Ciel Pierlot is joining us today to talk about her novel, Bluebird. Here’s the publisher’s description:
Lesbian gunslinger fights spies in space!
Three factions vie for control of the galaxy. Rig, a gunslinging, thieving, rebel with a cause, doesn’t give a damn about them and she hasn’t looked back since abandoning her faction three years ago.
That is, until her former faction sends her a message: return what she stole from them, or they’ll kill her twin sister.
Rig embarks on a journey across the galaxy to save her sister – but for once she’s not alone. She has help from her network of resistance contacts, her taser-wielding librarian girlfriend, and a mysterious bounty hunter.
If Rig fails and her former faction finds what she stole from them, trillions of lives will be lost–including her sister’s. But if she succeeds, she might just pull the whole damn faction system down around their ears. Either way, she’s going to do it with panache and pizzazz.
What’s Ciel’s favorite bit?
CIEL PIERLOT
As a disaster bisexual, I really like silly queer jokes. If you’ve ever had the misfortune to meet me in person, this will probably become obvious within five minutes or less. Once I began writing Rig and forming her personality, I soon started foisting my most terrible of jokes onto her
until it became part of her as well. Sorry, Rig, I know you’ll probably get some flak for that. That said, it seems as though nearly every queer person I’ve met makes the same bad jokes, so perhaps there’s just some manual beamed directly into our brains with bad joke instructions.
If it’s not really clear from the title, bird names feature prominently in Bluebird. Not only is Rig’s ship obviously named Bluebird, but there are a number of characters and organizations named after birds as well. It should also be noted that while I made up cool and funky space names for most animals, all bird names are unaltered from real life birds. Something-something birds represent freedom, something-something freedom being an important theme both in the book and in relation to Rig. Something-something seemed as though this would be more meaningful if I didn’t make up funky space names.
Aside from naming her ship Bluebird, Rig also has the equivalent of a hover-bike that she’s named Chickadee. This is a double whammy of a bad queer joke. The first is obvious, in that she’s a lesbian and the bike has the word ‘chick’ in it. The second is less obvious if you didn’t spend way too many hours of your life googling different kinds of birds, though Rig does point it out in the book. A chickadee falls under the tit family of birds. Get it? Cause lesbian… tits… The joke’s funnier when I explain it, right?
While I love that name now, I very nearly didn’t go with the name Chickadee. I thought at first “oh I should do something more serious, maybe don’t even name the bike at all, blah blah” but of course Rig had to name her bike, she names everything, and of course it wouldn’t be serious, Rig insists on surrounding herself with as much levity as she can muster. Another thought I had was the name Sparrow but then I remembered that I already used that name for something else in the book and also that’d be yoinking whole-cloth from Destiny and I already reference that video game enough as it is. The name my beta reader was pushing for was actually Zoom-zoom and while dear god I found that hilarious, I just couldn’t do it. That would be a bit too silly, even for me. Which is saying something.
So congratulations, Chickadee, you dodged one hell of a bullet there.
LINKS:
BIO:
Ciel Pierlot is a disaster bisexual from the San Francisco Bay Area. She’s also a giant nerd and no, you cannot stop her from bragging about her lightsaber collection. When she’s not writing SFF novels, she’s busy being a digital artist and a hardcore gaymer.
