoon Ha Lee: [Assenting noise]

Travis: I believe you said that you might be shifting your focus more towards that middle grade route in the future. Is that the case?

Yoon Ha Lee: Probably.

Travis: Do you mind talking about why that is?

Yoon Ha Lee: It’s pretty simple. It’s money. So, middle grade generally pays better than science fiction and fantasy. Science fiction and fantasy is a little bit niche, and I’m currently with, my Machineries books were published through a smaller publisher in the UK, Solaris, which is under Rebellion, whereas Disney Hyperion is, what can we say, the mouse has deep pockets and it’s willing to pay people. If it were a matter of just writing what I love, I would love to write more adult science fiction and fantasy, but I have a daughter who is in high school, and she is going to have to go to college, and the bills have to get paid.

Travis: Yeah, I think that is a very time-honored and respectable reason to shift your focus in writing. Well, I always like to ask: are there any books that you’ve enjoyed lately that you can recommend?

Yoon Ha Lee: I have two for you. One is Tamsyn Muir’s, I hope I’m pronouncing that correctly, I’m probably not, Gideon the Ninth, which is extremely gory, Gonzoweird crazy lesbian necromancers in space. You’ll probably know within the first chapter if it’s for you or not, I loved it to pieces. The other book that I read recently and absolutely adored was Kate Elliott’s space opera Unconquerable Sun, which is gender-bent Alexander the Great in space.

Travis: Yeah, I have actually read both of those books and I adored them to pieces.

Yoon Ha Lee: Yeah, I couldn’t put them down, it was wonderful.

Travis: Yeah. And Gideon the Ninth though, actually I very, very rarely reread books, but I’m going to be going through on audio this time round because I found a local book club that’s meeting virtually during lockdown, so that’s what they’re discussing this month.

Yoon Ha Lee: Cool.

Travis: And then one way I always like to close up these episodes is just asking: what is one thing that you’re excited about right now?

Yoon Ha Lee: So, this past summer I took a five-day workshop on hand drawn animation from The Centre for Cartoon Studies and it was super intensive and also I am really bad with the Wacom tablet, but I did my first walk cycle, which was very exciting, and I’m really looking forward to experimenting with little animation doodles.

Travis: Oh, that sounds so cool and super challenging.

Yoon Ha Lee: Yeah, no, animation is – it’s mathematically – I almost did not finish my final project for the workshop because if I had not deleted one line, and you would think that one line would not make a difference, but when you’re animating at twelve frames per second over three seconds, that’s thirty-six drawings. So, thirty-six lines.

Travis: Wow [laughs].

Yoon Ha Lee: Yeah no, it really – now when I look at professional animation like TV or an animated feature, I’m aware of how much work goes into it, and I have so much respect for those artists.

Travis: Yeah, especially like the 3D animation now, like I can’t even wrap my head around how difficult that must be.

Yoon Ha Lee: Yeah, yeah for sure.

Travis: Well, Yoon, thank you so much for coming on the show to chat, this has been wonderful.

Yoon Ha Lee: I’m very honored to be here, thank you so much.

[Outro music fades in, courtesy of Yoon Ha Lee]

Travis: You can find Yoon Ha Lee on twitter and Instagram as @deuceofgears or at his website yoonhalee.com. His art is available for purchase at deuceofgears.com, and his music can be found at soundcloud.com/deuceofgears. Phoenix Extravagant is a thoughtful look at colonization and revolution through the eyes of a pacifist artist, and if that isn’t enough to sell you on it, there’s also a giant mecha-dragon powered by magical painting. As always, you can find us over at thefantasyinn.com or click the invite in the show notes to join our Discord server, where you can hang out with us in real-time and find more books than you’ll ever be able to read. If you enjoyed this interview, consider supporting us on Patreon or take a minute of your time to leave us a review online, it really means the world. And of course, don’t forget to subscribe to this show so you can catch all of our future episodes. That’s all for this week, until next time.

[Outro music fades out]