Today the Storytelling Blog visits with author Charis Emanon. Montag Press has just released Emanon’s satirical speculative book, 51 Ways To End Your World. We talked via email about the book and the writing process.
Disclosure: I have a business relationship with Emanon’s publisher and wrote a back-cover blurb for 51 Ways To End Your World.
How many apocalypses can one world take? 51 Ways To End Your World is a fast-paced novella of a world turned upside down and inside out. Junior-college student Anna Frond just wants to be left alone to peacefully die from lack of sleep, but the violently disintegrating world is in danger of rescue. She must put aside her personal needs and meet the challenge: stop a villainous scientist from saving the world. The breezy, tongue-in-cheek narrative perfectly counterpoints this biting satire of modern America’s skewed values and dysfunctional obsessions. Thoroughly entertaining!
Kathy L. Brown
Kathy: Tell us about 51 Ways To End Your World. What was the inspiration? How long have you been working on it?
Emanon: I used to work in downtown Portland directly across the street from Pioneer Square, at a small college. The early 2000s was an exciting time to be in the downtown. The web boom of the late 1990s had gone bust—which meant a lot of us in the Silicon Forest had seen our fortunes wildly fluctuate. We had a second Bush on the throne…sorry, I mean in the White House. We had just been through this gigantic wave of fear concerning Y2K [year 2000], we had the 1999 World Trade Organization protests in Seattle which had absolutely shut down the entire city. Then there was September 11th, 2001, which dwarfed it all. Looking back you can kind of see this “end of the world” mentality blooming.
So, I sat there regularly looking down on Portland’s living room during mass protests. We would watch these huge crowds of people marching down the main street, drumming, all wearing black clothing and masks, shouting, and then, a few minutes later, the police with their shields and batons would drive them back and force everybody down towards the banks of the Willamette River. The throngs would surge one way and back the other, all of it playing out on the streets beneath us. All the while the “good citizens” of PDX [Portland. Ed] just kept honking their horns, shopping, and dodging the mayhem. It was a kind of a game, with everybody playing a role: “protestor,” “authority figure,” “concerned citizen,” or “civic leader.”
The Story Takes Shape
As I watched this all unfold, a story started to form in my head. I saw the different roles played by the people on the streets below coming to be embodied by individuals, and then I started to know their names, to recognize their faces: Anna Frod, Ben Padgett, Ian Takki, Eddie Chandran, Sal Caretz, Doc Ulent, Powell R. Crupt, and Scrodtop. [51 Ways To End Your World characters. Ed.]
I started writing in 2004, probably the summer. Just to be on the safe side I wrote it all to happen slightly in the future—like 2008, 2009. You know, to make sure that the novel was still current when it was published. You can see how well that worked out!
Kathy: 51 Ways To End Your World bends, if not outright defies, genre descriptions. A little science fiction pizzaz, some disaster movie tropes, and a lot of satire. Which genre readers do you feel will be most interested in the book? Or, if not genre fans, what sort of audience do you expect to be attracted to the story? Did you have trouble coming up with comparable titles?
Emanon: To my mind, this is science fiction, the soft kind, sociological. I meant it to be a bit in the future, but it wound up being alternative history. I would say it is a satire of end-of-the-world classics like Larry Niven’s and Jerry Pournelle’s Footfall, Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End, and, somehow, Capricorn One got in there—although I don’t remember ever seeing or knowing about that movie before I wrote this book.
As far as comparable titles, the one that comes closest to this idea is Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, although I have always loved Leonard Wibberley’s The Mouse That Roared, and I hope that my satire kind of careens between the sort written by that pair of authors. Both hold prominent places in my literary circle of friends.
Kathy: What are you working on next?
Emanon: I am very proud to be part of the Strangely Funny IX anthology coming out in the next month or so. It is exciting to have two books that I hope everyone will buy this year. My story in that one is called “An Arc Had Off With A Loon;” it is about a devilish artificial intelligence that grants the wishes of a lonely old man.
The next novel is Azzfapple: The Tech That Eats Us! A guy named Paige Brynn creates an immersive intelligence that swallows civilization whole. The technology that is supposed to keep our memories safe begins to cause us to forget. It actually takes place in the same universe as 51 Ways To End Your World. Some of the minor characters from this first novel have cameos in that one. It also gives the reader some idea of what we can expect in our own future—or, I guess I should say we find out what happens in the imaginary world of 51 Ways, which bears no relation to the real one. In real life, nobody would ever vote for Crupt, right?
Kathy: What is your writing process? Did other types of work you have done impacted your writing process?
Emanon: For a brief time in the early 2000s—as a result of that aforementioned world wide web bubble, I wound up being a technical writer and reviewer. It is all so long ago that I almost feel like I was a different person, with a different name. I was paid regularly to write for trade publications and even was a regular in a tech humor column and later branched out into short stories and poetry, the latter of which was my first love in writing. I had quite a bit of success with small presses.
Slowly, it just became this “business.” I would devote a couple of hours a day to writing, editing, sending off submissions, tracking them on a spreadsheet, and it devolved into a numbers thing. How much money was I making in return for my time? How many publications could I add to my writing vitae? It became data, and it became meaningless.
Plus, I changed jobs and no longer had the time to devote to writing. My old journals and manuscripts just disappeared into a drawer.
Finally, after ten years more, I semi-retired from the world of work and began to slowly open up some of those old drawers to discover some of the old passions.
Now I work a bit and keep that separate from writing. It is a craft again. If I have an idea, I write it. If I don’t have any ideas, then I read. If it gives me joy, I do more of it. That is my whole process.
Kathy: What does storytelling mean to you?
Emanon: Storytelling is existence. I exist because I look in the mirror each morning, remember who I was yesterday, and tell that same story again to the world today.
I wrote Charis Emanon [this author’s pen name. Ed.] into existence at some point in the past, but I have become so attached to this person that I can no longer separate myself from them, I can no longer see that this is clothing, this is just a mask I wear. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
If someone asks me for the story of my life I give them a beginning, a middle, and an end—without ever thinking much about how fictional all of that is. I could spread my life out on a timeline just as easily, then cut up the events, reorder them, put them into different piles. There’s a million ways to live, but we choose to live through stories.
In the end we are all characters; I play a minor role in your world, but I am the hero in my own.
Stories are sacred, they breathe us into life.
Charis Emanon
To tell a story is to participate in the games played by deities. As writers, we don’t imagine worlds, we realize their existence. The larger story speaks through the smaller ones. It just keeps unfolding, surprising us, motivating us to turn the next page, to find out what happens next.
If you enjoyed this author interview, you might like hearing from Pete Peru and Lord Tupelo.
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