Bio
I bought my first book, The Black Stallion, in 1975. I started writing horse stories the same year (I was seven), moving on to Tolkienesque fantasy at nine. My brother Dan, now an electrical engineer, can probably be blamed for my early exposure to SF. I got my mother to put iron-on Star Trek rank insignia on my long-sleeved blue t-shirt so I could pretend to be Mr. Spock (my ears are quite plausible). I remember D&D before the Dungeon Master’s Guide was published -- when it arrived at our house it was treated like a sacred text.
I became interested in science in high school, but wrote very little fiction during adolescence, and I only read bits of SF. My first attempts to write science fiction were begun at 21 and eventually both were published (Lethe and 'The Question Eaters' came out in 1995). After that I tried to write a literary novel (Someone To Watch Over Me) but couldn’t keep the SF out. So when it came to Dreaming In Smoke, I tried to write SF quite deliberately, but the book ended up being all about my personal problems at the time. Books seldom go to plan, for me.
During high school, although I wasn’t writing, I was learning music, for which I have little talent but much love. I studied in Music Program Zero at Bard College with Ben Boretz, who deeply shaped the way I think and work.
Attempts to earn a living in the business environment of New York City ended with me realizing that I can’t do a job purely for money -- I end up putting my whole soul into it, whether I ought to or not. I realized that if I was going to invest myself in a job, then it needed to be worthwhile. So I went to Teachers College at Columbia for my Master's. I did my student teaching at the amazing De La Salle Academy, where I was lucky enough to work with seasoned teachers and young people of great ability, depth, and spirit. I’ll never forget that year.
I then taught for a year at a start-up public alternative middle school in Manhattan. That was an education. I became painfully aware that as a suburban white liberal, I knew very little about the world my students lived in or the obstacles they had to overcome. Kids were coming to school with problems that were way over my head. I had become much more conscious of covert racism and privilege by that point; in fact, I was overwhelmed when faced with a reality that reminded me of James Baldwin’s Another Country that I'd read years before.
In this first real year of teaching, I’d also been offered a contract to write Lethe. This happened in October and the novel was expected in February. I’d only written 10,000 words and had never finished a book before. The next five months became a crash course in meeting word count goals weekend-warrior style.
I moved to Britain in 1995 with my then-husband, and between both our efforts we were able to write full-time. When the relationship ended in 1997, I was tempted to return to America, but by then I was training in martial arts with Steve Morris and I just couldn’t walk away from that.
I had been doing martial arts on-again-off again since age thirteen. Being exposed to Steve’s ideas and training methods totally blew away everything I thought I knew. Eventually I convinced him that we would have more fun as partners than as teacher and student, and we’ve been together ever since. I'm no fighter, but I still dabble in a bit of physical training, and I run Steve’s website and produce his DVDs.
For the first ten years that Steve and I were together, we found ourselves embroiled in a protracted property debacle that eventually deprived him of his life savings and stripped us of dignity, most of our possessions, a long-standing friendship, and a good deal of our cheer. A friend once described a problem as having ‘tentacles.' It was like that. You’d think you were on safe ground, and then the situation would fling out a tentacle and grab you from a new direction, and drag you down. For several years, life was distinctly not fun, and the hardship was compounded by the fact that I was popping out babies one after the other. Well, they didn’t really pop out, as such. It was rather more arduous than that -- in fact, going through difficult childbirth and recovery gave me tremendous appreciation for the value of good health, so easily taken for granted.
Between breastfeeding, co-sleeping, and full-time motherhood, my brain was fried and my writing efforts hard-fought for a long time. For years on end I didn’t read. But we all got through it, and I squeezed out Maul, Double Vision, and Sound Mind in that time. My publishers were extremely understanding and patient, and I was fortunate to have had money left over from the Valery Leith books, which helped. We also began to build an internet-based business for Steve.
I started my blog in 2006, and it was a lifesaver for me because I had become very isolated. The online community at Livejournal has been warmly supportive. The entire time I was writing Lightborn, online friends cheered me on. And Lightborn took a long time to write. I was trying to produce the highest quality SF I could, but I was very pressed on all sides and would not let go of the book until I was sure I had given it everything I could. I finished the last revisions on it in August, 2009 and as of this writing, it is to be published in October, 2010.
I've won the Clarke for one novel and had another novel on the shortlist, and my work has also been on the shortlist for the BSFA, the Tiptree, the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and the British Fantasy Society Award. Over the years, my stuff has been translated into Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, Hebrew, French, Czech, and German--but I live in rural Shropshire and don't get out much, so it would seem I am fairly obscure even among female SF novelists.
As I set this down, I have several new projects on my desk: SF, fantasy, YA and children’s. My three kids are getting older, sleeping through the night, staying healthier, and starting school. Life is much easier! It is lovely not to be running from crisis to crisis, at least for now.
Making a definitive autobiographical statement is harder at 42 than it ever was when I was 18, writing silly personal statements on college applications. I’ve radically altered my position and beliefs about many things in my lifetime, and I’ve changed directions a few times, too. I expect to contradict myself more. I don’t want to get stuck.
Life is (sometimes wonderfully) unpredictable. As a young person, I never anticipated how much the world would change, tidally--couldn’t have foreseen the internet, for example--nor the way the old guard would fall. The future is undiscovered.
I bought my first book, The Black Stallion, in 1975. I started writing horse stories the same year (I was seven), moving on to Tolkienesque fantasy at nine. My brother Dan, now an electrical engineer, can probably be blamed for my early exposure to SF. I got my mother to put iron-on Star Trek rank insignia on my long-sleeved blue t-shirt so I could pretend to be Mr. Spock (my ears are quite plausible). I remember D&D before the Dungeon Master’s Guide was published -- when it arrived at our house it was treated like a sacred text.
I became interested in science in high school, but wrote very little fiction during adolescence, and I only read bits of SF. My first attempts to write science fiction were begun at 21 and eventually both were published (Lethe and 'The Question Eaters' came out in 1995). After that I tried to write a literary novel (Someone To Watch Over Me) but couldn’t keep the SF out. So when it came to Dreaming In Smoke, I tried to write SF quite deliberately, but the book ended up being all about my personal problems at the time. Books seldom go to plan, for me.
During high school, although I wasn’t writing, I was learning music, for which I have little talent but much love. I studied in Music Program Zero at Bard College with Ben Boretz, who deeply shaped the way I think and work.
Attempts to earn a living in the business environment of New York City ended with me realizing that I can’t do a job purely for money -- I end up putting my whole soul into it, whether I ought to or not. I realized that if I was going to invest myself in a job, then it needed to be worthwhile. So I went to Teachers College at Columbia for my Master's. I did my student teaching at the amazing De La Salle Academy, where I was lucky enough to work with seasoned teachers and young people of great ability, depth, and spirit. I’ll never forget that year.
I then taught for a year at a start-up public alternative middle school in Manhattan. That was an education. I became painfully aware that as a suburban white liberal, I knew very little about the world my students lived in or the obstacles they had to overcome. Kids were coming to school with problems that were way over my head. I had become much more conscious of covert racism and privilege by that point; in fact, I was overwhelmed when faced with a reality that reminded me of James Baldwin’s Another Country that I'd read years before.
In this first real year of teaching, I’d also been offered a contract to write Lethe. This happened in October and the novel was expected in February. I’d only written 10,000 words and had never finished a book before. The next five months became a crash course in meeting word count goals weekend-warrior style.
I moved to Britain in 1995 with my then-husband, and between both our efforts we were able to write full-time. When the relationship ended in 1997, I was tempted to return to America, but by then I was training in martial arts with Steve Morris and I just couldn’t walk away from that.
I had been doing martial arts on-again-off again since age thirteen. Being exposed to Steve’s ideas and training methods totally blew away everything I thought I knew. Eventually I convinced him that we would have more fun as partners than as teacher and student, and we’ve been together ever since. I'm no fighter, but I still dabble in a bit of physical training, and I run Steve’s website and produce his DVDs.
For the first ten years that Steve and I were together, we found ourselves embroiled in a protracted property debacle that eventually deprived him of his life savings and stripped us of dignity, most of our possessions, a long-standing friendship, and a good deal of our cheer. A friend once described a problem as having ‘tentacles.' It was like that. You’d think you were on safe ground, and then the situation would fling out a tentacle and grab you from a new direction, and drag you down. For several years, life was distinctly not fun, and the hardship was compounded by the fact that I was popping out babies one after the other. Well, they didn’t really pop out, as such. It was rather more arduous than that -- in fact, going through difficult childbirth and recovery gave me tremendous appreciation for the value of good health, so easily taken for granted.
Between breastfeeding, co-sleeping, and full-time motherhood, my brain was fried and my writing efforts hard-fought for a long time. For years on end I didn’t read. But we all got through it, and I squeezed out Maul, Double Vision, and Sound Mind in that time. My publishers were extremely understanding and patient, and I was fortunate to have had money left over from the Valery Leith books, which helped. We also began to build an internet-based business for Steve.
I started my blog in 2006, and it was a lifesaver for me because I had become very isolated. The online community at Livejournal has been warmly supportive. The entire time I was writing Lightborn, online friends cheered me on. And Lightborn took a long time to write. I was trying to produce the highest quality SF I could, but I was very pressed on all sides and would not let go of the book until I was sure I had given it everything I could. I finished the last revisions on it in August, 2009 and as of this writing, it is to be published in October, 2010.
I've won the Clarke for one novel and had another novel on the shortlist, and my work has also been on the shortlist for the BSFA, the Tiptree, the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and the British Fantasy Society Award. Over the years, my stuff has been translated into Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, Hebrew, French, Czech, and German--but I live in rural Shropshire and don't get out much, so it would seem I am fairly obscure even among female SF novelists.
As I set this down, I have several new projects on my desk: SF, fantasy, YA and children’s. My three kids are getting older, sleeping through the night, staying healthier, and starting school. Life is much easier! It is lovely not to be running from crisis to crisis, at least for now.
Making a definitive autobiographical statement is harder at 42 than it ever was when I was 18, writing silly personal statements on college applications. I’ve radically altered my position and beliefs about many things in my lifetime, and I’ve changed directions a few times, too. I expect to contradict myself more. I don’t want to get stuck.
Life is (sometimes wonderfully) unpredictable. As a young person, I never anticipated how much the world would change, tidally--couldn’t have foreseen the internet, for example--nor the way the old guard would fall. The future is undiscovered.
Tricia Sullivan
All material copyright Tricia Sullivan 2010
