Alvaros Zinos-Amaro's "A User's Guide to Michael Swanwick," His Blog Tour, and What I Concluded From It

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A few years ago, I was talking with my wife, Marianne Porter, about a novel I may someday get around to writing and said, "You'll never guess what happens to the protagonist at the end of the first chapter."

"She dies," Marianne said.

I was astonished. "How in the world did you know that?" I asked.

"It happens all the time in your fiction," she replied

This incident was brought to mind recently when I read  Alvaro Zinos-Amaro's article in Tor.com,  "A User's Guide to Michael Swanwick." Alvaro is currently doing a blog tour to bring to public attention his remarkable year-and-a-half long series of conversations/interviews with me published by Fairwood Press under the title Being Michael Swanwick. 

In the article, Zinos-Amaro lists what he feels are the best of my stories and novels, along with the first sentence for each. That for my novel Vacuum Flowers was She didn't know she had died. And right away, I was struck by the fact that there were more works on the list where the protagonist was dead right from the very beginning. 

It was a strange discovery when Marianne first pointed it out to me, and it remains a strange observation today. I have no explanation for it.

But thinking about it, I realized that after I die--many long decades from now, I hope--the stories and novels will remain, living after me. It's pleasant to think that a vital fraction of my life will go blithely on, neither knowing nor caring that the rest of me is gone.

And, really, that's where, after a literary flourish or three, I was going to conclude this post. But then I thought deeper and came up with a different conclusion.

If you read Being Michael Swanwick (and, again, you already know if you will or will not) and pay close attention, you'll note that Alvaro has a crisper, cleaner voice than I do. It's as if I were speaking in first draft and he in final draft. Readihng his blog tour posts I was struck by the strength of his prose and inventiveness of his thought. I write the occasional nonfiction piece, so I'm aware of how hard that is.

Judge for yourself. You can find "A User's Guide to Michael Swanwick" here.

You can find Alvaro's post on Mary Robinette Kowal's blog here.

John Scalci hosted Alvaro here.

And Black Gate hosted Alvaro here. 

And if you're a gonnabe writer . . .

It would be worth your while to study these pieces and see how Alvaro Zinos-Amaro wrote very  different pieces to promote the same book. All of them varied, honest, and interesting. When you finally are published, you're going to be expected to promote yourself. (When I was first published, the Internet didn't exist and publishing houses took care of all that.) And when that happens, remember to make your self-promotion:

1) Varied

2) Honest

3) Interesting

Remember that you're not trying to outwit the system. That never works. You're just trying to bring your work to the attention of people who would enjoy reading it.

End of lecture.. Go thou and sin no more.

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