Shuvam Kabir Writing Sample

Medical News (Correlation between Sleeplessness and Psychiatric Problems in Children)...... 1 Medical News (Irregular Sleep Doubles Risk of CVD in Elderly) ...... 3 Medical News (Smells Increase Learning) ...... 5 Op-Ed (What do Black Lives Matter for Brown Folk) ...... 7 Abstract Proposal (Steampunk Aesthetics and Victorian Excess) ...... 9 Interview (Christopher Ruocchio, Editorial Asst. and Author) ...... 10 1

Medical news: Large Scale Study Finds Strong Correlation between Sleeplessness and Psychiatric Problems in Children A study of over 11,000 children found that less sleep was associated with depression, anxiety, impulsiveness, and small or underdeveloped regions of the brain. A group of international researchers published their findings in February, using data from the ambitious Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study, a massive brain development study conducted worldwide by the National Institutes of Health. The research was headed by Wei Cheng, Edmund Rolls, and Weikong Gong. Their team charted how dimensional measures of psychopathology changed as the amount of sleep decreased in their child subjects. Dimensional psychopathology holds that personality disorders and psychiatric problems can be measured numerically, rather than just categorically. In practice, these numerical measures are typically the result of a battery of personality tests. In measuring how severe the subjects’ psychiatric issues were, Cheng et al cited “depression, anxiety, and impulsive behavior” specifically. They found consistently that the child subjects displayed more psychiatric problems when they had lower amounts of sleep. The study was also longitudinal, taking measurements up to a year apart. In that regard, the researchers found that the relationship between sleep and psychiatric problems persisted over time. Lower levels of sleep correlated to more psychiatric problems, in the same subjects, across long periods of time. Cheng et al also looked at the relationships psychopathology and sleep might have with brain structure, finding that parts of the brain were physically larger when children were able to get more sleep. Some of those same parts (prefrontal, temporal, and medioorbital frontal cortexes) were also associated with higher scores on cognition tests. A mediation analysis found that the presence of depression altered those brain regions’ effect on sleep activity. Taken together, Cheng et al posited an interrelated web of connection between brain size and structure, sleep, thinking ability, and mental health. However, the problems associated with low sleep didn’t stop at the children themselves. A secondary finding was that less sleep in children was also associated with greater psychopathology in parents. Cheng et al indicate this could have important implications for public health. It should be noted that the study looked only at correlations and associations, so it is possible that sleep deprivation causes psychiatric issues, psychiatric issues cause sleep deprivation, or both at the same time. Throw in the issue of brain structure abnormalities, and it becomes truly difficult to determine the root cause of any of these problems. Jianfeng Feng, a researcher working on the study, pointed out in a press release to the University of Warwick that it is becoming increasingly difficult for young children to reach their recommended 9-12 hours of sleep a night regardless of mental health, highlighting the growing urgency of sleep problems, and the need to further chart the causal relationships between sleep, psychopathology, and brain structure. 2

Referenced study:

Cheng, Wei, Edmund Rolls, Weikong Gong. et al. “Sleep duration, brain structure, and psychiatric and cognitive problems in children.” Molecular Psychiatry. Feb 2020. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41380-020-0663-2 3

Medical news: Irregular Sleep Doubles Risk of Cardiovascular Disease In Adults Aged 45+ In an analysis of data from nearly 2000 subjects, Drs. Tianyi Huang, Sara Mariani, and Susan Redline found that irregular sleep durations and schedules were associated with considerable increase in risk for cardiovascular disease (CVD). The analysis sourced data from the Multi Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA). Overseen by the National Heart, Lung, Blood Institute (themselves a subsidiary of the National Institutes of Health), MESA studied an older group (aged 45-84) of racially diverse (38% white, 28% African-American, 22% Hispanic, and 12% Asian) individuals. The study tracked cardiovascular disease development. The MESA subjects all initially lacked the sympoms of cardiovascular disease, and MESA tracked them over time to observe which subjects developed CVD and determine the risk factors leading up to it. Using that data, Huang et al looked specifically at sleep irregularity, an area largely overlooked compared to sleep duration. The researchers also focused on more typical instances of sleep irregularity in individual subjects, as opposed to the extreme shifts that outliers like night-shift workers would see. In their analysis, irregularity was measured simply by determining the standard deviation (SD) of a subject’s various sleep durations over a period of time. Standard deviation is the most common measure of the spread of a sample. A sleeper with an average sleep duration of 8 hours and an SD of 10 minutes, would be expected to sleep between 7 hours 40 minutes and 8 hours 20 minutes, 95% of the time. A sleeper with the same average sleep duration but an SD of 60 minutes would be expected to sleep 6 hours to 10 hours, 95% of the time. A lower standard deviation indicates more regular sleep schedules. In the analysis, an standard deviation of 60 minutes or less in sleep duration was considered the baseline; subjects in this category were considered to have a ‘normal’ risk of CVD. The other categories were SDs of 61-90 minutes, 91-120 minutes, and greater than 120 minutes. The authors then compared the number of subjects developing CVD in each category to the baseline. The analysis found considerable increase in CVD development as sleep irregularity increased, with most irregular (SD>120) sleepers having more than double the risk (hazard ratio of 2.14) compared to regular (SD90 minutes) were found to have more than double the risk of CVD (hazard ratio of 2.11 times) compared to subjects with most regular sleep onset (SD

Medical news (a more accessible style): Smells Increase Learning and Memory Formation during Sleep It has long been known that sleep is essential to processing and learning new information. Observe the average college student and you’ll find that listening to recordings of notes the night before a heavy exam is a common method of cramming. Although these strategies rarely pay off, a study published in Current Biology shows that the targeted usage of scents during learning and sleeping can improve one’s ability to memorize specific information. The researchers theorize that memories are initially formed in the hippocampus, but during sleep can be transferred to the neocortex for stronger, long-term recall. This involves a process of activating the cortex, the thalamus, and then the hippocampus, while sleeping. That is, during sleep, activating brain waves in those parts of the brain would speed up a process that transfers memories to the cortex for long term storage; at the same time, the thalamus would be activated to increase the plasticity and receptivity of the cortex’s neurons, allowing it to be more effective at forming and consolidating new memories. Researchers in turn believe that they can stimulate this process to strengthen one’s memory, a method they call Targeted Memory Reactivation. The general idea is that by playing sounds or scents when a subject first learns information, and then replaying that while they sleep, the cortex-thalamus-hippocampus process above is more strongly stimulated, and the information will be recalled more effectively when they wake. Essentially, one can encourage part of the memory transfer process. The authors of the study chose to use odors for several reasons - they don’t interrupt sleep and smells tend to be strong stimulus for memories (the olfactory system has direct connections to the hippocampus). Most importantly, a quirk of the olfactory system means scent information can be largely segregated to a single hemisphere of the brain during sleep, depending on the nostril used. This is convenient because there are also certain kinds of information memorized using mostly one hemisphere of the brain. This means that the authors could use Targeted Memory Reactivation for one side of the brain as it memorized information, while letting the other side memorize information normally, without TMR. This would allow the researchers to see clearly what, if any, effect scents have. To test the theory, scientists devised a memorization task which involved sorting words into various locations in the subject’s visual field (eye-tracking software was used to ensure the eyes stayed still and the visual field stayed consistent). Words to the left would fire up the right side of the brain, and vice versa (which the researchers confirmed with electroencephalography). While memorizing words that were displayed on one side of their view, in this example the left side of their field of vision, the subjects inhaled a particular scent. This process was referred to as ‘cueing’ words. The subjects would also memorize words on the opposite side of their field of view, but without the scent stimulation. Later, during a two-and-a-half hour nap, scientists would send the odor used to cue left-hand words directly into the subject’s right nostril (stimulating the right brain hemisphere, which would control left-hand sight and memorization, and theoretically was responsible for learning the cued words). Before and after sleep, the subjects were tested on 6 how well they could sort both the left-side cued and right-side uncued words. If the hypothesis held true, the subjects would perform better memorizing the cued words. The hypothesis did hold true - subjects who underwent the procedure showed an average of 6% improvement in memory performance for the cued words, and a 10% deterioration for uncued words (p=.007) after sleep, compared to before sleep. A control experiment, in which neither the left or right side words were cued with smells but one nostril was cued with scents during sleep, showed no significant difference in performance. With TMR, scientists are able to artificially enhance a subject’s ability to memorize information. This novel brain training mechanism is a step forward in understanding the processes that govern our learning. Perhaps they’ll even lead to fewer sleepless nights before those hectic final exams.

Referenced Study:

Bar, Ella, Amit Marmelshtein, Anat Arzi et al. “Local Targeted Memory Reactivation in Human Sleep.” Current Biology. Vol. 30, no 8, pp. 1435-1446.e5, April 20, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2020.01.091

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Op-ed: What do Black Lives Matter for Brown Folk? It was in the fall of '19, as I sat with my parents for dinner, television blaring out the news of political debates, alt right euphoria, and hundreds protesting in Brooklyn. My father, immigrant and physician, looked at me and said, "I worry now I made a mistake coming here, opening you up to this." His ferocious brow deepened into canyons above his eyes. Anguish cast his features in cavernous shadow. What he didn’t say, hadn’t said throughout the years, echoed through the kitchen. It was, I recall, the first time in my life my father had spoken of racism to me. And this I realized was the problem. We’d never had those conversations about race. Never had the talk about how to handle police situations, or harassment, bullying, or the myriad intricate obstacles I (and he, no doubt) had faced as a brown man in the states. I learned quickly as a child that if I brought those problems to him, he would mask his own anxiety with a defensive disbelief. I don't blame my father; it was an innate idealism that led him to shelter and dissemble, to believe that his incredible work ethic would render the problems of race nonexistent. Would protect me. I myself have been guilty of this and adjacent behaviors. An innate desire for cosmopolitanism, a lack of role models other than the Simpson's Apu, caused me to reach for white Hollywood actors and news anchors, writers and artists as my behavioral templates. Race was my anathema, something to overcome, not cherish, and I was tortuously slow to wake up to the issues I and any people of color faced. It is clear there is the temptation for us brown people to think we are above matters of race. The apparent winners of a meritocratic system that has recognized us as peerless hard workers. Deserving of our relative affluence, typified by our low rates of crime and high education (never mind our outsized income disparity and unemployment rates) (1). The immigrant doctors and engineers, and their children, set as a breed apart. And from this egotism bloom our worse instincts. "It has nothing to do with our people." "We don't misbehave so we don't have these problems." "Why fight for them, when we aren't the ones at risk?" "Why contribute to all this strife?" Perhaps even, "Better them than us." Many brown folk can attest to the presence of these sentiments in their own communities when it comes to the struggle for justice and equality among black people. As pointed out in recent articles by Deepa Iyer for The Print, and Meera Estrada for Global News, there is a strain of anti-Black racism and even white supremacy among some brown peoples (2)(3). Make no mistake, the current protests against police brutality are intrinsically linked to systemic racism, and spearheaded by the black community and movements like Black Lives Matter. But as they are so delineated, they risk triggering the apathy of the brown community, a result of the model minority myth that implies the victims of systemic bias, and violence, ask for it. For anyone paying attention now, the murder of George Floyd and the flurry of national protests should shatter the illusion of racial idealism. For many of us, America has lived up to its golden promises of prosperity. My father has found success as a physician and a writer, has buoyed up 8 his sons, financed our educations, health, and welfare, all because he chose the states as his new home over three decades ago. Thus, the obvious conclusion is that it is our duty and privilege to give back to this country, by allying with those who need help. But let us not forget the long, interconnected history between the black and brown Communities. Since the late 19th century, when Bengali Muslim immigrants found support among the local people of color in port cities. Since the 40s, 50s, and 60s, when India's liberation from colonial rule and the aftermath inspired the black civil rights movements' tactics and philosophy by way of Ram Lohia and Bayard Rustin, Ghandi and King, and so many others (4)(5). And ever since that same civil rights movement pushed through the Immigration and Nationality Act of ‘65 — ever since and throughout, black communities have paved the way for the current generations of South Asian diaspora. For brown people, there is no America without the black community. This long-standing brotherhood shows the deeper reasons we should unerringly support black lives. The instinct for betterment is at the heart of our communities. Seventy-five percent of South Asians in America are immigrants (1). Seventy-five percent of us driven cross the globe for that siren call, that something better, escaping persecution or poverty. And most of the remainder, of course, are only a generation removed from that instinct. We are a community of treasure hunters, always seeking, just as the black community perennially struggles for racial equality here. And we should be keen to voice our support, and to amplify the voices of the many brown folk who already take part, whether online or on the street. And even should that awakening come late, as in my father’s case, so much the better that it comes at all. For to support black lives is to support our own. For we are as they are, neither abnormality nor other, but people set apart by an unyielding drive to strive for better, to uplift and strengthen this shared community. Whether they marched in the 60s, or they march in 20s, the black community’s movements for civil rights and equitability have been the shining zenith of American determination. This sheer relentlessness, in the face of institutions that have preyed on them for centuries, is the example all immigrants and people of color should look to when they think of their own success, not the entrepreneurs or hyper-capitalists. And so, it is only logical that their struggle becomes our struggle. Protesters matter. Black lives matter. For when they fight, they fight for all of us. And so too must we fight for them.

1. https://saalt.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/SAALT-Demographic-Snapshot-2019.pdf 2. https://theprint.in/opinion/south-asians-in-the-us-must-support-blacklivesmatter-but-first- undo-your-own-anti-blackness/432754/ 3. https://globalnews.ca/news/6999013/commentary-south-asians-anti-black-racism/ 4. Slate, Nico. Colored Cosmopolitanism. Harvard University Press, 2012. 5. Levi, Daniel. Bayard Rustin and the Civil Rights Movement. Rutger University Press, 1999. 9

An abstract proposal for the Victorians Institute 2018 Conference:

The Analog Appeal: Steampunk Aesthetics and Victorian Excess

Abstract:

Steampunk fiction is variegated in terms of setting and plot, but often appropriates Victorian culture and design sensibilities alongside its Vernian extrapolations of analog, industrial-era steam technology. Though it stems from a literary tradition, the steampunk aesthetic is popular in art, movies, and video-games, and enjoys a wide following in a growing “do-it-yourself” arts, crafts, and fashion subculture. Because of steampunk’s widespread presence, its relative recency, and its usage of approximately Victorian settings, the aesthetics and choices of steampunk fiction shape how contemporary mass audiences conceive Victorian England. The steampunk genre is therefore an area ripe for inquiry regarding consumption of the Victorians. Past authors, such as Vandermeer and Danahay, have posited steampunk as either problematically softening the racist, sexist and/or colonial legacies of empirical England, or aspirationally correcting them. But while those authors explicate the relationship between steampunk and the Victorians, rarely do they explore the reasons for the enduring popularity of Victorian tropes in steampunk fiction and subcultures. This paper seeks to characterize steampunk’s use of Victorian settings and tropes as tools in the creation of a Foucauldian heterotopia. For readers and fans of steampunk, Victorian England overlaps with an amorphous imaginative space, an area defined not only by the aesthetic of analog technology but also by a Victorian culture of excess. When reconfigured in steampunk fiction, those Victorian excesses – sentimentality, sensationalism, and food and resource consumption – create a delocalized play space in which audiences can engage with eternally recurring problems of industrial and postindustrial societies, such as socioeconomic inequality and environmental disaster. The continual relevance of these is responsible for the preponderance of Victorian cultural cues seen in steampunk today. By demonstrating such, this paper provides one way to reckon with the connection between the mass market appeal of steampunk and its historical and literary roots, a subject which remains relatively unexplored and may unearth useful tools for pedagogy of the Victorians.

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An interview:

Writing and Publishing: An Interview with an Christopher Ruocchio of (Early 2018) Christopher Ruocchio is an Editorial and Marketing Assistant at Baen Books, as well as the author of upcoming space-opera novel Empire of Silence (due out in 2018, DAW Books). Christopher graduated from NC State with a Bachelor’s in English, focusing on Rhetoric and minoring in Creative Writing and Classics. His work at Baen began with an internship at their Wake Forest headquarters during his final year of college in 2015, which converted into a full- time position after he graduated. Christopher was kind enough to share his experience and views as an author/editor. The interview ranged in topics from his daily work at Baen, Baen’s tradition of innovating in digital media, the evolution of the publishing industry, the interplay of writing and editing, to his own writing. See below for the full interview:

The Day-to-Day at Baen To start with, could you give us an overview of your role at Baen Books? My full formal title is “Editorial and Marketing Assistant” which, as you guess, means I have rather diverse duties. The first thing I should say though is what I do not do. I do not work directly with our authors editing their works. I may grow in that direction. My most visible function is actually the managing of our social media accounts: primarily Facebook and Twitter, though we have some limited YouTube presence as well. This involves scheduling posts to promote new and upcoming releases, publicizing our authors’ signings and convention appearances, and interacting with the fan community. In order to accomplish this properly, I have to do several other things. I have to work with all our authors to keep us up to date with said appearances, as well as to coordinate the shipment of materials for these appearances (be those books, posters, bookmarks, or whatever other sort of promotional items we may be having at the time). I know editorial assistants tend to have rather diverse duties. Other than social media management, what other jobs do you perform? I also work to take out advertisements with the conventions our authors will be appearing at, which requires that I work with our graphic designers in the creation of these ads. While this sort of coordination takes up a large portion of my time, I also perform several other tasks, such as selecting teaser text to go inside the front cover of our mass market editions; proofing cover copy, our twice-monthly newsletter, and our seasonal catalogs; I’m in charge of filing copyrights with the Library of Congress; and for keeping our physical filing system up to date; I’ve even been known to host and edit the occasional weekly podcast (we like to interview our authors 11 fairly regularly) or review the occasional submitted manuscript. In short, I do a bit of almost everything, all with the intention of keeping the wheels turning smoothly. What attracted you to the position? I had always wanted to find a literature-related job and career that wasn’t teaching (classrooms are not for me, I’m afraid). The day-to-day schedule is fairly straightforward: I come in, make sure I have the day’s social media squared away, then set about to dealing with whatever new challenges have arrived in my inbox (which may be any of the sort outlined above, or something new entirely). That done, I set about more long-term tasks, like the filing of copyrights or the maintenance of the office file system, these being somewhat less time sensitive than the creation or ads or the proofing of cover copy. It sounds like your role emphasizes a fair amount of multimedia skills. Do you find that this spectrum of ability is expected of people in your field, or have you taken on duties that match already present skills? There’s definitely a variety of skills expected of people in the field, at least at the assistant level. The editors tend to mostly edit, although one of ours does our weekly podcast, and the higher- ups do all sorts of the legal/contract work as well, which is definitely a different skill set from the editorial bag of tricks. I think it may be different in the larger houses, with people taking on more specialized roles, but ours is a relatively small team, about a 12 all told. As for the skill sets, most of what I’ve learned was a consequence of on the job training more than it was a consequence of pre-existing skills. Was there anything about working at Baen, either about the company or the job itself, that ended up surprising you? The only surprising thing is that the company wasn’t what I expected. I think I was expecting some stuffy office of the sort one imagines in a New York City tower, but we’re just in a little space in Wake Forest, NC. It’s cluttered and very quiet, and I’m more or less left to my own devices. The whole working environment is very informal.

Baen and Digital Media Baen has a reputation for being a pioneer in digital media, starting with the Baen's Bar forums, web subscriptions, and CDs. From your perspective, do these seem like singular business decisions, responding to a changing industry, or are they the result of the particular attitude/work-culture at Baen? (Before I answer this, I want to say that I say this as the new kid. Two/three years might be a lot of experience in some places, but most of the Baen team has been in place for very much longer than that.) I think a lot of these decisions were deeply informed by the personal convictions of our founder, Jim Baen (who passed away some years before I started here). That is to say that while I think 12 taken individually any of these actions can be seen as a singular business move, I think they all reflect his general attitude in a way that has come to define our ethos as a company. Take our sale of the electronic advance reader copies (EARCS), for example. We are, as far as I know, the only publisher to sell their EARCS direct to their readers. As I understand the story, this practice arose out a conversation between Mr. Baen and our readers on the Baen’s Bar forum. Every publisher these days prepares EARCs for review and promo purposes, but we make ours available—at a premium—to those fans willing to pay. Those who can’t wait to read the next installment from their favorite author don’t have to, those authors get a chance to earn against their advance before the book is even released, and everyone wins. It’s an unorthodox move, and many others might balk at the perceived loss of sales come release day, but it has been our experience that most people willing to shell out for the EARC are going to be buying the finished book come release day. People are happy to have the option, and we’re happy to provide it. But it’s precisely that openness with the fans and the willingness to have a conversation with them on Mr. Baen’s part that has not only informed a lot of our business decisions, but has become the ethos of the company as I understand it. As you’ve mentioned, Baen's DRM-free policy seems at odds with the industry standard. Consumers of books tend to be very positive about the lack of DRM, saying that it's more convenient for paying customers and, to a lesser extent, is a sign of trust. On the other hand, some might say that the DRM-free policy doesn't adequately protect creative properties and either allows or encourages piracy of eBooks. The DRM issue is exactly another one of those cases where Mr. Baen’s personal convictions informed our business decisions. As you say, we are strongly opposed to the use of DRM in our books. We don’t want to treat our readers like latent criminals or tell them how to use the thing they bought from us with their own money. Do you see any particular advantages/disadvantages of DRM-free eBooks from the side of the eBook producer? We like to think that if we provide a product in an easier to use, hassle-free way, that fact alone will help us stay competitive. And it has. Our own eBook store has remained highly trafficked despite the rise of Amazon, and while it may be a mistake to credit our DRM policy alone with this robust traffic, it would be a mistake to ignore it. Good business choice or no, it’s the principle of the thing that is more important (and I think I speak for everyone at Baen when I say that). There may be some advantages to DRM where “protecting” copyright holders is concerned. But here’s the thing: most readers aren’t criminals, and the legal system works. If someone were selling or illegally distributing our books, we can send them a DMCA takedown request and pursue whatever subsequent legal action might be necessary. It seems less than morally correct to punish good and decent readers and customers with DRM restrictions because someone else is going to upload files illegally on the internet. To the best of my understanding, this has never hurt sales and is (much like the controversy about internet piracy of TV and film) a vastly exaggerated problem more interested in protecting 13 business interests than people or facts. Consider, for example, that Game of Thrones was both at its MOST pirated and MOST legitimately viewed this past year. If our readers are copying our eBooks to give to their friends, it must be that many of those friends are buying copies of their own. How does this policy affect your work at Baen, if at all? I don’t work much with the actual sales data, so my own work is more or less unaffected, but as someone who strongly dislikes DRM, I am very proud to work for a company so vehemently opposed to it.

The Evolution of the Publishing Industry, Small Press, and Indie Publishing As an editorial/marketing assistant, have you seen (or are you predicting) any particular shifts in the way people consume books and/or the way the publishers are approaching book selling? I assume you’re referring mostly to the battle between print books and eBooks and audiobooks, etc. I know that—contrary to the Jeremiads you see online about the death of literature—the number of books being sold has increased. Now, most of that is in eBook form, and the result of Amazon’s massive amount of self-publishing. Many people have seen the rise of self-publishing as a death knell to the traditional publishing industry, but I would argue the opposite. I would think that in a world where anyone can publish anything, the use of the traditional publishing house as a filtering mechanism to screen for quality will become only more important as time drags on. Some people will read anything, just for the pleasure of reading, but most folks like to be reassured that what they’re reading is worth their time going in. I’m not so concerned about whether people are reading in hardback or on Kindles or their smart phones, I don’t care if they’re reading them themselves or listening to them through Audible. What matters is that people are reading. And people ARE reading. So, you’re seeing more diversification in the formats of books, how people read in addition to what they read. I think we’ll see a lot of experimentation in the way people read. I think we might see more and more of a market for things like radio shows or more interactive media like the visual novels popular in Japan, but as the literary world atomizes (not just by genre, but by medium) and people are finding new ways to consume stories, ways that work better for them, we’ll only find more readers. Now, does the presence of things like audiobooks or visual novels change what “reader” means? Sure. There’s a difference between listening to an audiobook and reading a book. But there was a difference between reading a scroll and listening to the Iliad recited by ephebes in ancient Athens, and the ancient Greeks got on just fine, no matter how much Plato complained that writing was going to ruin people. I think there’s a lot of room to experiment right now with genre 14 and format, and while a lot of those experiments will be less than successful, you never know what might catch on. You’ve said that traditional publishers are valuable as a “filtering mechanism” for literature. Do you think this is still the case right now? Or do you think the industry is currently in enough of a flux state that publishers haven't decide what role to solidify around? Well, traditional publishing has always been a filtering mechanism, it was just back in the day, they filtered the publishable (read: “good”) works from the “bad” ones. I think that the rise of indie presses, vanity presses, and self-publishing has lowered the barrier to publications for a lot of works that wouldn’t have been published in Hemingway’s day, and I think that’s been a mixed bag. On the one hand, I think that it means a lot of books that would never have been published are finding audiences, however small or particular that audience may be. But on the other, there are now so many books being published that it’s made it a lot harder for up-and-coming and mid-list authors to get noticed and to rise higher up the bestsellers’ lists. Look through Amazon’s self- published titles sometime. Not to sound too patrician, but those self-published titles can be a real mixed bag, quality wise. To be sure, The Martian was originally self-published, and it’s amazing, but for every Andy Weir there are 10,000 titles with fewer than 10 sales. In that climate, having the Baen logo stamped on your side, or Penguin’s colophon, or Simon & Schusters, et al, is a badge of quality that says, “You know who we are as a company, you know we know our literature.” It helps reassure readers the book is worth reading. The reputation means something. I think this will start mattering more and more as Amazon keeps pushing into the real world. They already have one bookstore, but once their stuff starts showing up in grocery store racks and the like, name and brand recognition will really matter. You mentioned earlier how readers are becoming interested in newer, electronic formats for books. What about developments in genre and content? For the past few years, for instance, zombie and dystopian fiction seem to have been hugely popular among sci-fi and YA readers. Are there any recurring themes or trends that you've found to be particularly interesting, or newly popular? I dearly hope the zombie and dystopian trends are dying out, but that’s just personal opinion. As to new trends, my agent says we’re looking at a new, third wave of space opera stories (like Lois Bujold’s work). She cites writers like James S.A. Corey of the Expanse series and the return of Star Wars as indicators. I hope she’s right, since I’m a space opera writer myself. We tend to be pretty immune to trends at Baen, because more than other publishers we tend to have a brand. We’re known for action-heavy, military science fiction and urban . Our core readers expect more of that, and we aim to provide.

The Interplay of Editing and Writing 15

Where do your own interests lie, in terms of reading/writing/other creative or professional pursuits? Do you get to explore these interests in your job? Science fiction and fantasy have always been my first love. As I mentioned [above] I’m an author myself, and had been trying to write books since I was about 8 years old. Contrary to the positions of many college literature professors, I think SF/F literature best carries on the legacy of the mythic tradition of stories like the Iliad, Ramayana, and Beowulf. Larger than life heroes and stakes, gods and monsters fighting with the fate of worlds hanging in the balance…that always appealed to me more than Jane Austen (not that there’s anything wrong with Jane Austen). But breaking into the writing game is extremely difficult, so while I was trying to break in on that end I thought I’d try and get a job in the field, too. I ended up getting both in the same week, which was truly humbling. At first, I was afraid there might be some conflict of interest, but the two sides of my professional life have dovetailed quite neatly, and my work in publishing has made me, I think, a better author (or at least an easier-to-work-with author) and vice versa. I feel extremely fortunate. Do you consider it rare for someone to be in your position, both a writer and a worker in the publishing field? I know at the indie/small press level there’s more people wearing both the author and editor hats. (My personal feeling on this is that there’s a lot of nepotism at the small press level, friends publishing their friends). Not to sound too conceited, but I don’t think there are very many people in my position at my level, employed by one traditional publisher and published by another, but I’m certainly not alone.

Do you think it's a natural path for someone interested in writing to get involved in publishing, or vice versa? (Or neither?)

As to whether it’s a natural path, I think the answer may be both yes and no. Yes because I’ve a pretty unique insight into both sides of the editorial process, and that’s been pretty useful and has I think made me a better author to my editor and a better editor to our authors, and because I get to travel to conventions with my day job that are also opportunities for my authorial life. And no because I like to compartmentalize my life as neatly as I can, and it turns out that one can actually read too much. Between work-work and author-work I read so much now that I don’t really get to read for enjoyment anymore, just because my brain’s a bit storied-out by the end of the day.

How has your editorial work shaped the way you write? It hasn’t shaped the way I write, per se, but it’s helped to make things clearer. I’m more tolerant of delays—both on my publisher’s part and on the part of those authors I work with—than I otherwise might be. If there’s a holdup, I’m familiar enough both with the creative process and the business end of things to understand why that might be happening, and it helps to keep things in perspective, if that makes sense.

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Writing and Influences Let’s hear a bit more about your upcoming book. Any details about it, or the process of writing it, that you'd like to share? My book—thanks for asking!—is called Empire of Silence, it’s coming out next summer (I think July, but no one has told me for sure) from DAW Books. It’s a space opera story, and tells the story of a man called Hadrian Marlowe, who quite famously wiped out an entire alien species— and his own Emperor—to end the a war that threatened trillions of lives. He’s considered the worst war criminal of all time, but naturally the truth is a little more complicated. The book purports to be his autobiography.

As to the process, I’ve been writing something or other since I was 8. I’d turn 9, realize 8 year old me knew nothing, and start over. Over the years the story has grown from a goofy mess into something I think is quite respectable. I’m actually turning in the final draft this week. I don’t have any sort of magical system or process. I just write. I outline pretty strenuously and just make sure I hit 2-3K words a day until the writing’s done. I’ll write anywhere I can, with whatever time I have available (unlike some writers, who will only write in their fancy writing room when the moon is right). I try to treat writing like my job, and hope that one day it will be. I’ve got plenty of time. This is my first book and I was only 22 when I sold it last year. (I hope my age doesn’t undermine the legitimacy of my answers!)

You've also mentioned that you write space-opera sci-fi. What do you think is the appeal of that genre, to audiences and authors? For me, the exciting thing about space opera is the scope. There’s no bigger genre out there, not really. You get to play with everything. All the SF stuff, aliens, spaceships, strange planets, and all the stuff that gives fantasy its power: religion and politics, monsters, good and evil. Sci-fi and fantasy sort of fill the same niche today that mythology did centuries ago, and we’re dealing with some heavy themes. Are there any particular authors, in that genre or otherwise, who have influenced you particularly? Do you have any favorite authors in general? As to my favorite writers, J.R.R. Tolkien and are definitely my biggest influences, but I should credit , Dan Simmons, Neal Stephenson, Iain Banks, and Lois Bujold. Outside the genre, I have an especial fondness for Shakespeare, Keats (well, all the Romantics), and the ancient Greeks, particularly Aeschylus. And Mary Shelley, I shouldn’t forget her. Is there anything, any piece of information, that most authors or editors don't know about the industry, that they really should know? This is a little nebulous, but the first thing that comes to mind is that a lot of prospective authors seem to think that we’re some sort of big machine. We get complaints from people that have sent in manuscripts that they’ve been waiting for months to hear back, but the reality is we only have 2 guys reading slush manuscripts part time and when we say on our site it will take us 9-12 months to get back to you, that’s not an exaggeration. People seem to think we’ve got dozens of employees when—at time of writing you—there are only 2 of us in the office. 17

Thanks so much for your time, Christopher. It’s been a pleasure.