Tim Susman's The Revolution and the Fox: Book Release and Author Interview

Today's Author Interview is with Tim Susman, who is celebrating the upcoming release of his queer furry alternate history, The Revolution and the Fox.


Deborah J. Ross: Tell us a little about yourself. How did you come to be a writer?
Tim Susman: I was encouraged to read by my parents, both English majors, and I read everything I could get my hands on. Eventually I found that I had stories in my head that I wanted to work out on paper, so I joined my college’s science fiction magazine and started writing short stories. After college, I kept on writing, and reached a point where I wanted to do more with it, so I took some writing workshop classes at our local university. I started writing novels, and when I got laid off from my tech job some years later, my husband encouraged me to write full time. I’ve been doing that for ten years now, and it is the best job I’ve ever had.


DJR: What inspired your book?
TS: This is the fourth (and final) book in a series inspired by the idea that coming-of-age stories play out in our lives at many different scales, that a country’s war of independence is a coming-of-age story, that a magical race created by a human sorcerer can, like any child, also have a coming-of-age story. The fourth book specifically grew out of two ideas: first, the idea that what a person or country does with their independence is as interesting as how they achieved it, and I wanted to explore that both for my protagonists and their new country; and second, that the magic system I’d built for the British Empire wouldn’t necessarily be the same system used all over the world. I wanted to explore other cultures and give the reader a sense of how different magic might be outside of Britain.


DJR: What authors have most influenced your writing? What about them do you find inspiring?
TS: Stephen King for his ability to create a mood. David Mitchell for his ability to find the perfect little details to describe a character, whether in narrative or in the character’s voice (also for his use of language and the craft in the endings of his books). Kazuo Ishiguro for the fragility of perception and memory (and also for his lovely characters). Susan Cooper’s Dark is Rising series and the way she brings real people to meet epic moments will always be in the back of my head, as will much of Madeleine L’Engle’s work for the same reason. For this series specifically I often thought back to Kevin O’Donnell, Jr.’s Flinger series (Caverns, Reefs, Lava, Cliffs) because he so ably portrayed a protagonist growing up with powers he needed to constantly build on in order to fight the forces arrayed against him for no logical reason other than an accident around his birth.


DJR: Why do you write what you do, and how does your work differ from others in your genre?
TS: I write furry fiction, meaning my stories usually have animal-people of some kind in them. I like that aesthetic and the idea that culturally we invest certain animals with certain traits; furry fiction is the logical extension of that. We think foxes are crafty; what if you had a whole group of fox-people who would be viewed as crafty? That’s the literary explanation, but it may be more of a justification after the fact of my having seen Disney’s Robin Hood at a young age and wanting desperately to live in that world.

I also write queer fiction because I think there needs to be more queer fiction, and also because I love to see the breadth of ways in which people find love and identity. I’m old enough to remember when I thought the world was divided into straight and gay, and to see people come forward year after year to show us how diverse the world is, and how blurred the distinctions are that we once thought so sharp, has been just a continuing source of joy.

As for what differs from others in my genre, I think what I try to bring to each of my works is a sense of optimism that everyone can find out their truest self and can express that. I hope that reading my books will give readers confidence that they too can find who they are and live their best lives.

GUEST BLOG: Kyell Gold on Writing From The Heart

I had to become someone else to write the things that were important to me.

Let me back up a little. You’ll hear this phrase, “write from the heart,” a fair amount as you navigate the world of writing advice. When I suggested the topic to Deborah, she immediately pointed me to a podcast in which Betsy Wollheim of DAW spent fifteen minutes giving just that advice. So I want to talk a little about why it’s important, why many people don’t do it, and how you can.

Writing from the heart is scary. It means exposing yourself to the world. In a way, it’s like having an intimate conversation with hundreds or thousands or (if you’re lucky) millions of strangers. It’s talking about the pain of breaking up, the fear of not having enough to eat, the loneliness of losing a parent, the depressing reality of falling short. It’s talking about falling in love, about the joy of discovery, about those words your mother said when you were six that you carried with you all your life. It can mean describing your journey from realizing you’re different to realizing that that’s okay.

If this scares you or disturbs you (in an emotional sense rather than a horror sense), that’s good. Tap into a place where you’re not comfortable: those are the raw places from which powerful writing comes. You guard them because they are important to you. And when they are important to you, that passion comes across in your writing. When you put yourself on the page, the reader can feel that, because your characters reactions feel authentic.