Introduction:

Recently I began  a new “mini-series” of posts titled “Here’s SpecFicNZ-Christchurch.”  As explained, effectively my fellow authors will be introducing themselves using a series of  common headings:

Here’s Who: a short, first person introduction to the writer
Here’s Why: the writer writes speculative fiction
Here’s What: an example of the writer’s work
Here’s Where: you can find out more about the writer and their work—and I really hope you will!

And now I am very pleased to introduce this week’s guest:

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Here’s SpecFicNZ–Christchurch: Featuring A.J. (Amanda) Fitzwater

Here’s Who:

How to pin down /who is Amanda (A.J.) Fitzwater is like trying to eat water with a knife and fork.

There’s the facts, ma’am: I grew up a very staid small town life in Blenheim, where to get out you needed a job, not a dream of being a writer. Being the Big W didn’t pay the bills. So I followed that need to Christchurch in my early twenties. After securing my Piece of Paper (Bachelor Broadcasting Communications – Radio) and getting a job in the advertising industry, I set about being a good little capitalist. Choose life, choose a career, choose a job, choose a family, choose a … big television & etc…

But in amongst all that, I read. I devoured books. Science Fiction or Fantasy? Bring it on! And I started to think “I like that, I could do that, I want that. I can write things for a living, but where’s my dream?“

Here’s Why:

For the longest time I forgot about my dream, put it aside. I didn’t believe in myself. It’s a really sad sack tale that’s decades in the making, so I won’t bore you with it. But the short of it is: I started asking myself what I really wanted from my life.

This wasn’t a click moment, a flash of inspiration. It was a slow creeping thing, took me years to work up the guts to decide to do it. I watched friends become writers, and wanted some of their happiness. I wanted to create art, and I wanted to leave some mark on the world.

So I made one of those decisions: I have to do something before I hit 40. I wanted to make a professional sale of a story (preferably to Asimov’s magazine, but hey, now I know the industry better my first pro sales are just as important).

By this time my reading habits and appreciation of literature had changed. Short stories had become more than just something for the literary elite. I discovered I was good at them. My writing habits and mentality suited them well. Maybe this will change as I grow as a writer. I’m happy to follow where it leads.

And at this time, around 2009-10, I was also being introduced to a world of SFF I had completely missed in my earlier education and reading habits: the worlds of Joanna Russ and James Tiptree Jnr, that of Ursula Le Guin and Octavia Butler. And I discovered I wanted to write like that, but for the now and the future.

Here’s What:

The author that I am today probably wouldn’t be the same author as if I had started writing at a different time in my life. When I decided “yes, this is it, it’s time to herd cats or go home”, I was a very different person to the Writer Me who may have got beyond those tentative, abandoned fanfictions as a kid, or made my first baby steps into the industry 20 years ago (and quit). I needed that time to learn something, to figure out what I wanted to write about. The Writer Me of today has a much broader appreciation of politics and social justice. For all my angst behind not exploring my full potential, I started into this full and proper with eyes as wide open as they can be at this point in my life.

Writer Me of 20 years ago may have written about dragons and spaceships, and done it with all the earnestness of an 18 year old grabbing the bull by the horns. Now, I write about those things, but they’re gay dragons and women starship captains, fat girls living large in strange worlds and genderfluid people battling tyranny in space, lesbian genies and matriarchal societies on climate and gender changed worlds.

Social justice and feminist themes are large in my work, and the f word is not something to be frightened of. It’s a label that morphs and stretches and intersects so many things, and sometimes I want to reject it because of its troubled history. But it comes back to one thing: I am a woman, writing about voices that deserve the volume turned way up. I’m not always going to get it right, and there are some voices that deserve louder volume than mine, but they are important stories to me.

I am A.J. Fitzwater, and I write science fiction and fantasy, sometimes weird, sometimes not. And I eat water with a knife and fork by freezing it.

Here’s Where:

I blog about my writer’s journey at Pickled Think, and you can also find me on Good Reads and Twitter.

Some of my stories available are:

“Blood Stone Water” at Beneath Ceaseless Skies

“The City of Sand and Knives” at The Future Fire

“The Ten Thousand Steps” at Expanded Horizons

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The “Here’s SpecFicNZ–Christchurch” series will continue posting every Wednesday for the next five weeks.