Valerie Valdes: Treat All Writing Advice Like a Tool You Add to Your Toolbox
Valerie Valdes is a co-editor of Escape Pod as well as the author of the Chilling Effect trilogy and the space fantasy novel Where Peace Is Lost. Her short fiction and poetry have appeared in Uncanny Magazine, Nightmare Magazine, and several anthologies. She lives in Georgia with her husband, children and cats. Follow her on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
Valerie Valdes
In this post, Valerie shares sources of inspiration for her new space fantasy novel, thoughts on incorporating nature into science fiction, and more.
Name: Valerie Valdes
Literary agent: Quressa Robinson
Book title: Where Peace Is Lost
Publisher: Harper Voyager
Release date: August 29, 2023
Genre/category: Science fiction (space opera, space fantasy)
Previous titles: Chilling Effect, Prime Deceptions, Fault Tolerance
Elevator pitch for the book: A refugee hiding from the empire that conquered her people must risk exposure—or all-out war—on a road trip to save her new home from a deadly machine that will destroy the planet.
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What prompted you to write this book?
Most of my books are cooked from a mélange of random ingredients I pick up in the grocery store of the world. This book started primarily with a love of Star Wars. The character of Obi-Wan Kenobi has always interested me because, when he’s introduced in A New Hope, we know very little about him and what we do know is mysterious and hints at a deep, tragic back story that is never fully explained in that film. Why was he hiding alone in the desert? Why wasn’t he working with the rebels, with his experience and abilities? What happened to the order he used to belong to?
Certainly his history has been filled out since then, but that initial mystique was fertile ground for speculation and imagining and reimagining. It made me want to write a story about a character living in relative isolation on a planet that isn’t her home, hiding from her enemies—and then being called to help in a way she’s uniquely suited to handle, but risks not only exposing her to those enemies, but also bringing them down on the very people she’s trying to protect.
I’ve also always had a related love of Arthuriana, knighthood, paladins, and so on (see also various superheroes!). In idealized form, knights go around helping people, defending the downtrodden, taking on seemingly hopeless quests, liberating the oppressed… All stuff that appeals to my arguably overdeveloped sense of justice.
One specific group I researched as I was writing this book was the Knights Hospitaller, who were ostensibly tasked with providing medical care for Christian pilgrims in Jerusalem and whose purview expanded first to providing armed escorts, then well beyond that to much more militaristic functions. I’m certainly not here to pretend any part of the Crusades or what came after was pretty or romantic, and my world-building isn’t intended to be analogous.
Even so, I wanted to consider what a group of powerful protectors sprung from healers might look like, how they might function, what code they would follow—and how they might be taken advantage of, undermined, opposed, and ultimately defeated by not only unscrupulous people, but also their own internal strife when their ideals can’t survive contact with external realities.
To a certain extent, I also drew from my family’s experience fleeing Cuba after the revolution. Even when one successfully integrates into a new community, there is always a lingering sense of dislocation and loss, a nostalgia for the place left behind, no matter how slight. But where fictional nostos can occur, as in the Odyssey, in life there is often no going back, leaving only the algos, the pain, like a bone that never set properly and aches when it rains. Even if one returns to the place one left, it isn’t the same, and so it isn’t really a return at all.
How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?
I want to say this idea started about five years ago, but time is fake, so I can’t pinpoint it exactly. I do know it took me around a year to outline and draft it, and my initial idea, the one I pitched to my publisher, was very different—much more of a planet-hopping space adventure with an ominous, powerful villain hunting the hero and a love interest from her tragic past.
At some point as I was outlining (I’m a plotter, not a pantser), I realized the story I really wanted to tell first, the one that had always drawn me, was how the main character was convinced to come out of her figurative cave and rejoin the galaxy at large. I wanted a smaller-scale, planetary romance-style story that focused on a single planet before expanding to a broader scope in potential future books.
I also wanted to explore a place that had some utopian elements, not only as a contrast to the “evil empire” antagonist, but also because I think a lot of modern world-building emphasizes dystopian features. We’re taught to examine failure points, places where the setting is ripe for change because of inequities or injustices. But I think sometimes it’s good to also have representations of places that aren’t perfect, but have qualities we’d like to see in our own world.
Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?
My amazing editor, Tessa Woodward, gave me some extremely good notes about the original ending of the book that led me to completely rewrite it—for the better! But I spent a long time trying to figure out how to apply those notes, how to see past the critique to the underlying problem.
I think that’s a common issue writers can run into: we receive feedback that identifies some issue in the story, but it may not pinpoint the precise thing that’s wrong, much less suggest the right way to fix it. For me, this meant a long time spent iterating and brainstorming and plotting and replotting, only to realize I was overthinking the situation and the solution was more simple and straightforward than I was trying to make it.
Sometimes cramming complexity into a story or scene is the equivalent of jamming a stick into the spokes of a bike wheel; instead of giving readers an enjoyably bumpy ride, you’re just making them crash.
Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?
A thing I often struggle with in writing is feeling something is very obvious or easily empathized with, when it may not actually be. I’ll think, “This makes total sense!” and then I explain the thing to others and I watch the suspension bridge of belief snap its cables and fall into the river of incredulity. For this book, I knew I wanted the culture of the planet’s residents to involve a strong ethic of care for the environment; however, despite emphasizing this in drafting, some people found certain anti-technology choices to be strange or unjustified. It threw me for a loop.
Luckily, I came across Sloane Leong’s essay, “The Nature of a Natural Future,” which asked why so many science fiction stories prioritize technology at the expense of nature or eliminate nature altogether, intentionally or by omission. Leong gave examples of places where the natural world is granted personhood and rights, and I knew immediately that was the missing element I needed. Where some may find it unbelievable for characters to make inconvenient choices that protect a planet’s flora and fauna because it’s the right thing to do, it’s easier to accept the notion that those plants and creatures have an explicit legal status that grants them the same, or nearly the same, protections as the humans who live among them.
Is there something cynical about having to get all lawyerly about an aspect of worldbuilding for it to function? Maybe. But, laws aren’t intrinsically an admission of the failures of humans to make good choices for their own sake; laws can also be a standard to which we aspire, and I’d like to represent those aspirations in my fiction.
What do you hope readers will get out of your book?
While in fiction we frequently find stories where Good triumphs over Evil, in real life we know it’s not so simple or straightforward on a number of levels. But, in real life as in fiction, that doesn’t mean we should give up and accept that bad things are inevitable and can’t be stopped or opposed.
It’s tempting to avoid confrontation for any number of reasons, and sometimes it’s necessary for survival, but there comes a time for all of us to reach for whatever agency we do possess and use it to make the world better, even if it’s only in a limited way. Some of us can work toward progress on a large scale, through politics or collective action, while some of us can try to make small changes for the better in our own lives and the lives of the people in our immediate orbits.
Voltaire ended his novel Candide by asserting, stoically, “We must cultivate our garden”; I think his rejection of unwarranted optimism is valuable in that it encourages us to exert our efforts in ways that are personally manageable and that will yield results. However, I also think, more than ever, it’s imperative that we view our entire world as a connected garden that we all need to cultivate together, because if we don’t, there won’t be anything left capable of growing.
If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?
Treat all writing advice like a tool you add to your toolbox. My husband has a tool set with dozens of different screwdrivers and wrenches and hex keys. None of them is intrinsically better or worse than another, they’re just suited to a particular task or they’re not. Some of the tools get used more frequently and some never leave the box, but they’re all available in case they’re needed.
It’s also okay to invent your own tools, or to customize them so you can use them more easily or effectively, or to change your process as you go in ways that change your favored tools. And if you lend your tools to a friend, keep in mind that the ones you find indispensable may not be useful to them at all, and that’s okay, too!
While there’s no shortage of writing advice, it’s often scattered around—a piece of advice here, words of wisdom there. And in the moments when you most need writing advice, what you find might not resonate with you or speak to the issue you’re dealing with. In A Year of Writing Advice, the editors of Writer’s Digest have gathered thoughts, musings, and yes, advice from 365 authors in dozens of genres to help you on your writing journey.