Thrill Me!
A conversation with novelist and editor Renee James
Before today’s feature, two book prize competitions with deadlines fast approaching:
Prairie Schooner’s Raz-Shumaker Book Prizes for poetry and short story collections, deadline March 15, $3000 prize per recipient with publication.
National Poetry Series Open Competition for poetry collections by U.S. poets, deadline March 21, five titles selected, $10,000 cash prize per recipient with publication.
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In 2012, I was asked to serve as judge for the indie fiction category of the Chicago Writers’ Association Book of the Year Award. It was my first encounter with the work of today’s interviewee, Renee James, and her writing struck me as assured, wise, and kinetic, and perhaps most of all, her characters were drawn with complexity and pathos. Ultimately, I selected her debut novel, Coming Out Can Be Murder, as the recipient of that year’s award.
Renee is likewise an accomplished editor whose writerly origin story is as compelling as her books. I’ll leave you to it…
Christine/Bookish: You began writing fiction seriously in midlife. What spurred you to start?
Renee James: The biggest thing was, I finally had a story I wanted to tell. Soon after the turn of the 20th century, I finally confronted the fact that I was transgender. I explored what that meant by networking in the community, and by coming out to some of the people in my life, and by reading.
Ultimately, I decided that I wasn’t a candidate for transitioning, and that decision left me with a lot of curiosity about what that might have been like. I traveled a lot on business in those days, and I began to fill the endless hours in airports and on airplanes by writing a fictional diary in which I tried to project the realities of transitioning in the early 2000s. It was wonderfully addictive exercise and after some months, I had something like 40,000 words of copy.
It was all very rough, but even in that stage, I thought the material presented a unique and interesting character, and it also opened the curtain on transgender life at that time in our history. I decided to make it into a crime novel and spent two or three years doing it. I was hooked. I loved the process—the writing, the editing, the revising, all of it—and I’ve been writing books and short stories ever since.
CS: You've written three thrillers that feature Bobbi Logan, a transgender woman who is a successful business owner in Chicago. Your newest novel, BeatNikki's Cafe, features a new cast of characters. What made you decide to bring Nikki Finch to life? Are you envisioning a new series with her as your protagonist?
RJ: I’m a fan of authors who start with a new cast for each book because they tend to give us more original lead characters and more interesting character arcs. There are exceptions, of course, and my own Bobbi Logan trilogy is one, or at least tries to be. Each book explores Bobbi’s development at three remarkably different stages of life, so she’s a different person with a different arc in each of them.
BeatNikki’s Café evolved from a desire to create a plot around a transwoman trying to navigate sudden parenthood and survive the first year of the first Trump presidency, which ushered in an open-season on minorities, especially trans people. I’m not planning a sequel. My new manuscripts have younger heroines dealing with the difficult realities of contemporary times while also trying to experience romance and acceptance. It’s just more fun meeting new people each time I sit down to live with them for a year or two.
CS: You've worked with both hybrid and traditional publishers. Would you comment on your experiences - the pros and cons - of each modality?
RJ: I published my first book with a hybrid publisher, Windy City Publishing. I had tried to get an agent, and it looked impossible: I was a trans author with a book about a transgender woman. We were years away from the outings of celebrities like Chaz Bono and Caitlin Jenner making trans people topical. No one in traditional publishing wanted anything to do with a first-time author and a transgender story.
In contrast, the Windy City people were welcoming and informational, talking me through their program of services. I decided that publishing with them would be a great investment in my book and my book publishing education. I got that part right. I learned more about writing, editing, and publishing books with them than I have in publishing five or six books with traditional publishers. Why? Because I was the customer, so I got to ask questions and get great answers, and I got to work closely with some really great editors.
Interaction with traditional publishers is limited by the fact that they’re on the clock. They have to turn out books on a schedule and there’s not a lot of time for author communication.
Be careful of startups and micro-publishers with marginal web sites and promotional tools—there are fly-by-nights out there that will bury your work in anonymity for years.
The great limitation of hybrid publishers is their brands have no status with reviewers and booksellers. There may be some exceptions to this rule, but not many. You have to open your own doors, often overcoming built-in biases against self-published books. Traditional publishers, to varying degrees, have some brand awareness among sellers and reviewers—especially houses that specialize in specific genres. That said, be careful of startups and micro-publishers with marginal web sites and promotional tools—there are fly-by-nights out there that will bury your work in anonymity for years.
CS: What advice do you have for writers who are just beginning to write novels they hope one day to publish?
RJ: Many years ago, I wrote captions and sidebars for the old Time-Life Books division. I had a brilliant series editor who would go through every word, phrase, and sentence of my work and comment, “That’s interesting, that’s interesting…” until he got to a phrase that wasn’t interesting, which was when I went back to the drawing board. That’s how fiction writing is, too. Every sentence and every paragraph has to be interesting to a stranger.
So, my advice comes in several parts:
1) Have an interesting story to tell
2) Tell your story in a series of conflicts; all storytelling is conflict—every scene, every chapter
3) Give the reader characters with some kind of charisma, a reason to live with them for eight or ten hours
4) Work on your storytelling voice—you’ll have your own way of telling the story, but don’t ever stop trying to improve it.
I also recommend getting active in author groups, especially if you write genre fiction. You can learn a lot about craft in these organizations and a lot about marketing.
Finally, learn to love editing and seek out good editors. Understand that editing isn’t personal, and that it’s not perfect. Edits reveal as much about the editor as about your writing, so you have to interpret the feedback you get. It’s fun!
CS: Speaking of editing, you've edited two Off-Campus Writing Workshops anthologies. What are a few things you've learned about yourself as writer and editor while doing this work?
RJ: One of the biggest things the anthologies taught me is that there are a lot of great writers out there and they see the world in ways I never imagined. I also quickly came to realize that how I read a manuscript can be distinctly different than how you or any other editor reads it. We’re all limited by our tastes and experiences, so it’s wise to be respectful and modest about one’s own “genius.” And my most embarrassing realization: I don’t recognize some of the weaknesses in my own work until I see them in someone else’s.
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Renee James is a confessed English major and transgender author who is also a spouse, parent, grandparent and Vietnam veteran. She took up fiction writing after a long career in magazines as a writer, editor, and owner. Since 2012, she has published seven novels and several short stories under various bylines. Her seventh novel, BeatNikki’s Café, was released by Amble Press in June 2023 and was a finalist for the Joseph Hansen Award for Crime Fiction. Her screenplay adaptation of BeatNikki’s Café won honors in the 2023 Chicago Script Awards. Renee James has published short stories in several anthologies and implemented developmental anthologies for Off Campus Writers Workshop.