It’s been a while since I last hosted an author interview, but today I have the pleasure of welcoming Leigh Hellman, the amazingly articulate author of Orbit, a YA sci-fi novel released by Snowy Wings Publishing. I’m always thrilled to host fellow ace authors. Get settled in, this discussion is one of the most interesting I’ve ever had. 🙂
Below is the blurb, and if this sounds like your jam, you should buy it now!
Ciaan Gennett isn’t green, despite the brand of light hair that betrays her heritage: an Earth mother. A mother she remembers but doesn’t know, who left one day and never came back. Ciaan’s as metal as her home planet—cold and hard and full of so many cracks she’s trying to ignore that she doesn’t have time to wonder about questions that don’t get answers.
After one too many run-ins with the law, Ciaan finds herself sentenced to probation at a port facility and given an ultimatum: Prove that your potential is worth believing in. With help from her best friend Tidoris, Ciaan stays away from trouble—and trouble stays away from her. But when a routine refueling turns into a revelation, Ciaan and Tidoris find themselves forced into an alliance with an Earth captain of questionable morality and his stoic, artificially-grown first officer. Their escalating resistance against bureaucratic cover-ups begins unraveling a history of human monstrosity and an ugly truth that Ciaan isn’t so sure she wants to discover.
Now they all must decide how far they are willing to dig into humanity’s dark desperation—and what they are willing to do about what digs back.
Let’s start with some basics. Can you tell me a little about Orbit‘s main character? What do you and Ciaan have in common? In what ways is she completely different from you?
Ciaan holds a special place in my heart because she was the first original female character that I really committed to setting up as the main POV in a piece of long fiction.
Since all of us grow up under systems of structural political, economic, and social powers and disenfranchisements (with respect to the nuances of individual cultural backgrounds, mine being as a white American)—and those same systems dictate and influence things like mass media production and consumption, which is a core concept in the dialogues surrounding authentic representation—it follows that I grew up watching (and learning to identify with) white male protagonists, while simultaneously internalizing the misogyny bundled up with female “representation” (itself a false monolith with little attention paid to variations in experiences across racial, cultural, sexual orientation, gender, etc. identities). It makes sense, then, that I ultimately was left feeling completely uninterested in and uncompelled by female characters and their stories. Part of this, I’m coming to understand now, stemmed from my burgeoning genderqueerness and the ways in which I was (unknowingly) struggling for representation of that experience; but equal parts were my own internalized misogyny. Deciding to write Orbit (something that started more than a decade ago) was experimental in many aspects—an experiment on whether or not I could write a novel-length piece, an experiment on whether or not I could construct a cohesive world, etc.—but a primary part of that experimentation was addressing this question: can I write a female main character who I am compelled by, who is flawed and difficult and authentic in a way that I can stand behind, as her creator?
Though it was a fraught birthing process, the answer (in Ciaan) became yes.
I think that those are probably the best (and most succinct) descriptors I can use for her: flawed, difficult, authentic. Some people have said that they found her “unlikeable” which was interesting feedback for me, since I believe that many of the female characters we get in media (still, even those who are “strong”) are packaged to be palatable for mainstream audiences in a way that translates to marketable likeability. Female protagonists can be flawed, but they must be beautifully so—they can be frustrating, but only if they do sufficient penance for it before their narrative is resolved. Where cismale heroes get a great deal of leeway with their behavior and personality, female characters are still much more limited. That’s not to say that there aren’t “difficult” non-cismale characters being written, only that there continues to be pushback against them (much of it subconscious, which is something I find myself grappling with as well). Even as I was writing Ciaan, there were points when I had to stop from discomfort and concern that she was being too unreasonable or taking up too much space or not pulling everyone else’s emotional weight (all echoes of my own self-concerns). But I actively wrote against those instincts because I wanted to see if I could create a different type of character for myself, one who wasn’t so constrained by what is and isn’t acceptable from female characters.
Another stereotype about female main characters is that they are all idealized self-inserts for their (assumed female) authors—the “Mary Sue” false equivalency. I was hyper aware of that trope throughout Orbit’s creation and probably overcorrected myself in an effort to distance my personality from Ciaan’s personality. Where she is rash and reactive, I internalize and am overly cautious. Where she flies off the handle with her temper, I simmer to a boil. Where she is bitter and resentful of those who try to care for her, I take on far too much emotional labor.
Although, I see now that most of those delineations (and the defining traits I built her around) were flaws rather than strengths. I would hope that we share more of those: loyalty to those we love, resistance against injustices, and stubbornness in our convictions (even to reckless ends). As with every character I write, there is some of me in Ciaan—enough to be refracted back through the rest of her non-me facets. That helps me connect without blurring the line too far between what their story is and what my story is.
This all sounds like I think I broke some millennia-old mold with a revolutionary character; that’s not at all what I mean. It’s just that I can’t talk about Ciaan without giving this backstory for her genesis, as context for why I wrote her the way I did. She became a funnel for the things about myself that I felt (at the time, or even now) were unlovable—and worse, unlikeable—and though I wrote her somewhat specifically to be frustrating to myself, she ended up becoming something of a personal catharsis. I ended up liking her, not in spite of her flaws but because of them, which in turn gave me some hope for the potential likability of my own less-than-perfections.
Orbit‘s focus isn’t on romance at all (yay!). What are the most important relationships between your protagonists?
I have a lot of strong feelings about romance in non-romance genres, but I won’t bore you with them here! Suffice to say, I tend to find most secondary love plots (and especially love triangles) forced and one-dimensional, not because romance is inherently forced and one-dimensional but because I don’t feel like a secondary plotline allows enough time or development for a love story. I also tend to feel like—if, for example, you’re in the middle of a world-threatening dystopic event—you’d probably have more pressing matters on your mind than super-hot fellow rag-tag revolutionaries. But that is a reflection of how I experience romantic and sexual attraction, and I’d never want to yuck anyone else’s yum. Different strokes for different folks!
For me (and, I feel, a lot of other queer folks) some of the most compelling and emotional relationships to explore are those of found family. Whether or not any of those relationships are romantic/sexual, the overarching theme of finding people who—of their own volition, and not because they are “struck with you”—choose to love and accept and support you, even into world-threatening dystopic events, is a theme that drives almost all of my work. It is the fracturing of a “traditional” familial bond (Ciaan and her first mother) that directs most of Orbit’s central narrative, but the deeper story becomes one of how a disjointed group of hurting people can come become something more—both as a team, but also individually in their togetherness.
There were two specific common (and harmful) tropes that I tried to subvert here: that of best friends—particularly a cisfemale and a cismale—being either a cover for or a denial of secret romantic love, and that of the evil or villainous step-mother. A lot of these tropes’ toxicity lies in the incorrect assumptions of love hierarchies: that platonic love is lesser than romantic/sexual love, and that biological family ties are stronger or better than non-biological ties. Ciaan’s relationships with Tidoris and her second mother were set up not only to refute those assumptions but also to offer examples of what more complex alternatives could (and do) look like within narrative trappings.
So if someone wants to know “who do the main characters belong with?” the answer is simply: each other. All four of them bring different strengths and weaknesses to their group dynamic, and they all have distinctive relationships with one another that would be hurt by a division into pairs. They are better together, and together is where they belong.
Two of your four main characters are on the asexual spectrum, as you are. While it’s not explicit in Orbit, can you talk about ways your own aceness impacts how you write these characters?
At least two are; the others have not yet fully revealed themselves to me! I started writing Orbit before I realized that I was on the a-spectrum—before discussions about asexuality and aromanticism were really happening, even in queer spaces—and came back to edit it after I’d started working through those discussions with myself, so it was very interesting to go back in revisions and see where my not-yet-named aceness had already started to seep through the sentences.
Part of that subliminal aceness was undoubtedly my active resistance against explicit love plots. Even though I was already out as queer when I started writing the first draft, and even though I was already committed to making queerness central to my stories, I still didn’t want to write in explicit romantic relationships. I enjoy writing romances in, well, romances—but have no real interest in chopping them up and shoving them between the “real story” in my other genre works. (That’s the beautiful space for transformative fanwork!) So that ace-permeated mindset was already there when I started hammering out the story, but it wasn’t until I revisited it post-aceness that the specific impact that mindset had on my characters became evident.
The most obviously a-spectrum characters in Orbit are 1119 and Tidoris, which make sense since they are also the characters with whom I share the most similar emotional internalities, but even there I struggle with the discomfort of ace stereotypes and trying not to feed into them. Is Tidoris—easily the nerdiest of the main four—ace-coded because nerds in media are desexualized in general? Is the emotional disconnect that 1119 (and all Artificials) experience from Earth humanity something that also disconnects them from their sexuality? Desexual, robotic, cold, inhuman—these are all poisonous stereotypes that plague people’s perceptions of asexuality and aromanticism; am I perpetuating them through my own internalized aphobia?
I hope not. I believe not. Though these characters may—at least in the beginning—seem like they could fall into those stereotype traps, part of their journeys and revelations are the stripping away of those assumptions to expose who they (and Ciaan and Mael) truly are. Tidoris is not awkwardly desexual, 1119 is not robotic and cold; they are both warm and vibrant and complicated characters, capable of deep and fiery love that is not lesser for not being primarily motivated by romantic and/or sexual attraction.
That said, there are definitely undertones that can be read as romantic and/or sexual in Orbit, and I absolutely encourage readers to engage with and explore those too, if they want!
I’m always fascinated by the changes a novel undergoes between first draft and final. Without spoiling it too much (if you can!), what are some major changes Orbit underwent? Alternatively, what is one of your favourite, whether big or small?
Surprisingly, not too much changed in Orbit structurally from the first draft to the final draft—probably because I tend to work out a lot of those kinks in the brainstorming/outlining process! I’m also a very slow and methodical writer who edits as they go, so there aren’t usually major plot or character changes post-first full draft.
However, there were definitely extensive rewrites! They were mostly stylistic—both an attempt to update a manuscript written seven years ago to be more in-tune with my current writing style, and because I wrote that first draft after I’d been living for several years in a non-native English-speaking country (South Korea). Living abroad was amazing, and part of that included trying my best to learn and communicate in the native language of my new home, so a lot of my interactions were in Korean (or a Korean-English hybrid). That obviously changes how you speak and create in your own native language, and during rewrites (about five years after emigrating back to the States) it became very apparent that the tone and syntax didn’t flow in the way that I wanted it to. So most of those rewrites involved sentence restructuring and word exchanges—far more tedious and much less intriguing than substantial structural changes, I’m afraid.
There was one significant change—or clarification, rather—that is also probably my favorite: as with aceness, I wrote the first draft of Orbit before I had really started to come to terms with being genderqueer/non-binary so that wasn’t something that I had explicitly planned on exploring in the novel. When I came back to it, I’d also come out more fully with my gender identity and had been working to engage with it creatively; from memory, I thought that I might be able to do something with one of the main four (1119) but was pretty sure that it would need to be built-up implicitly in this story (with an explicit coming-out happening later) just to make sense. However, when I got into my rewrites I realized that most of the framework was already there for 1119’s gender identity to be authentically explored in a subplot, so I went for it! Finding out that I’d already subconsciously written a non-binary character was a delightful (and telling) surprise, and one that I was very excited about being able to make explicit in the final draft.
Finally, it sounds like Orbit has terrific and intriguing world-building. What’s one of your favourite details or aspect of the world you’ve created?
First of all, thank you! It can be an infuriating line to walk between threadbare world-building and overcrowded world-building, and I hope that I was able to keep it relatively balanced. I’m a stickler for as much consistency as possible, so I tried to ensure that I wasn’t creating details that were too specific—which might later have to be retconned—while also considering potentially unique ways in which our societies may (and may not) have evolved.
I never set an exact date, but this is a near-future story—the initial seeds were planted during a strange college course curriculum overlap, where I read Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game and Alex Kotlowitz’s There Are No Children Here concurrently. That odd combination got me thinking about what the future of public housing could look like, and all the racial and socio-economic implications that would go along with it. While I don’t think that metal housing planets orbiting Earth is the exact next step in our reality (although, given the current state of affairs, who even knows) I am pretty proud of that concept and the collection of metaphors and symbolism that it offered for the story.
One of my favorite pieces of individual imagery—regardless of its scientific veracity—is the artificial atmosphere. The idea of mimicked skies and weather but only a sheen, only a veil through which the wide void of the galaxy still presses in. The juxtaposition between those false horizons and the naked stretch of blackness and stars above the port base; it’s such a terrifying and yet inspiring visual for me. It represents all of the characters’ fear and wonder and potentials and dangers and, well, I’m always gonna be a sucker for space.