One of the most common questions authors face is a deceptively difficult one to answer: “Where do you get your ideas?” Yet, the answers to that common question can be almost as interesting as the resulting story. Welcome to You’re My Inspiration, a new column dedicated to discovering what inspires a particular author and their work. Whether it be a lifelong love of mythical creatures, a fascinating bit of history, or a trip to a new and exciting place, You’re My Inspiration is all about those special and sometimes dark things that spark ideas and result in great stories.
This week, we bring you Hugo-nominated and Locus-Award winning author Yoon Ha Lee, who will be a guest lecturer at the 2020 Odyssey Writing Workshop! If you want to hear him speak at this amazing six-week program, details will be below. In the meantime, we’re also promoting his next novel, Phoenix Extravagant, which comes out from Solaris in June 2020.
The Magic of Quinacridone Gold
A couple years back, I discovered Jane Blundell’s website on watercolor painting. I’d been noodling with art since childhood, including a regrettable stint with watercolor pencils and some experiments with brush and ink. One of Blundell’s blog posts suggested a five-color starter palette, but of course I should have known that it wouldn’t end there. Before I knew it, I had a horde of paint tubes, a Robax palette, an Etchr 37-well miniature palette, and watercolor sketchbooks all over the place. I painted my family. I painted the family cat. I painted at the game store during Pathfinder sessions. The game store people got used to seeing me dabbing away with my brush. I have probably invented every single way it’s possible to get that most dreaded of colors, Mud, with my particular palette of colors. You can see some of my efforts at my online portfolio.
Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that the protagonist of my forthcoming novel, Phoenix Extravagant, is a painter. Mind you, this isn’t because I think of myself as a particularly talented artist. I love drawing and painting, but I’m still learning. Painting, however, leads to some incredibly nerdy places.
For years I had assumed that names for paints/colors like “Van Dyck Brown” or “Prussian Blue” were standardized across manufacturers. The artists among you are laughing now, but a civilian has no reason to know any better! I discovered Handprint.com’s Guide to Watercolor Pigments, which, alongside Blundell’s site, taught me to look at the pigments used to create those paints, rather than relying on the names. So, for example, Sap Green from Daniel Smith is made from PO48 (an orange-yellow), PY150 (a yellow), and PG7 (a green). From Schmincke Horadam, on the other hand, it’s made from PY153 (a different yellow) and PG7 (same green). These differences lead to differences in behavior, granulation, lightfastness — I’m not a chemist, but essentially this is due to the chemical properties of the pigments.
One of the pigments I fell in love with early on was PO49, usually known as Quinacridone Gold. This pigment is no longer manufactured; the world supply ran out a couple of years ago. Originally it was manufactured for car paint, but that particular golden yellow color went out of fashion, and so the paint manufacturer Daniel Smith bought up the world supply and used it in their paints until they ran out. I have a small stockpile of the stuff and you are taking it away from me over my dead body. You can still buy paint called Quinacridone Gold from Daniel Smith, but it’s a hue made from different pigments, PO48 and PY150. It’s close, but if I can see the difference between PO49 and the newer hue in swatches, then a professional artist can definitely tell.
All through my childhood happily making terrible art, I never worried about colors running out; about the fact that the pigments that go into paints are made of physical and therefore finite materials. That made me think — what about a world in which certain pigments had magical properties? And what would happen if those pigments ran out?
Because this is me, I came up with a magic system in which those pigments can be used for dastardly enchantments, with a side of genocide. (“Are you writing about genocide again?” my teenage daughter demanded in exasperation. Sorry, kid!) Phoenix Extravagant is set in a fantasy analogue of Korea during the Japanese occupation (1910-1945), so imperialism and cultural genocide were very much on my mind. When I was reading up on the history of Korean art, I learned that native art traditions were in fact affected by the occupation as well as the introduction of Western art styles and innovations (like “perspective”). This made me squirm, since I’ve had a Western education. While I’m self-taught in art, I draw in a more or less conventionally Western style.
When I first took up watercolor, I never imagined that I’d be immersing myself in books and articles on art in order to write a novel about an artist. I thought it was “just” a hobby. It’s funny the way these things turn out!
The Odyssey Writing Workshop is a six week writing workshop for science fiction, fantasy, and horror authors, and it is currently accepting applications for its 2020 session. It will be held from June 1st through July 10th, 2020, and feature the daily teachings of Jeanne Cavelos and the following guest speakers: Brandon Sanderson, Yoon Ha Lee, Scott H. Andrews, J.G. Faherty, Sheila Williams, Barbara Ashford, Carrie Vaughn, John Joseph Adams, and E.C. Ambrose. To learn more and discover how you can apply, click here. Applications are due by April 1st, 2020.
Yoon Ha Lee’s debut novel, Ninefox Gambit, won the Locus Award for best first novel and was a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and Clarke awards. Its sequels, Raven Stratagem and Revenant Gun, were both Hugo finalists. His middle grade space opera, Dragon Pearl, was a New York Times bestseller. His next novel, Phoenix Extravagant, is forthcoming from Solaris in June 2020. Lee lives in Louisiana with his family and an extremely lazy cat, and has not yet been eaten by gators.
Photo by Jeff Mann
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