Welcome back to our last author interview of 2017! This week, I’m pleased to featured the talented Gordon B. White. Gordon is the author of numerous works of short fiction, and his stories have appeared in Nightscript II, Borderlands 6, and A Breath from the Sky, among other publications. In addition to his fiction writing, he is also an interviewer, including his popular Deep Cuts series at Hell Notes.

Recently, Gordon and I discussed his inspiration as an author, his recent time at Clarion, and what he has planned for the future.

A couple icebreakers to start: when did you first decide to become a writer, and who are some of your favorite authors?

While I can’t remember when I first wanted to be a writer, I can remember the brief period when I didn’t. I was one of those kids who loves to read – when I was in elementary school, if I couldn’t fall asleep at night by the time my parents went to bed, my mom would let me turn the light back on and read to myself. So of course I would force myself to stay up late, just so that I could read more.

I wrote all the time in school. I remember being bored in my middle school science class and instead of taking notes on chemical equations, I would write scenes of knights and orcs dueling under purple skies. Even into college, I wrote for fun (and wrote poetry for girls) and took creative writing classes and really liked it. For some reason, though, I decided that I was going to push back against everyone’s expectation that I’d be an English major and instead began a period in the wilderness of other social sciences.

By the time I went to law school, I had convinced myself that I should give up on creative writing. That lasted for a few years. Then, during grad school, my father died and all that grief came out in poetry and stories (you can still see it in some of my recent work, like last year’s “As Summer’s Mask Slips”). I couldn’t deny it any more. So I took the work ethic and discipline I’d developed in grad school, using it to write more seriously and research markets. Now here I am.

As for favorite authors, I feel like that’s a loaded question. For every one I name, I’ll be sure to have left a dozen off, greatly offending anyone who is still alive, as well as the estates of the dead. The last thing I want is angry Facebook friends and hungry ghosts on my case.

What in particular draws you to speculative literature? Do you remember the first speculative story you read or film you saw growing up?

I think there are two things that draw me to speculative fiction: First, I love speculative fiction’s ability to dramatize and externalize human emotions and conflicts. There’s so much poetic and metaphoric potential in the speculative, which makes it not only a useful tool, but also a thoroughly entertaining one to employ. By using speculative elements to create implausible situations, writers and readers can then explore thoroughly realistic and cathartic reactions within those confines. I see speculative fiction on a continuum with mythology and religion when it comes to exploring human relationships and conflicts (although speculative fiction is usually less dogmatic about explaining the “why” of things).

Second, I employ speculative elements in my own writing because I feel that I lack the authority to presume to speak for other human beings, yet I desperately want to understand them. By using speculative elements, I can shift reality enough that I’m still digging into human characters acting in real ways, but by being one step off from true, I’m more comfortable with taking that liberty. As an example, while I have anxiety over something like the demands of being a parent, since I’m not one, I don’t feel qualified to really dig those elements out in a realistic “literary” context. Of course, I can write a story about adopting an alien baby or finding a wolf-child in the woods and, with that little bit of a change, allow myself the freedom to explore.

As to my first exposure to the speculative, I grew up with a mix of fairytales, ghost stories, and too many books, so I was awash in it from the very beginning. My memory is also a bit spotty from my misspent early twenties, so, unfortunately, I cannot recall.

You’re a recent Clarion West graduate. First off, congratulations on such a huge achievement! What was the most surprising part of the experience, and any kernels of wisdom you’d like to share with the rest of us?

To me, the most surprising part was that the camaraderie with my cohorts ended up being just as, if not more, important than the instructional aspects. I learned a ton about writing, really honed in on my particular strengths and weaknesses, and stepped up my writing discipline, but going through the experience with fifteen other writers at the same time was amazing. Despite having lots of online social connections with others, the ability to talk and brainstorm and commiserate and argue with my classmates in person was fantastic. I love and miss them all.

As far as kernels of wisdom go, I’d be here for the next week trying to type out my notes if I was going to offer technical advice, but the thing that sticks with me the most is that each of us has to come up with our own definition of success. There’s no one way to be a writer or to have a writing career, and so being overly concerned with comparing your process and your position and your achievements with others can put you on a never-ending Ladder of Sadness. That, and that the only predictor of “success” is persistence.

In addition to your fiction writing, you’re also an interviewer at Hellnotes. What inspired you to start interviewing authors, and how if at all has the process shaped your own writing?

I got started doing this back around the time I started writing seriously again and have done a few dozen since then (I have an archive on my site here). I think I saw a Facebook post or an email looking for people to do interviews and I thought it would be a good way to meet authors writing the kinds of things I wanted to write and, if possible, steal their mojo. The mojo-stealing hasn’t quite worked out, but I’ve been very pleased to be able to run into former interviewees at conventions and use our prior discussions as an icebreaker.

I started off doing mostly promotional interviews for people with new books or other projects, but Hellnotes has been kind enough to allow me to do my own feature series called Deep Cuts. In those interviews, I select an author who I admire and think is doing really interesting work, and then we do an in-depth spoiler-filled discussion on one of their free-to-read online stories. I love digging into all the “deep” aspects of a story – structural choices, themes, influences, symbolism, conversations with other works – so I really like sharing my reading of a story with the authors in order to have as much of a dialogue as the format allows.

In doing these, the process of closely reading (and re-reading and re-re-reading) has helped me become more attentive when revising my own work. Part of the process is asking myself, “Why is this story worth telling? What is it attempting to do other than merely existing?” Moreover, it’s shown me that sometimes symbols are unintentional, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. They may have been unconsciously inserted by the author or they may exist only in the reader’s eye, but they’re there and they influence the reading. This has made me more attentive to the possible interpretations of things I write, and – although I like some ambiguity – I try to write in a way that guides readers away from potentially distracting unintended interpretations.

Also, I’ve recently become an interviewer over at Lightspeed Magazine, too! I do Author Spotlight interviews for them where I try to do the same kind of questions as in Deep Cuts.

What is your favorite part of the writing process: establishing setting, crafting characters, or writing dialogue?

Of those three, I think it’s probably establishing setting, but that’s an offshoot of how my mind works. I love prose. I’m familiar with the adage that “Story is everything” and greatly envy people who can craft a compelling story with clean, unobtrusive prose, but I have no desire to do that. I love the flow of sounds, the shape of letters on the page. I love poetry and lyrics and rhythm and vocabulary, so all of that is usually at the forefront of my mind when I’m working on a project that really draws me in. Because of that, I typically start with either a speculative premise or a bit of description in prose that I really like, and then I use all my tools to build up the setting using that. In doing so, I can do extra work on building themes and tone and other stuff by hiding them in the backdrop of the setting.

Part of my preference, though, stems from the fact that I don’t have a very vivid visual imagination. I’m not completely aphantasiac, but most of what I visualize is hazy and usually only very isolated details. My drafts sometimes get the “white room” critique, but that’s because that’s how I see things in my mind. However, while I struggle with visualizing settings to translate them into descriptions, I am much more in-tune with assemblages of words and the sort of emotional effects and totality of feeling that they cumulatively elicit from a reader. That’s why neither invisible prose nor visually lush prose speaks very much to me; I need the sizzle and the slam because I feel words more than see sights. As a result, I really like the wide-open area that playing with setting allows.

That’s not to say that I don’t like crafting characters or writing dialogue, it’s just that unless one of those elements is the guiding impetus of a particular story, I tend to let them fall by the wayside a bit. It’s not that I avoid them, I just kind of . . . forget about them . . . and let “good enough” slip through. I’m working on it, though!

Oh, and since I started off by saying “of those three” before making a choice, I’ll let you in on a secret: My absolute favorite part of writing is revision. My mighty struggle as a writer is always to finish first drafts, but when the whetstone comes out, I’m ready to hone.

Out of your published work, do you have a personal favorite?

I have a sentimental spot for “Hair Shirt Drag,” which I consider my first “real” publication. It’s the story of a gender nonconforming witch in the rural South and a special coming of age ritual, as informed by RuPaul’s Drag Race. The protagonist in that story is still my favorite character that I’ve ever written. (Hair Shirt Drag first appeared in Sekhmet Press’s Wrapped in Black: 13 Tales of Witches and the Occult, and is reprinted in the charity anthology We Are Not This: Carolina Writers for Equality, as well as a forthcoming audiocast from Tales to Terrify).

I also really like “The Albatrossity Exhibition, or Why I Want to Fuck the Ancient Mariner” which appeared in Milkfist Issue 1. It’s a J.G. Ballard/Samuel Taylor Coleridge mash-up retelling of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” in alternatively supernatural and hyper-realistic detail, employing one of my most deliberately non-traditional structures and some of my favorite prose.

What projects are you currently working on?

Well, I’m using NaNoWriMo as an impetus to draft a first (trunk) novel about rural small town intrigue and ancestral memory set in an alternate 1990s where magical plants grow from people’s graves. I doubt it will ever see the light of day, but I’ve never tackled a project of novel length and I’m finding it alternatingly wonderful and horrible, so I’m okay with doing my practice behind the woodshed. While I love revision but sometimes struggle with pushing through those rough spots between beginning and end, the NaNoWriMo accountability is very helpful. I know some people dislike NaNoWriMo’s emphasis on word count, but I find that having daily goals fits in very well with my normal writing process. I definitely prefer to get a first draft down as quickly as possible and then spend my time restructuring, rewriting, and (eventually) polishing, so having to hit a certain number of words each day pushes me to get the story down bit by bit.

Other than that, I have some inchoate projects that I’m sure I’ll jinx by discussing, but here goes: A fragmented cosmic horror story involving cave paintings, but told in the form of static panels and non-narrative background information; research (fiction and nonfiction) for a Weird West legal thriller idea; background reading for something involving capital-F Fate in the mold of Greek tragedies; and some sci-fi flash pieces revolving around cyborg art and fashion.

Where can we find you online?

I recently had to do a bit of re-branding by incorporating my middle initial into things, as there is another Gordon White who is very active in chaos magick and other esoteric areas. As a result, things being published since August 2017 are under “Gordon B. White” and so is most of my web presence.

My website is at www.gordonbwhite.com and I hope to start getting it spiffed up soon, although it currently redirects to my original website (www.grizzlyspectacles.com) where you can find links to all my publications and interviews. I’m also on Twitter as @gordonbwhite and on Facebook.

Huge thanks to Gordon B. White for being part of this week’s author interview series!

Happy reading!

Welcome back! This week’s featured writer is the amazing Vanessa Fogg. Vanessa is the author of The Lilies of Dawn, a fantasy novelette from Annorlunda Books. In addition, her short fiction has appeared widely in outlets including GigaNotoSaurus, The Future Fire, Mythic Delirium, and Luna Station Quarterly, among others.

Recently, Vanessa and I discussed her inspiration as an author as well as what she hopes to see for the future of the fantasy genre.

A couple icebreakers to start: when did you first decide to become a writer, and who are some of your favorite authors?

I was one of those kids who was writing, always making up stories; I remember stapling pages together to make “books.” I wrote throughout my childhood and adolescence—short stories, sketches, and wretched poetry. In college, I even minored in creative writing. But I majored in biology, which was another love. After college I took a long break from creative writing as I concentrated on trying to build a scientific research career. I only slowly made my way back into writing, after more than a decade away. I started off submitting a little bit here and there to literary journals. In 2013 I left the laboratory bench for good, and decided to finally take my writing seriously.

Early writing influences: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising series, Ursula LeGuin, Patricia McKillip. Current authors and works I love: Lev Grossman’s The Magicians trilogy; Sofia Samatar’s Olondria novels and everything else she writes, everything. Ken Liu. Carmen Maria Machado. Aliette de Bodard. Short fiction by Alyssa Wong and Isabel Yap. I could keep going forever.

Your novelette, The Lilies of Dawn, which was released last year through Annorlunda Books, is such a beautiful work of fantasy. What was the inspiration for the book, and what was your process as you were writing it?

Thank you for your kind words!

This story grew from a single image: a girl standing in her boat on a lake of blooming lotus flowers, staring up at a flock of cranes.

Where did this image come from? Two different sparks. The first one: this travel article about a beautiful lotus flower-covered lake in northeast Thailand. The second spark: a crane sanctuary that my family and I stumbled upon while visiting the Wisconsin Dells. I’d never seen crowned cranes up close before.

The central image came to me, and then I had to work slowly to understand what it meant and to unfold the plot.

As for my process? A lot of brainstorming and mulling of ideas before ever setting anything to paper (or Word document, as it were). I usually need at least the basic plot points and ending set in my mind before I can begin writing. The writing itself is slow, for I often revise as I write. I usually know where the story is going, broadly speaking, but the unexpected twists and details along the way make the journey all the more fun.

You have written both short fiction as well as longer works. Do you find that your process differs depending on the length of the story?

Not really. I suspect my typical Outline-Only-in-my-Head-and-Revise-as-I-Go method would not fly for a novel, but I’ve yet to attempt a novel. I think novel-writing would probably kill me. But as the saying goes: never say never.

In addition to your fiction writing, you also review fiction on your site, It’s a Jumble. What inspired you to start reviewing, and how, if at all, has it affected your own fiction writing?

I’m gratified to see my reviews getting more attention of late. When I wrote those first reviews, I don’t think anyone was even reading. I wrote them for myself, and for the off chance that someone might stumble upon them and be inspired to read the linked story or book. I wrote on the off chance that the author of a story might stumble upon that review and know that someone loved their work. But at the beginning it was really for me. There is a pleasure in analyzing a book or story and trying to figure out what makes it work. Trying to articulate what I loved about it, and why. My short story recommendations tend to consist only of short summaries (because I don’t want spoilers for such short works), but I’ve written more extended analyses for some books. Now that I know that people actually are reading these posts—well, that’s a big motivator now, too! I just want to boost the stories I love, and metaphorically grab others by the shoulders and say, “Read this!”

As for how reviewing has affected my own fiction writing? I can’t point to anything specific, but I am sure it has helped me. To critically review something is to pay attention to it—real attention. It means looking at craftsmanship, at how the story is put together and how it has its effect. That attention to others’ writing can only help my own writing (or so I would think!).

Fantasy is a constantly evolving genre. As a writer whose work is mostly in the realm of fantasy, where do you see the genre going over the next ten to twenty years? What would you like to see more of? Conversely, what would you like to see less of in fantasy?

Oh, what a question. The future is often unpredictable (as this last year of geopolitics has driven home). But there are certainly trend lines, many of which I’ve found hopeful for fantasy publishing if not elsewhere. Literary forms are always evolving, and in speculative fiction I think there’s always been a particular hunger for the new. And what I’ve been seeing the last few years is an impressive influx of talented new voices representing new backgrounds and perspectives that were not represented well before. Tolkien basically established medieval European-based epic fantasy as a genre. I think Tolkien-esque fantasy is still popular, but we are now seeing more and more books and stories exploring fantasy worlds based on other myths and cultures—African, Asian, Central American and South American, and more. We’re seeing these new perspectives, these global voices, extended into urban fantasy and other fantasy modes as well. No one can stop the increasing globalization of our world, and I for one think it’s great to find writers from Singapore, Malaysia, Nigeria, India, and more in the pages of my favorite journals. And of course, there are the many Western-born and-based writers who have cultural connections to non-European cultures and draw literary inspiration from them–of which I am one.

Another trend I notice is the increasing overlap between “literary” writing and “fantasy” writing. I always thought it was a false dichotomy, but the boundaries between the two seem more porous these days, and I know of writers who are publishing in both prestigious literary journals and prestigious genre magazines. I see “experimental” literary techniques appearing in genre work. Style and technique are always evolving, of course. I’m very interested in seeing how these techniques will change fantasy writing. As an example, Sofia Samatar and Carmen Maria Machado are very different writers, but I think they both bring what many would term a certain “literary” feel (though very different “literary” feels!) to their works.

I think overall that fantasy publishing is becoming more accepting of different voices, styles, and stories. I think that can only be a good thing. I think American publishing is becoming more open to voices right here in America which were not well-represented before, and I think that is a very good thing.

Stories are always reflective of the real time and place of their authors—even when they’re fantasies of dragons and spaceships. The political upheaval of this time is certainly going to be reflected in the stories told now. I don’t think we’ll fully appreciate how until much later.

As for what I want to see more of? What I want to see less of? I want to see more good stories. That’s it. Stories of all kinds, stories of all types of people, stories told in mind-bendingly innovative ways as well as more traditionally-told narratives that still delight and break my heart. I want to see fewer boring, cliched, badly written stories. I want stories that surprise and dazzle and move me. That’s all.

What is your favorite part of the writing process: outlining new ideas, crafting a first draft, or polishing an almost finished piece?

This differs for each piece. There have been stories where I loved revising, and it was my favorite part. There have been stories where revisions were painful and like pulling teeth. There were first drafts that went down easy and first drafts that were hard (usually the latter). I will say that background research is most consistently fun. To the extent that research often becomes a procrastination tool against actual writing.

Out of your own published work, do you have a favorite piece?

The Lilies of Dawn is one of my favorites. But I will also always have a soft spot for another fantasy novelette I published, “Between Sea and Shore” which appeared in GigaNotoSaurus in 2014. This was the first story I wrote after leaving academic science and deciding to finally get serious about fiction writing. I still think it’s one of my best in terms of character development and emotional complexity—there are things you can do at novelette length that you simply can’t achieve at shorter wordcounts. Like Lilies, “Between Sea and Shore” is set in a secondary world which draws inspiration from Southeast Asia, and like Lilies it draws on themes of family, duty, and belonging. There are ways in which I think Lilies and “Between Sea and Shore” are in conversation with each other. Although I guess you can say that an author’s works are always in conversation with one another, at some level.

What projects are you currently working on?

Ooh, I hate talking about works-in-progress because I always think I’ll jinx them! Um, I’m doing some background research for a dark fantasy that might just veer into horror.

Huge thanks to Vanessa Fogg for being this week’s featured author! Find her online at her author site as well as on Twitter and Goodreads.

Happy reading!

Welcome back! Today’s interview is with the incredible S.P. Miskowski. S.P. is a three-time Shirley Jackson Award nominee. Her fiction has appeared widely in such outlets as Black Static, Supernatural Tales, and anthologies including Looming Low, Autumn Cthulhu, and The Madness of Dr. Caligari, among many others. Earlier this year, her novel, I Wish I Was Like You, and her collection, Strange Is the Night, debuted from Trepidatio Publishing.

Recently, S.P. and I discussed her inspiration as an author as well as her future projects.

A couple icebreakers to start: when did you first decide to become a writer, and who are some of your favorite authors?

Writing was never a career decision. I’ve been writing all of my life, keeping journals, constructing little books of my stories with cover art when I was in grade school. Some of my poetry was published in the school newspaper. In college I majored in Psychology and then changed the focus after a year, studying English Literature and Anthropology. Even then I was writing stories, attending an off-campus fiction workshop for the merciless critiques, and occasionally getting published in small press magazines.

After graduation I put together a collection of stories that was lucky enough to be selected for a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. I had an agent lined up in New York. At his suggestion I wrote a novel to back up the collection. The novel was about elderly siblings who had known F.W. Murnau and were reduced to making porn films in the Valley of the Sun in the 1980s. It’s still sitting in a drawer somewhere because I tossed away all of those plans, moved to Seattle, and went for a graduate degree in theatre.

For about 15 years I wrote plays and supported myself editing, teaching, mentoring, and doing temp work. In 2010 I decided to quit theatre altogether, and I recommitted to writing stories. Long story short, writing isn’t a choice. The choice is about how and where and in what medium.

I’ve gone through many phases, jumping into the work of an author, reading several books back-to-back and moving on—from Raymond Chandler to Vladimir Nabokov to Hermann Hesse to Kurt Vonnegut. Some of the authors I return to time and again are Janet Malcolm, Joan Didion, Shirley Jackson, Flannery O’Connor, Daphne du Maurier, Ruth Rendell (her stories and novellas rather than her detective novels) and more recently I’ve become a fan of Megan Abbott. She has a sharp eye and a keen sense for the hypocrisy we embrace as part of our survival kit. When it comes to dissecting female characters and their motives, she’s superb. She pays women the respect of absolute honesty.

Congratulations on the release of your novel, I Wish I Was Like You. What was the process behind the book? How long did it take you to complete, and were there any unexpected developments along the way? Also, what inspired you to use 1990s Seattle as a setting? 

Thank you. The process began with notes while fulfilling other commitments. I had a long series of deadlines for stories I was invited to submit to anthologies. While writing those stories I sketched out ideas, images, themes for I Wish I Was Like You. By the time I was ready to make the novel my daily priority I had quite a lot of material and the challenge was to decide what the point of view would be.

I’m not sure when it occurred to me that the narrator would be dead from the first page, looking back over the city as it morphed between 1990 and 2016. But as soon as I had the idea I knew it was wrong, at least according to every writing class and manual out there. “Never open with a corpse.” I could imagine seeing that tip on a Facebook post. I could also hear it in the voice of grumpy teachers I’d known. The more I thought about it, the more it became one voice, a character named Lee Todd Butcher, a washed up crime fiction author teaching at a community college. Once I had both of these characters—the angry, dead narrator and the disheveled teacher spouting the rules of crime fiction, the book sort of took off. From first notes to final draft, it was completed in less than two years.

My choice of setting was fueled by the nostalgia of friends. No one ever believes middle age is going to be a reality. We squander youth arrogantly thinking we’re different from the last generation and always will be. Then you begin to see your friends getting married, having babies, seeking more permanent homes—and bemoaning the ways in which the places they love are changing. At one point I could scroll through the newsfeed on Facebook and read half a dozen “oh no, they’re killing the city” posts in one day.

Of course the big, central element to this disappointment isn’t the city itself but the loss of youth. The city represents what you were when you were just starting out and you were convinced that you would get everything you wanted.

I tried to capture that, to sort of honor it without being sentimental. I tried to describe the Seattle of 1990 for the benefit of those friends who knew it well and for younger readers who will never know that incarnation of the city. I’m less nostalgic than some of my friends but I tried to catch that sense of a place representing one’s early days.

Your collection, Strange Is the Night, also made its debut this year, so congratulations on this as well! How did you choose which stories to include in the table of contents? Were there any you were planning to include that ended up being cut, or any last-minute additions? 

The stories in this collection portray ordinary life interrupted by something extraordinarily disturbing. Most of them have an urban or suburban setting. I left out anything I’d written with a more folk horror background or a sense of rural isolation to it. Maybe I’ll collect those stories in another book sometime.

There were no cuts, but my editor wanted me to add two original stories so that the final balance was ten reprints and three new pieces. The new ones are “Animal House,” “A Condition for Marriage,” and “Ms. X Regrets Everything.”

I’ve loved your past contributions to Nightmare Magazine‘s The H Word column. How does your approach to writing nonfiction differ from fiction writing? Do you have any plans for forthcoming nonfiction in other venues? 

Storytelling is my natural field. Nonfiction is something I approach with great anxiety. I mentioned some of my favorite authors—Joan Didion, Janet Malcolm—and one of my favorite books is The Orchid Thief. So the standard is quite high. Also, I’ve worked with enough real journalists to have enormous respect for what they do. I could never be a journalist. Earlier on, in college, I learned a healthy respect for the essay form. Although an essay may be mostly personal observation, I feel the need to present information that’s been fact-checked and challenged before it’s let loose in the wild.

I never plan to write nonfiction. I’m content to scribble a blog post now and then. These opportunities sort of came along, and I decided to take a stab at it. The Nightmare Magazine nonfiction editor, Wendy Wagner, was brilliant at making suggestions and gently nudging me in the most interesting direction.

In your work, you craft such nuanced female characters, many of whom are far more complicated and sometimes even less traditionally “likeable” than the average women in literature. You included a fantastic list of your favorite horrible female characters in one of your H Word articles; do you have any more recent additions specifically from speculative fiction that you would add to that list? On a similar note, do you feel that there are more nuanced female characters in fiction today than ever before (even if we do still have a long way to go)?  

I think there have always been some hellish female characters in fiction. For the more nuanced ones I look to recent books. One character I still marvel at is the narrator in Zoë Heller’s novel What Was She Thinking? (a.k.a. Notes on a Scandal). I think the really dark edges and the complexities of the character were sheared away for the film. She ended up being a doddering old schoolteacher with an adolescent crush on younger women. In the book there was a real sense that she wanted to possess and devour and destroy the object of her desire. In the film it seemed she would have been happy to make her tea every day. It’s a good demonstration of how complex female characters are perceived, misinterpreted, and manipulated to underscore traditional values.

I mentioned Megan Abbott’s books. The girls in The End of Everything are among the very few instances in modern fiction where an author got female adolescence absolutely right, and really nailed the confusion and strangeness of that age. In You Will Know Me, Abbott applies the same clear-eyed approach to the American family, in particular the pressures of motherhood during this era when expectations are insanely high. I loved the women in Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, Behind Her Eyes by Sarah Pinborough, and Concrete Angel by Patricia Abbott. These authors kick ass when it comes to creating indelible female characters that ring true in every way.

Out of your published work, do you have a personal favorite?

I love the first story in my collection, “A.G.A.” It was originally published in Supernatural Tales edited by David Longhorn. On the surface it’s just two guys talking in a bar. The menace is in the details and in the tales told by one of the guys. These tales open it out and provide an ever-darkening backdrop. It’s one of my simplest stories in terms of the presentation but it’s pretty disturbing in its implications.

What projects are you currently working on?

Over the next six months I’ll be writing five stories to submit to anthologies, and completing a novel that’s underway. JournalStone plans to publish a novel and novella from me in 2018. Fingers crossed. This is the kind of work schedule I love.

Where can we find you online?

You can find my web site if you Google my name, and you can find me on Facebook and Twitter, although I’m posting a bit less these days. Send a friend request. If you don’t look like a bot or a fake identity for a Russian troll, I’ll accept your invitation.

Tremendous thanks to S.P. Miskowski for being this week’s featured author!

Happy reading!

Welcome back! This week’s featured author is the incredible Christina Sng. Christina is a supremely accomplished author of both fiction and poetry with her work appearing in a wide variety of venues, including Mythic Delirium, Apex Magazine, Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, and many more. Her recent books include Astropoetry and A Collection of Nightmares.

Recently, Christina and I discussed her inspiration as a writer, her tips for surviving the rejection of publishing, as well as how her love of gardening figures into her work.

A couple icebreakers to start: when did you first decide to become a writer, and who are some of your favorite authors?

For as long as I can remember, I’ve always been scribbling a poem or doodling a comic wherever I am. It took me decades to realize that I am happiest and most fulfilled when I write. Writing is part of who I am, it is what I do as much as living and breathing is.

Enid Blyton introduced me to magical worlds as a child, Robert R. McCammon showed me the horrors of humanity as a teenager, Sylvia Plath spoke to me as a young adult, and Ben Bova took me to the stars as a new mother.

You are a widely published and extremely accomplished poet, with your work appearing in countless venues, both printed and online. Do you have a certain approach when crafting a new work, or is the process behind each piece entirely unique?

As with everything else in life, I’ve had to make time for writing, even in the days when I had much less commitments. These days I steal time whenever I can and have learnt to write in the oddest places and even through interruptions. But only haiku survives such conditions. Longer poems and fiction require uninterrupted, relaxed, and focused time which is as rare as an automatically folded shirt.

There is always a space carved out for writing and when I am in that sacred space, inspiration hits at all angles, and the story or poem flows.

Often the words write themselves, almost like automatic writing but it is in the editing process, perhaps, where I am more present. Few pass the muster without being edited. But a rare few have, like “After the War”. I have a great fondness for their perfect completeness.

As an author who has been involved in the publishing industry for well over a decade, do you have any tips for writers who are just starting out? In particular, how have you learned to deal with rejection, and how do you manage your time as a writer?

Keep writing and submitting. Always be scrupulously polite and respectful in correspondence. When a piece returns rejected, send it out again right away but first consider any advice an editor offers. I normally give the poems or story a once over before sending it out again, within 24 hours.

Many moons ago, I received a rejection from the Harvard Review on a poem where the editor had made some suggestions and asked me to resend it after I had made revisions. I worked furiously to improve it as the editor suggested. It was out in the mail (yes, the snail mail era) again within 2 weeks but during that time, a new editor took over and rejected my poem. While the rejection was disappointing, I was buoyed that a Harvard Review editor thought enough of my poem to offer suggestions on improving it. Since then, I’ve taken rejections as an indication of where I am in my writing, if the work needs improvement, and if it is a right fit for the venue.

I’ll be honest. In between caring for the family and home, I have had to steal time from sleep to restore myself and write late into the night. If Margaret Thatcher could be Prime Minister on 4 hours sleep a night, so could I. Well, I make do with 4-6 hours most nights and luxurious days are the ones where I get 7 hours. But truly, most nights, my brain is in a fog so much of my work now are very short pieces.

You list gardening as one of your hobbies when you’re not writing. That being said, do you ever find your love of gardens influencing your poetry?

Oh yes, definitely. I’ve written a lot about humans destroying our beloved Earth, plants taking over and eating everyone, and the irreversible changes happening to our world now. On a more positive note, trying to inhabit new planets and moons but normally not surviving. Rather bleak, I admit, but I’m seeing the self-annihilation of the human species in the next 500 years, a bit more optimistic than Stephen Hawking who cited 100 years.

If forced to choose, which part of the writing process is your favorite: drafting new ideas, working on a first draft, or polishing an almost finished piece?

All of it, really. The joys are different in each stage. The delight in discovery, the diligence of carving and molding, and the accomplishment of a completed piece.

Out of your published work, do you have a favorite piece?

I have many favorites. “After the War” is one of them, as is “Exquisite”, the opening poem in my book, A Collection of Nightmares. Many early poems I treasure, “The Art of Weaving” and “Postwar”. Of science fiction, “The Leviathans of Jupiter” — this year’s Rhysling nominee, “Twenty Years” — last year’s, and “The Perfect Planet”, which appeared in Apex Magazine. My favorite fantasy poem is “Allegra”, a 2014 Rhysling nominee.

What projects are you currently working on?

I am compiling a horrorku chapbook, a full-length haiku collection, a bumper science fiction collection, and hopefully a short story collection over the next 4-8 years. After selling a historic two flash fictions this year, I’ve been especially motivated to write more and I’m particularly enjoying writing flash and micro fiction. My various hats (fussy things they are) don’t like to be worn at the same time so I have to shift gears whenever writing a different genre.

Tremendous thanks to Christina Sng for being this week’s featured author. Find her at her author website as well as on Facebook and Twitter.

Happy reading!