Summer Sessions 2011: Session Ten

via eonism.net

What is The Summer Sessions?

The Summer Sessions is a project organised by Magen Toole with the help of Melissa Dominic, bringing authors, poets, photographers and artists together under a common theme: A desire to create. This year’s project consists of ten people, in different stages of their careers and creative development, from different cultural and educational backgrounds, who agreed to be interviewed and interview one another, with the goal of cross-posting each others’ interviews in our respective blogs. It’s a project about knowing who’s in our community, and giving back to that community by helping one another promote our own work.

SESSION TEN: MAGEN TOOLE, INTERVIEWED BY BERIT ELLENGSEN

Drawing on a familiarity with the anxious and the alienated, weird and dark fiction Magen Toole takes some time to discuss her work, her favorite movies, and her love of bad television. Find more of her writing at her website eonism.net

1. Tell us a little about yourself and your stories.

I come from the Texas plains with an arts background, a love for Star Trek and a need to tell stories about people in otherworldly circumstances. I’m all about character dynamics and interactions, drawing on the supernatural to explore the duality of human nature and concepts of fear in the modern world. My stories are kind of a grab-bag of genres, from the weird to the romantic, the creepy to the surreal. I like to think that makes me entertaining, but I guess we’ll have to wait and see if there’s any truth to that.

2. Do you have a specific style or genre? If so, what would you call it or define it as?

If I had to call it a style, I’d say it was minimalism within reason. I like to be as brief and concise as possible without selling my ideas short. Give my characters just enough time and space to tell their stories, and cut out all the fat so the reader is left with the purest impression of my idea. It may be layered with other metaphors, other imagery to flesh the world out, but I hate to waste time on excess detail or diversions. I’ll never stop to talk about the drapes or that summer spent backpacking across Europe. The reader can take what he or she will from the story, just so long as I feel they got the best of what I could give them.

On the other hand, I really don’t know what genres I write, most days. I’m often published in weird tale, horror and dark fiction magazines and anthologies, so I guess that’s the clean answer. I just like to tell stories about people faced with the horror of the world around them, the low-volume dread of loneliness, of alienation from others, of separation from safety and detachment from reality. I usually represent that unknown threat with a monster, whether real or imagined, because giving a fear a face makes it palpable, even if you don’t understand why.

3. Is there a message or theme in your work you want to convey to others?

The message varies from story to story, but the theme in my work usually revolves around people struggling against their surroundings. They usually feel out of synch with the world, estranged from others, just outsiders looking in on their particular circumstances. There’s almost always a sense of separation for my characters, taking the form in a person or a singular goal, manifesting as a longing or obsession that fuels their actions. My characters are incomplete, unfinished, and afraid of what they might find if they go looking for what they need to fill that void. The worlds I build for my characters are scary places, populated by monsters and the subtle horror of the mundane modern existence. I can’t really blame them for being afraid.

Having dealt with social anxiety most of my life, I’m well-acquainted with that sense of fear and alienation. It’s easy to write, because I think the modern world makes us feel alienated in a lot of ways. Most things in our lives seem colder, detached, powered by the instant gratification of technology. My generation is still adapting to the world we’ve come up in, with iPhones and Twitter and the fifteen-minute cable news cycle. We’re still sorting out our place in history, and the jury seems out on whether or not we’re going to succeed at all. So I think I like to tell stories about outsiders, because as a reader it’s easier for me to relate to characters like that.

4. What have been your biggest influences?

Good movies, super hero comic books and bad television. Good movies from guys like David Cronenberg and Tarsem Singh, and genre movies from guys like Rob Zombie and Robert Rodriguez, that taught me there’s more than one way to tell horror stories. Super hero comics taught me about adapting mythology and hero folklore traditions to modern audiences, and how to use simple symbols to talk about grand ideas. Bad television, well, that’s just fun. Some of my favorite actors do bad television, and do these amazing things with these terrible scripts they’re given. Like making gold out of oxygen, they make me believe in these characters they’re playing even when the writers have slacked off in the staff room, make me care about these tiny lives they lead. They taught me about sleight of hand, and how a little humanization can hook an audience into a story, no matter how silly.

5. What are your current projects?

At the moment, I’m kicking around ideas for an apocalyptic alternate history series based around the first half of the 20th century, revolving around World War II. I’m working up the lives of the Four Horsemen, four people called to service at the beginning World War I to end the world, and their travels across the planet leading them toward the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I’m also workshopping and preparing for my next novel White Bull, the second in the Casey Way Trilogy.

6. I know you have written a novel that you just completed, Flesh Trap. Can you tell us what it’s about and what plans you have for it?

Flesh Trap is a psychological horror and dark fiction novel, looking at how the things we do to ourselves and each other leave holes in the world so profound that others can be pulled in. It centers on the life of Casey Way, a sarcastic, caffeine-junkie insomniac library cataloger who is being haunted by violent visions of his dead rapist father, suffering under the weight of his father’s sins for twenty years. One part mystery story, one part psychedelic trip, it follows Casey, his boyfriend Joel and step-sister Mariska as the anniversary of the death of Casey’s father approaches, increasing the frequency and brutality of Casey’s visions. They come to find that Casey has become the center of a series of deaths, disappearances and attacks, all stemming from a mysterious box that begins following him. With each character working the story from their own angle, their own perspective and motivations, the mystery leads Casey back to his childhood home and the scene of the crime, as he’s forced further and further into his own fractured psyche to confront his father and also himself.

I’m planning to release the novel as a free-to-read serial beginning in September. I have an awesome team of volunteers that are helping me put together the website, illustrate the characters and key scenes, and assemble the soundtrack. It’s going to be a mixed-media project, art and music backing up the novel chapters. I’m really excited about putting this together.

7. You have said in your blog that you find it difficult to write when you’re happy. Is there anything else you find particularly challenging about writing?

I usually find myself scratching my head over how to portray horror in my stories. The horror I enjoy as a reader or viewer is largely psychological, examining fear from a more clinical, cerebral level rather than through gore and scares. Not that I don’t enjoy my schlock-and-awe movies, because I have my favorites like everybody else, but I like to explore fear as much as possible without automatically going to blood. This is why death and the fear of dying is rarely ever a source of dread in my stories. Most often my characters are afraid of living with something, be it a choice they’ve made, or a loss, or a larger truth they’ve discovered along the way. Which is scarier? That’s what I have to ask myself every time I sit down to write.

8. Can you tell us about your future projects?

I’m working on the second and third books of the Casey Way Trilogy, expanding on the concepts and themes of the first book, respectively titled White Bull and Nightmare Child. Those are a ways off at the moment, as I’m still getting the first book launched. In the meantime I have plans for a collaborative vampire novella. I’m keen on exploring the idea of the vampire from a more traditional folklore standpoint, making them more of a predatory species than the aristocratic or tragic romantic figures they’ve become. The novella focuses on a race of vampires that came out of a nomadic gypsy society in Eastern Europe, spreading across Europe and to the Americas in the chaos following World War II, living by the strict mythic traditions of their ancestors in a lifestyle akin to that of Hasidic Judaism. Living like a cloistered religious community, with well-organized means of procuring and distributing blood through human trafficking, vampires are able to live among the people they feed on with little scrutiny from law enforcement.

I’m also working on a bizarro novel about a man who loses his tongue to an aquatic parasite that lives in his mouth, communicating with him telepathically and leading him on a hallucinatory, vaguely criminal joy-ride toward self-improvement.

Summer Sessions 2011: Session Nine

via eonism.net

What is The Summer Sessions?

The Summer Sessions is a project organised by Magen Toole with the help of Melissa Dominic, bringing authors, poets, photographers and artists together under a common theme: A desire to create. This year’s project consists of ten people, in different stages of their careers and creative development, from different cultural and educational backgrounds, who agreed to be interviewed and interview one another, with the goal of cross-posting each others’ interviews in our respective blogs. It’s a project about knowing who’s in our community, and giving back to that community by helping one another promote our own work.

SESSION NINE: REBECCA BLAIN, INTERVIEWED BY J.A. PAK

With a love of nature, animals and tea, fantasy author Rebecca Blain shares with us a little bit about her work, her world, and her thoughts on coffee-drinkers. You can find more on Rebecca at her website and writing blog.

If you could change one thing about your own writing, what would it be?

This is a hard question. There are so many ways that I could improve my writing. If I had to pick one, however, I would pick my tendency to repeat myself when I describe things. That, and my flaw of forgetting to write down some important details I know but the reader doesn’t!

You are a passionate tea drinker. Now V.S. Naipaul claims that he can tell whether a writer is male or female by just reading a paragraph. Can you tell if a writer is a tea drinker or coffee drinker? What are the tell-tale signs?

Oh my. If I had to give a knee-jerk reaction, you can tell the tea drinker as the person who stares at the mugs and cups as if analyzing them. Cups make a difference with tea. Not so much with coffee. I also identify the coffee drinkers as those who look glassy-eyed and ready to quit existence after not having a hit in an hour. The more zombie they look, the likelier they drink coffee, in my opinion!

If you could distill your writing into tea, what kind of tea would it be? And what time of day would you drink it?

I think my writing would be a flavored white — I think the type of white would be really determined by the day of the week. Sometimes I’m a smooth cup of white coconut creme, smooth finish and a great start. Others, I’m a white mixed with chamomile, a rough start and leaves an interesting aftertaste on the tongue. As for the time of day, I would definitely be an afternoon tea. Mornings are for chai and a swift kick in the rump. Or a nice breakfast tea.

You concentrate your fiction in the fantasy realm. If you were given the chance to fashion the world you would be born into next, what would that world look like? Can you write a paragraph for us as if it were a novel, knowing you would be an inhabitant? And who would you be? What role would you play?

Oooh ho. This is a tricky question. I’ll start with the who I would be and what role I would play. I don’t think I would really want to change who I am right now — I like what I do, and I like my dreams. Even my fantasy worlds steal from the real world. It is the hardships of our life and world that make us who we are.

That said, I would rig things so that people were more considerate to the planet. It makes me sound like a hippy (I’m not, really), but I enjoy blue skies, mild sunsets and clean waters.

How does one put into words the perfect world? It is my own, but fewer cities, cleaner cities, nicer people and fresh air not tainted with smog. If I had to make one change, it would be to encourage people to be more understanding of other cultures, religions and skin color, however lame that sounds.

(Who am I kidding? I would be Queen of the Universe and everyone would be my minion. Go, slave, fetch me some tea — and don’t screw it up!)

Summer Sessions 2011: Session Eight

via eonism.net

What is The Summer Sessions?

The Summer Sessions is a project organised by Magen Toole with the help of Melissa Dominic, bringing authors, poets, photographers and artists together under a common theme: A desire to create. This year’s project consists of ten people, in different stages of their careers and creative development, from different cultural and educational backgrounds, who agreed to be interviewed and interview one another, with the goal of cross-posting each others’ interviews in our respective blogs. It’s a project about knowing who’s in our community, and giving back to that community by helping one another promote our own work.

SESSION EIGHT: M. RAOULEE, INTERVIEWED BY CHRISTINE DANSE

Full of wit and practical wisdom, science fiction writer M. Raoulee takes some time to discuss her work, her dolls, her beading, and everything else in between. You can find more about M. at her Livejournal.

1. What, primarily, do you write?

Trashy science fiction and fantasy, often with a side of porn and/or snark.

1A. Science fiction and fantasy! There’s a large genre. Any favorite subgenres?

Well, right now I have an interest in slice-of-life science fiction, which I would like to take a moment to blame on Hitoshi Ashinano. I’ve written a lot of adventures the past few years, and I guess I felt like something a little more mellow. I say adventure, but I’m not much of an epic person. There’s just something that burns my toast about “YOU ARE THE ONE WHO MUST DO A THING, YO.” I’ve always wondered about what the lives of ordinary people in extraordinary worlds are like. In my hands, the answer appears to be “ridiculous”, but I’ll take that.

As for what I’m doing writing non-epics in the most epic-prone genres ever, I’ve never been accused of doing things the easy way. And I’m fine with other people writing epics and such. Can you imagine a world with no high fantasy battlefests? I don’t WANT to.

2. Where, primarily, do you write it?

n the fearsome hell-dimension which exists in the back of my sock drawer! Well, I wish. I have an antique vanity facing a window and one of those laptops that’s so huge as to be thoroughly UN-portable. Oh, and all this stuff is in the room I rent, to the right of a shelf full of dolls and a painting of the human incarnation of fluorite.

3. The question I hate to answer, but love to ask: are you a pantser…or plotter?

Why? That is a good question! I used to be a hardcore pantser. Genius of spontaneity and all that. And sometimes, if I have a deadline, I will still pants the everyloving crap out individual scenes. But, as a pantser, it wasn’t very often I saw the ends of stories and I much too gradually came to realize I was never going to get anything done without something resembling an outline.

I have to be able to physically move plot points around which results in these OneNote tabs that look like QED worksheets. For very long, complex stories, sometimes I resort to taping colored notecards to my closet door.

4. Who are your primary inspirations for writing?

I am going to take a moment to excerpt a conversation I had with GreenJudy about that very thing.

> Corny as it may be, things come to me in dreams. Often, I’m dimly aware

> that I’m dreaming and have the some say in what’s going on. I can ring

> room service for a movie, but I only get to pick the genre.

> Or, I’ll overhear a thing. “That is a phone that has seen better days”.

> What of this phone? I beheld not the phone. But, my brain wanted to know

> about the phone and filled in some info on it’s own. This is where my

> most nonsensical notes hail from.

> But, more and more, I find myself engineering scenes. I want to

> accomplish X. What is the best way to do this? Oddly enough, this is

> where a lot of my jokes come from, [when I'm not pantsing them].

> All three of these states have to balance out for a good scene (and I do

> outline by scene).

> Say, the T-rex story. I was dreaming about doppelgangers and soldiers and

> Umi no Aria, only things went horribly wrong, as tings are wont to do.

> This stuck itself to some of my notes that had been otherwise

> languishing. And then I thought: this is a great excuse to write about

> miniature dinosaurs as pets. How would I work one in? You know what would

> be funny? If one SAT on the main character and made T. Rex noises in his

> face. Wait, what noise does a T. Rex make? And then, I posted in LJ [posing that question].

> Plotting and writing work like this for me.

> Plotting makes more stuff / writing walls off the new stuff / revising

> purifies the stuff.

> I think it’s like making vodka and being hopelessly bad at it.

4A. I think I’m going to frame “Plotting makes … purifies the stuff” and hang it on my wall! That’s the essence of writing for me, right there. And what about literary role models–who are yours?

Well, I already ended up name-dropping one before you asked. Oopsie. I want to disclaim before I say anything else that I think there’s a difference between liking a book and looking up to the author. Meaning I dig a whole lot more books by a whole lot more writers than I’m about to list.

-Umberto Eco: “I felt like killing a monk”. Is there ever any better reason to turn out a massive tome of a novel? Plus, he writes what he damn well pleases, which is what he knows, which may well be everything awesome ever.

-Mark Danielewski: Supreme lord and master of fucking with the audience.

-Hagio Moto: Created to shonen-ai genre in comics and otherwise made a career of filling women’s comic magazines with hard sci-fi and comics about ballerinas if she damnwell felt like it.

-Tanith Lee: has written more imminently readable books in her life than most companies put out over their entire existences.

5. Can you tell us a bit about your current work-in-progress? (Or works-in-progress, whatever the case may be.)

Let me see. I have a novel I keep meaning to revise with some modicum of seriousness, but it weighs about ten pounds and I have, in fact, killed scorpions with it. In the drafting department, the T. rex story ate a bunch of my other outlines, so I have this cute little soft sci-fi slice-of-life tangle of stories going on and very little desire to move on at this point. Oh, and there are two pet ideas which follow me around: the serious one and the not serious one. The serious one I did try to write once and botched. I have no idea how to even outline the not serious one due to a certain prevalence of lying and alcohol.

5A. Well, if you’re going to make us wait that long for literary goodness…do you at least have a prize snippet you’re willing to share?

Is it Tuesday? No? Well, here’s one anyway.


Later that evening while he waited for some bread to rise, Nel emailed Tasso at his “best for social agendas” address, to see if there was anything he absolutely wouldn’t eat. He would never have the chance to do as much with a restaurant patron, but he figured: now, while he could. Now, before he’d mentally assembled a menu.

Tasso wrote back almost at once, and it was then that doubt crept up on Nel. Just a little doubt, no more harmful than a dropped fork, but well-founded just the same.

I like: black olives, green olives, red olives, items which contain any of the aforementioned olives.

I don’t like: bran; things that taste how grass smells; breakfast cereal; foodstuffs produced by members of the Musa genus.

And here where Nel had bet himself that likes would be all about pizza, Chinese and Bereit lunchboxes (Bereit still flinging its cheese-drenched cuisine across the galaxy despite a heavy backlash in the culinary world).

Musa turned out to bananas.

That, and the request he’d started out with? Not much to go on.

What really threw him though was the part about grass. Nel knew how grass smelled: he lived in the middle of some pretty serious grass. But, he couldn’t translate that aroma into a taste. He’d been trying to work on that skill. In fact, he’d probably been working on it when he should have been studying for algebra. It got to annoy him that while he knew what Tasso was getting at, he couldn’t have expressed it better than Tasso already had.

So, he clattered down the outside steps of his apartment complex and made his way across the parking lot to the communal yard where he got down on his hands and knees, and shoved his face in the grass for a big, gushing smell of the stuff.

His tongue reacted to the scent. Stirred, though there was no taste per se.

The grass smelled remarkably like grass.

“Nel?” came Ms. Chicklace’s voice, and Ms. Chicklace’s pink and black flats intruding on the grass he had engaged. “Are you alright?”

“It’s for school,” he sighed. “I got this hypothetical client who doesn’t like the taste of suburbia.”

“Ohhh. In that case, I would make sure not to hypothetically serve him macaroni out of a box. That’s about the most suburban thing ever,” and she laughed a little, one shoe brushing the other. “Not that you’d dream of it.”

“I gotta start somewhere. Hey, did anybody loose their keys?”

6. What is your goal or dream for writing?

I’ve wanted to be published since I was nine. Failing that, I would at least like to leave behind a readable version of the not serious pet outline above. Why? Because heroic atheist lesbians, that’s why.

7. Well, that’s a great reason! Your profile says you write in the nude. Is this a metaphor for baring yourself to the world through your writing? Or am I just looking too far into that?

Even as I type this, my pants are on the other side of the bedroom! It’s hot here. I don’t have much of a choice. But, I do have a problem expressing myself verbally. The mind and the mouth do not sync up for me. It’s not as bad as it used to be since I’ve had people INSIST on getting to know me lately. I still get a hell of a lot more across in writing.

8. Ya know, we Floridians believe in something called “A/C”… Besides writing, you seem to have quite a few other creative pursuits. Can you share some of these with us?

I absolutely cannot stand to do nothing. I go stir crazy if I can’t be making or doing something. But, I only have so much space, so miniatures work for me. Well, I have been beading more human-sized items lately, but I still sew around 1/4 scale most of the time. Also, I was raised in a family where everyone cooked, so I love-love-love to cook. My favorite thing to make is literal soup du jour where I grab whatever we’ve got and try to turn it into tasty soup. I also make killer risotto. Seriously- it’s got about a half pound of butter in it. Don’t eat it and then go get a blood test.

Some other media I’ve messed around with include Friendly Plastic, Angelina Film and plastic canvas. If I get in the mood or there’s a special occasion I will do cartonnage, which is those fabric-covered boxes from your grandmother’s bathroom. Great results, but you will trash daylights out of your workspace.

8A. Friendly Plastic, Angelina Film, and plastic canvas? These sound like great band names…but something tells me they’re not musical groups.

I would listen the hell out of a band called Angelina Film.

Friendly Plastic, also known as Polycaprolactone, is a plastic that’s moldable at 140F. Fantastic Plastic from back in the 80?s was similar, but everyone may rest assured the newer version is less carcinogenic. In fact, it may have medical applications. Anyway, you can dye it, get ink all over yourself and use it to make miniatures or cabochons.

Angelina Film similar to cellophane. You heat it, it sticks to itself and gets all iridescent. The fun part comes when you glue it to an armature first. Oh, but there’s lacquer involved too. Lots of lacquer. Everywhere. Still fun though.

Plastic canvas works up like gigantic scale cross stitch, but you can make three-dimension things out of it too. Say, doll furniture. I know that particular application had some fans in the late 80?s, early 90?s. This material in particular may be dismissed as tacky, but anything’s tacky in the wrong hands.

8B. Do you find that any of these other pursuits fuel your writing? Do any killer soups du jour show up in your stories?

I did actually end up writing a character who beaded into one of my Halloween porn fests. Very sparkly bonking ensued. And I THINK The Soup That We Don’t Talk About in one of my more current projects may be a relative of one that got all weird on me the other day. Protip: frozen pork and frozen giant chicken breasts may be indistinguishable in the depths of the freezer.

9. Tell us a little bit about your dolls. Do you build them? Just their accessories? Both?

I have a collection of Asian Ball-Joint Dolls, otherwise known as those overpriced resin things. I do not have a theme for my collection. Oh, you know, now that I think of it, I know what my pantsing went into. Anyway, I do like fantasy-themed dolls, but I don’t buy those exclusively. Also, a lot of writers will get dolls to represent their characters. I have two out of two dozen, and one is actually a reverse character doll- I based the way the character looks on the doll. The rest? They don’t need refining and motives and backstories. They just need tiny dashikis and to be hung in palo verde trees for pictures. I did try to build one at one point, but it went badly.

10. And I need to know about these beading kits you’re putting together.

Oh, my goodness. I should get you some coffee or something. Long story alert.

These people who have INSISTED on getting to know me are all regulars from my local bead shop. I had not had any corporeal friends in years before I met them. Originally, I would just stop into this shop occasionally for doll props, but they wore me down and got me having conversations and making human-sized things.

The economy still being made of suck and fail, we decided we would invent some kits for our bead store to sell online so it can stick around. And we would do it with Tila beads, which are square, have two holes and make for a pain in the ass 99% of the time. I had this idea that I would use them to make bigger, ornate square units that could be assembled in different ways. This went over way better than I ever thought it would. I ended up teaching it to a bunch of people, who did their own takes on it.

Two months later, we’re tentatively expecting three design variations in five colorways each once we get the directions finished and the materials together. I have learned so much. I mean, everything from how to write good directions to the fact French Brittany’s turn into balls when they lie down. It’s really been an wonderful, though occasionally frustrating, experience and you had better believe I am going to pimp the living daylights out of these things once we have them to sell.

Oh, and I got put in charge of naming the different colors, which has been LOLerous because everything I know about naming fashion items I gleaned from 80?s Avon catalogues.

CD: M., thank you for joining me! It’s been a real pleasure! And greatest of luck with those bead kits. Is there a link we’ll be able to find them at when they’re available?

Oh, thank YOU. I’ve really enjoyed this exchange myself. And goodness knows I need some luck. Anyway, the kits should be available online at http://www.cosmopolitanbeads.com/ . I’m trying to set it up that people who order online and mention Shipwreck Light get at least a special thank you note. Lynda kinda shot down my free porn idea.

Summer Sessions 2011: Session Six

via eonism.net

What is The Summer Sessions?

The Summer Sessions is a project organised by Magen Toole with the help of Melissa Dominic, bringing authors, poets, photographers and artists together under a common theme: A desire to create. This year’s project consists of ten people, in different stages of their careers and creative development, from different cultural and educational backgrounds, who agreed to be interviewed and interview one another, with the goal of cross-posting each others’ interviews in our respective blogs. It’s a project about knowing who’s in our community, and giving back to that community by helping one another promote our own work.

SESSION SIX: J.A. PAK, INTERVIEWED BY REBECCA BLAIN

Known for her extensive blogging and off-beat style, poet and author J.A. Pak takes a moment to discuss self-publishing, her recent anthology and future projects. You can find on her at her website, JA-PAK.com.

1. When many people think of creative writing, novels, books and short stories come to mind. You have dipped your hands into these things, and have added a special flare of humor to almost everything you do. Your website shows your creative ability with humor, and your stories have a depth (not just in humor, but more serious subjects as well!) that practically ooze inspiration and creativity.

What inspires you to be so creative with both your writing and your website?

Thank you—I’m so glad you found the humor. That’s a tough question. With my website, I just wanted it to be fun. And my stories just tend to come that way from my muse.

2. Have you always had a flare with such creativity? If not, how did you learn to be so creative?

I’m not really sure. I always had a different way of thinking and I suppose that could be termed as creativity.

3. You have released an anthology called Act of Creation & Other Stories. What was the defining moment that made you realize that you wanted to take your stories and create a book with them?

I’d wanted to do a collection of food-inspired short stories for quite a while. At one point I had about eight stories, but most of them didn’t really fit in with the theme or didn’t stand the test of time. When I decided to explore self-publishing with ebooks, a mini food collection just seemed to make sense. Act is really a test drive for me.

4. What work was involved in preparing Act of Creation for publication?

Luckily, since all the stories had been previously published, there wasn’t a great deal to do in terms of editing. I just did some last-minute proofreading. From there on, it was really all technical, like ebook formatting, finding out about distributors, etc. And of course, creating a cover for the ebook.

5. There are many people who are undecided over self-publication versus traditional publication. What have your experiences been?

Traditional publication takes a lot of time. After writing the book, you’ll probably need to find an agent. That can take a year, several years, or never. Even with an agent, you may or may not find a publisher. If you find a publisher, it’ll take anywhere from a year to a couple of years for your book to find its way into a bookstore—sometimes never, as book contracts do get canceled. Self-publication, if you go the ebook route, is about a month (two weeks for Act because it was a mini collection). Of course, you’ll handle all the publicity work yourself, but you know, you’ll do a good deal of that even with a publisher unless you’re already famous.

The other thing is that you have a lot more freedom doing it yourself. Like big trade publishers don’t print individual stories or even novellas. You can do both with your own ebooks.

6. Do you regret the decisions that you have made?

Self-publishing my collection? No, not at all. I plan to self-publish many more stories in the next year or so. In fact, I’m getting ready to release my novella Seal Skin. In prep, an excerpt is already up at Fictionaut.

7. If you could change anything about how you approach your writing, what would you change and why?

I would love to be able to write on demand. Wouldn’t it be fantastic if you could just sit down and say, “Okay, will write the first draft of x story in the next four hours” and have it happen?

Summer Sessions 2011: Session Five

via eonism.net

What is The Summer Sessions?

The Summer Sessions is a project organised by Magen Toole with the help of Melissa Dominic, bringing authors, poets, photographers and artists together under a common theme: A desire to create. This year’s project consists of ten people, in different stages of their careers and creative development, from different cultural and educational backgrounds, who agreed to be interviewed and interview one another, with the goal of cross-posting each others’ interviews in our respective blogs. It’s a project about knowing who’s in our community, and giving back to that community by helping one another promote our own work.

SESSION FIVE: MELISSA DOMINIC, INTERVIEWED BY NOEL GAYLE

With a flair for the post-apocalyptic, author Melissa Dominic discusses her mix-and-match sense of minimalism, her love for the complex dynamics of cities, and just what it means to be a Data Gypsy. You can find more about Melissa at her website, Broken Nerves.

1. Where did you get the green dia de los muertos skull featured in the sandwich pic currently at the top of your page of bloggage?

In Miami, there’s a little bit of awesome that is known as The Miami Book Fair International. Last year, there was a large push in the culture of Mexico as part of the theme. I picked up one of the Dia De Los Muertos skulls because I’m quite a fan of the holiday, especially because my birthday falls on November 2nd – All Soul’s Day, one of the days of the celebration. The little skull was cheap, in one of my favourite colours and I leave it on my desk like it’s my little friend or something.

2. Being well aware that asking a writer about the source(s) of their inspiration is about as useful as greasing oneself up and trying to slide to China…would or could you at least attempt to relate the mindset and the circumstances surrounding the writing of A
Contortionists Love Story? Pretty please?

Since you picked such an easy one to talk about, I can do that! Last November was my lucky month, it seems. I also got a chance to go see Cirque de Soliel’s “Kooza” under the big top in Miami. They usually have a contortionist trio that does a sequence, but, this time one of them wasn’t performing, so it was just two women. After I got back, the way they twisted and folded into one another had me thinking for a few days on end. A pinch of creepiness and I was able to write the story in one shot. It comes across a whole lot less glamorous then the end result does, I’m sure.

3. When I read Ithica and the Pack of Wolves I immediately got flashbacks to Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (the one time I saw the ending), Midgar City from FFVII and the city that is the backdrop and focus of Kakurenbo, an anime short film. Having explored the various online locales that you have and maintain, I have come to recognize your fascination for cities, a fascination that comes across in your description of the blackened city in Ithica. Could you tell us a little bit about this city, how it got this way and how the people within it survive from day to day?

The Black City is a city I am still working on and it sometimes goes by several names, but, it is the major area in the story set known as Cartography, existing just outside the only normal funtioning city in nation it’s a part of. It’s the backdrop to my collection of gypsys, mapmakers and gypsy mapmakers who roam the battered landscape trying to remap what is left of the nation after a deadly virus and war had ravaged it. While I still don’t have all the perfect answers, I can say that the Black City is mostly run community style – everyone
helping one another where they can, importing and exporting goods and using barter systems between them. Without the people, there would be no city. It is probably the largest of the areas of it’s type in what is left of the nation at the start of Cartography, but it isn’t the only one of its kind.

4. “It left the outer cities in dirt and dark, left them not really
cities at all, but loose groupings of buildings and people.” This is a
beautiful turn of phrase. At the end of reading this, I can see the
shattered cities and broken skyscrapers. What do you draw on to find the emotional resonance with which you infuse your words? Is your writing mainly stream of consciousness (which I suspect) or more crafty and word for word?

I actually am extremely meticulous when it comes to chosing my words and I can spend forever tweaking a sentence until it is just right for me. Before I properly began in fiction, I studied and wrote poetry almost exclusively. I think, because of this, I am really detail oriented when it comes to my fiction work and I like to make sure each and every single word, phrase, sentence, paragraph (etc, etc, etc…) is the best it can be, said in the most concise way and also has a particular sound when read outloud. You can always find me at the computer, re-reading my work outloud, just to make sure it has the right sound.

5. What is it about cities that fascinate you so?

The short answer would be everything. From the way they function, to the histories in the people that have passed through them, to the ways they’ve evolved over time. Every single thing you can imagine about a city facinates me. I think, though, I’ve sort of pinned down why I am so facinated with cities. I’m a girl who grew up in a smaller-type town in northern New Jersey, just across from New York City itself. I spent seventeen years of my life trying to escape it – never completely happy with where I lived, but I was always observant of the place, even if it was only in an effort to explain how much I disliked it, and eventually, when I packed up and moved to Miami in 2001, after two months or so I was homesick. Disgustingly homesick. To the point that some days, I am still homesick. While I learned to love Miami and I was and am still in awe by it daily, I realized you can leave a place, but you can never really leave it and as a person, you become the places you live. You are your enviroment.

People, to me, are a sum of what is around them. Once I started looking at it that way, that was when I became even more obsessed with cities and places and really developing them in my stories. It seemed to be where my best work came from. It seemed to be what I enjoyed in other novels the most. Things like Dark Dark Cities and Places We’ve Never Been sprung up in my mind and they were all cenetered around the world that can develop when you just try to populate a piece of land.

For me, a city is another character in the story. It reflects everything: the plot, the theme, the characters, the emotion. I try to make my stories unable to exist anywhere else other than where they exist. The city and the person, the story, the idea, can’t be pulled from one another.

6. The short piece Cartography, combined with the concept of Dark Dark Cities paints a picture of desolate cities dotting the landscape of broken nations, inhabited with those that survive and adapt and those that don’t and are preyed on; the places that Dark Dark Cities was set up to map out and explore. Do you plan to do anything else with this concept/digital domain in the future? If no, why not?

I have quite a few plans for Dark Dark Cities! Once I realized that I cared about having really specialized cities for my stories to exist in, I began to pare them down and combine stories, trying to get to the core of the places I want to talk about. Each city itself has a certain type of story to be told in it: some of them are more focused on being post apocalyptic (Cartography), cyberpunk/speculative futurist/magical realistic (District Heights) and even bubble-gum coloured future noir (Stereoport). My plan is to have this place be their home, to express all these different stories through one main channel. The idea is, at it’s heart, every city is dark, but we live in them and love in them every single day.

Right now I am working on a story for District Heights that I hope to be able to seralize on Dark Dark Cities once it is complete.

7. The term Data Gypsy brings to mind a dancer on the seas of information, or in them, slipping from stream to stream, stopping only to save a rare bit of info or shake the accumulated digital flotsam from her skirts. Do you take the name seriously? What does it invoke in your mind?

In my own way, I definately do take the term seriously. The terminology mostly comes from me trying to describe Ithica (from Ithica and the Pack of Wolves and Cartography), who is probably the closest representation of myself I’ve ever put down to paper. My own personal style itself is very cyberpunk/data gypsy mixed with a bit of mori girl and most people don’t expect it of me. After reading my stories and even seeing some images of me online, they expect a constantly goggled girl who is always wearing slick black and razorblades and while I totally would love to be a Gibsoneque Razorgirl, it isn’t in me. I’m all flowing layers and I think the image you’ve got going on right there is spot on. I’m a data gypsy, wearing too many layers of light fabric, old boots and torn up tanktops, surverying the land for information and collecting it in my side pouch for later use.

8. Have you ever wanted to live in one of the fictional cities that your characters inhabit? (Of course). Which one and why?

Oh yes! Once I got thinking about it though, the answer slighty surprised me. While I love the dirt and dank of most of my cities, I’d actually love to live in Stereoport, where everything is blazing bright and art-fueled. I guess the idea of a city where I can shove away responsibility for a little while and dodge criminals and become a gang member and have it mean more like being part of family than anything dangerous seems sort of… fun. Soccer matches every Sunday morning and all-hours maid cafe styled diners where I can eat taco rice at 3am? While the city in Steam Gutterwork entices me like you wouldn’t believe, I’d make my home in Stereoport, for sure.

9. You speak of the loss of internet community, and more specifically, the loss of your LJ community, as a heart breaking loss; a loss I can very well understand. How did this affect your writing? How did it colour its ongoing mood and tone, if any at all?

Above all, I had to learn to write alone. It’s tough and it still is tough when you come from a background that involved a lot of community-based literature and instant gratification. It can be rough in the way that I no longer know for certain if something works or not, but, you find the people whose opinion you begin to value and they open up their own stories to you in the same way you open up your stories to them and at some point, you can go to them with one hundred questions and they will have one hundred answers. Finding those people is hard. I still don’t have all the people I can carry in my pocket and I still am always looking for more.

It does hurt, still, but, I think by being vocal about it, I’ve found more people who are suffering through similar types of loss and that brings me more people to discuss stuff with. Which I like. A lot.

10. I find your writing to be in the vein of Steampunk/Dark Sci-Fantasy; Steam Gutterwork is a fine example of this (and another example of a world I wish you would explore more. ). This has clearly developed over the years you’ve been writing. Stop and think about whether or not I am right in my assessment of your style, and share some of the influences that you are certain led to your development of this style.

I find your assessment of my style to be very interesting. It’s not really for me to say if it is right or if it is wrong, but, I can tell you I view my own work slightly differently. I’ve jokingly referred to my own work as post-post on occasion. I have post/cyberpunk sentiments and post-apocalyptic leanings and I’ve spend a lot of time crafting speculative futures and dabbling in magical realism (or at the very least, total-belief-suspension-on-really-weird-crap) and I’ve wrapped it all up with a extra-heavy dose of minimalism.

There are things I know for certain fact have lead to my style, though, I am unsure if they’re the sort of things people expected. While I love William Gibson as an author and yes, I am completely inspired by him and everyone always throws that name out first, I didn’t discover any of his work until I was twenty-one, after I had already been writing for some time. I’m more heavily influenced by the things I see and the things I hear other than things I’ve read.

You’ve mentioned both anime and video games and I have to admit that Midgar from FFVII was totally an early influence of mine. It was one of the few things I’ve seen, visually, that sort of expressed all the things I wanted to say before saying it. Also, Cannabis Works by Tatsuyuki Tanaka is one of the art books I am constantly going back to, trying to squeeze it for all it’s inspiration. I spent a lot of my youth pillaging anything that came out of Japan, anything from Akira to Cooking Master Boy to Suikoden and even every day street culture. Just random things. I pull from everywhere.

Other than that, I’m also extremely influenced by music – post-rock to be exact and rap music when I’m feeling amusing. I can easily say I’ve penned most of Stereoport while listening to Drake’s “Thank Me Later” on repeat and the entire Stereoport idea came from seeing Major Lazer play ULTRA 2010. Music on long busrides or while sitting in the backseat of someone’s car is probably the most inspiring to me.

Also, I should mention, there’ll be a sequel to Steam Gutterwork being published soon, so, I haven’t totally abandoned you on that!

Summer Sessions 2011: Session Four

via eonism.net

What is The Summer Sessions?

The Summer Sessions is a project organised by Magen Toole with the help of Melissa Dominic, bringing authors, poets, photographers and artists together under a common theme: A desire to create. This year’s project consists of ten people, in different stages of their careers and creative development, from different cultural and educational backgrounds, who agreed to be interviewed and interview one another, with the goal of cross-posting each others’ interviews in our respective blogs. It’s a project about knowing who’s in our community, and giving back to that community by helping one another promote our own work.

SESSION FOUR: BERIT ELLINGSEN, INTERVIEWED BY MAGEN TOOLE

Drawing on Eastern philosophy and taking advantage of a wide variety of mediums, science journalist and fiction author Berit Ellingsen discusses her work, her processes and the sources of her inspiration. You can find more on Berit at her blog.

1. Who are you, and how would you describe your work?

My name is Berit Ellingsen and I’m a Norwegian science journalist and fiction writer working in English. I write literary fiction and some science fiction and fantasy. I enjoy writing all kinds of lengths, from nano- and twitter fiction and flash, to short stories and novels.

My stories are about zen, dreams, consciousness, love, relationship, family, death and everything in between. All my published stories are linked here: http://emptycitynovel.com/short-fiction. My long work, The Empty City, is serialized online here: http://emptycitynovel.com

2. Much of your writing is inspired by the philosophies of Zen, Taoism and nonduality. What is it about these particular themes that appeal to you, and how have they informed your work?

The core of these philosophies is the same. It points to the heart of human existence and knowledge, even something as radical your true nature, which may not be as simply or as clearly expressed elsewhere. I find that knowledge very valuable and appealing. Those themes often sneak into my stories, but they are rarely the purpose of the stories or the only thing they are about.

3. From what other sources do you typically draw your inspiration?

I read several literary magazines online; the short stories there are some of the best available from emerging and established writers. It’s more updated and alive, I feel, than what’s churned out by the large publishing houses years after it was originally written. Reading the stories in these magazines is very learning and inspiring, sometimes awe-inspiring.

I have also beta read several novels written by writer friends this year, and I find it very learning to read and give feedback to other writers.

Books, films, tv-series, games, music, visual art, I find them all to be inspiring in various ways, because they are different types of expression and storytelling.

4. What is your creative process like?

I write a first draft, then make grammar and linguistic corrections, and polish it a few times. I pay attention to plot, characterization, atmosphere, voice, vocabulary and rhythm etc. I work a lot to find the right words and the right flow.

If the story requires it, I send it to beta readers for feedback. Then I do the necessary changes, leave the story for some weeks, and then do final rounds of polishing. Then I submit the story to a suitable lit mag or anthology, or publish it on my website.

5. What, if anything, do you want readers to take away from your work?

Readers have their own and often very different interpretations of the stories, and that’s the way it should be. If the stories make the readers reflect a little on the world or their own situation, that’s great.

The events and characters in my stories are rarely ethically right or wrong. If that can make people reflect over the complexity and simplicity of human existence, it would be wonderful.

6. What have been your biggest creative influences?

Reading a lot of different fiction, from various time periods and all kinds of genres, non-fiction, reviewing and watching a lot of different films, games and tv-series. I’ve been a reader and watcher much longer than I’ve been a writer. Traveling, studying and working have also been sources for inspiration.

7. How do you balance your professional life with your creative life?

Like most people, and most writers, I find it a little difficult. I love to write and sometimes wake up in the middle of the night to jot down a story. But daily work must come first. I always get that done before I start on the fiction writing and editing for the day.

8. Is there anything in your own work that you have found particularly challenging in the past?

When I started writing The Empty City I was inexperienced as a writer and editor. As a result, the story has changed a lot, been shortened drastically and edited a large number of times. The stories that I have written afterwards were not as unfinished as The Empty City and have fortunately needed fewer rounds of editing. Although I always find something I would have changed when I read my old stories. I’m constantly editing.

9.Do you have any plans for future projects?

I have two long (for me) short stories that have more plot and are more linear than what I usually write. They will need some feedback, editing and cooldown before they are finished.

I’ve been thinking about a few longer works, but not sure if or when they will happen. I will also collect my current short stories into an anthology.

10. Thank you for sharing your words and work with us, Berit. Do you have any parting words for readers?

FThank you very much for the interview and for including me in the Summer Sessions! It’s been great!

I really appreciate the company of all the readers and writers and editors I have gotten to know the last year. It’s been an adventure! I can see why people don’t leave writing once they start with it. I hope to write for a long time to come.

Summer Sessions 2011: Session Three

via eonism.net

What is The Summer Sessions?

The Summer Sessions is a project organised by Magen Toole with the help of Melissa Dominic, bringing authors, poets, photographers and artists together under a common theme: A desire to create. This year’s project consists of ten people, in different stages of their careers and creative development, from different cultural and educational backgrounds, who agreed to be interviewed and interview one another, with the goal of cross-posting each others’ interviews in our respective blogs. It’s a project about knowing who’s in our community, and giving back to that community by helping one another promote our own work.

SESSION THREE: CHRISTINE DANSE, INTERVIEWED BY M. RAOULEE.

Discussing everything from literary tropes to gaming to furries, genre-bending author Christine Danse takes a moment to share her thoughts, her processes, and her work. You can find more about Christine at her website.

1. Who are you? What are you doing here? Why do you have my martini?

Hi! I’m–what? Oh. Oh! Excuse me. I thought that was my glass of absinthe. (I thought it was tasting a little too good…) I’m Christine. I’m an author, and I’m here for interrogation–er, being interviewed?

2. What is your thing? Er, I mean your writing thing, specifically. We’ll talk about other things soon enough.

My writing thing is speculative fiction–usually with romantic or erotic themes. By speculative fiction I mean science fiction, fantasy, paranormal…anything magical or out-of-this-world. The more I blend genres together, the happier I am. I especially love the ‘punk genres: steampunk, biopunk, cyberpunk. And I especially love mixing fantasy and paranormal into the ‘punks.

2a. You know, I’ve noticed that a lot of people who write enjoy the blending of genres, while people who talk ABOUT writing tend to give the advice of sticking to ONE AND ONLY ONE genre. As someone who has gotten out there and written multigenre stories, what would your thoughts on genre happen to be?

There is only one kind of genre that matters to me: bookstore sections. Fortunately for me, science fiction and fantasy stories of all subgenres are included in one section. The same with romance. Erotic Romance. Young Adult. I target the story for one of those and have fun with the other details.

Obviously, my focus is going to be a little different for each. Young Adult is going to have young adult characters, and I’m probably going to have coming-of-age, rebellion, and romantic themes (okay, so I realize YA can be way more than that–I’m painting broad strokes here). Romance is going to focus on the love story, and it’s going to have a happy ending. Erotic romance is going to leave nothing to the imagination. Science Fiction & Fantasy has the broadest “guidelines”–main characters can be practically any age, there can be full-blown romantic plots or no romance at all, and the heat level varies wildly.

As long as my story fits neatly into a bookstore section, I’m happy. And I’ll mix subgenres inside of that as much as I damned well please…as long as it’s coherent! The mix has to make sense.

3. And if you could tell me about your current project, that would be awesome too.

My current project… Well, there’s this middle-grade steampunk fantasy that I’m working on, although I don’t know if I’m writing it. It might actually be written by someone else. I’m not sure yet. And then there’s this urban fantasy erotica that’s a piece of homework from my crit partner. (Best homework ever!) And then there’s this really sweet modern myth about loss and love involving a man and a dryad in the mountains of southern Oregon. And then there’s this novel about the son of a god. And then…

3a. Did you bring a clip? Sorry, I always wanted to ask someone that. So, umm, more to the point: would this be your first time collaborating with another author if things work out?

Oh! Well, it isn’t precisely a collaboration. She gave me a prompt. I’m running with it.

A clip… A sample of my writing? Or a clip to load my gun with to shoot my partner if she doesn’t like where I go with my writing prompt.

Unfortunately, most of my projects are in deep outlining phase or complete terrible-draft phase.

Here is a somewhat more polished clip from my dryad story. It’s the opening:

I sleep.

I sleep while snow weighs on our branches and wind rattles through our leaves. Sunshine lights us and brings us life. Our roots dig deep into the embracing ground, always warm in the winter, cool in the summer.

Cycles pass. I dream deeply of sunlit days, of moonlit nights, of others who dance beneath our cover. In my dream, I dance in my mother’s trunk and her leaves shake, waving with the movement of my arms.

But in reality, we are still, because we sleep. We sleep for a very long time, as if through a winter that does not end. And the world around us changes.

The November morning was brisk, the Eastern Oregon air a world of change from the lukewarm, humid autumn temperatures in South Florida that Corey was used to. It went straight through his old knit sweater, the only warm thing he owned besides a ski jacket—and it certainly wasn’t cold enough to warrant that.

Corey followed a narrow game path through the woods. The air was still under the shelter of the trees, almost hushed, save for the crackling of his footsteps over the leaves. It felt good to stretch his legs, never mind that he had no clue where he was going.

For one entire week, Corey had been cooped up in his new cabin, unboxing. Or rather, avoiding unboxing. There were things in the boxes he wasn’t sure he should have packed at all. Knitting needles, balls of yarn, photo albums, the trio of little jointed stuffed cats, the set of samurai swords—all things he should have given to Marion’s mother when he was still in Florida. But he couldn’t bear parting with them, not while Marion’s memory still clung to every rainbow thread and button eye. Counterproductive, really, considering he’d driven across the United States to escape her ghost. Now it lived in those boxes, taped shut and stacked against the bare white walls.

3b. Also, I’m not sure, so I’ll ask. By middle-grade, do you mean aimed at a younger audience or is this a ‘punk shop talk? You’ve baffled the great Google!

Yes, aimed at a younger audience. Usually 9-12.

4. How long have you been writing? When did you know you were a writer? What about the first thing you wrote that you were really, truly proud of?

Well, that’s kind of a three-for-one, isn’t it? This is probably cliche, but I’ve been writing for as long as I’ve been able to put sentences together. The first “book” I can remember writing was this storybook about a winged schnauzer named after my first dog. It had a sad ending, and reading it years later, I had to shake my head. Kids say the darndest things. Anyway. I guess that kind of set the precedent for writing fantasy stories.

In the seventh grade, I wrote a short story titled “Howling Werewolves” (original, yeh?). I was very proud of that. My teacher took me aside and told me that I should really consider writing, you know, for publication. After that, my mind was pretty set.

5. What do you need to write? Besides the obvious. I mean the kind of music you write to, a place you like, other goodness along those lines.

I need my netbook, because it’s small and light and has these amazing flat keys that my fingers just fly over. And I need my notebook, because sometimes I just need to write longhand to break through a block.

Sometimes, I need silence to write so that I can hear my thoughts. And sometimes I need music to stay in the zone. I’m in love with Pandora. I have some fantasy soundtrack stations in there, and some trance stations, and a few New Age things.

Besides that, I need to take walks every now and then to shake things loose. Something about staring at a screen or a blank space on a piece of paper can turn my imagination off. It’s amazing how stepping outside can get ideas flowing again. I dread the summer months. I live in South Florida, and there’s really nowhere to go when the world beyond the front door is a sauna.

6. Every writer’s got tropes, so what’s your favorite page at TV Tropes and why do you like using or abusing that trope so much? Oh, and leave the tab open if you can. I have another question coming up to which that may or may not be relevant.

The trope I most familiar with and really keep my eyes open for is the MacGuffin. It’s the object in a story that serves no actual purpose except to move the plot. You could replace the object with almost anything without actually doing damage to the story. I watch for MacGuffins when I write, because I think every element should be integral.

6a. Truly, a classic trope. Is there a particular MacGuffin out there in the world of fiction which spurred you into this, or is it more of an acquired distaste?

Acquired, I suppose. Although as I write this, I’ve begun to plot a story that sort of depends on a MacGuffin. I’ll see if I can make it a not-MacGuffin by the time I’m finished writing it.

7. How do you come up with what you write? What do your outlines and such look like?

That’s…a big question. Hoo boy. Um. All right, so here’s the deal. Every time I write, I think I have it down. You know…”it.” My system. I think, “Great. I finally know the secret to writing well and writing fast. See, first I…” But it changes every time. My first novel sprang from a single first line, and I pretty much blundered through it. I’m glad it never made it to print. Island of Icarus, my debut novella from Carina Press, came from a steampunk brainstorm session. I outlined that, although the “outline” was really more like plot notes.

My current work in progress, the middle-grade steampunk, stemmed from a short story I wrote a couple years back, although I’m not sure where I got the short story idea from… I outlined the novel’s plot and laid out the sections in Celtx. This is the first time I’m using Celtx, a free program that’s a bit like Scrivener, a writing program for the Mac. It has a sort of file system and notecards, so you can attach character files, other files, and notes to a single story document and have it all available in one window. So I put notes for each chapter onto individual notecards–just brief statements of what happens and where the chapter “moves” (because every chapter should serve to push the story forward).

Now, as I get to each new chapter, I jot out what I call a “skeleton outline” of what’s going to happen, based on those notes. “Tea wakes and is tired. She trudges downstairs to breakfast.” Paragraph break. “Her mom tells her and her brother that she needs to visit the old woman down the street. They’ll be alone at home for half the day.” And so on. And then I go back and flesh those points out into actual narrative. I call this the sh– Um. The very rough draft. Later, when I’m done with the book, the plan is to completely revise the entire story–but this time, I’ll know exactly what happens, and how it happens, and what the characters feel about all of these things that happen, so I’ll just be able to focus on the writing itself.

But that’s just how I’m writing this novel. For the urban fantasy erotica novella, I have a feeling of where the plot is going, but I’m probably just going to go ahead and write that one straight through (I feel better doing that with shorter stories). And for the dryad romance, I’m actually writing each chapter as a mini saga first–a really useful trick for testing the narrative structure and emotional development of each chapter. More about mini sagas here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minisaga

7a. That is a stupendous answer which I’m sure is going to help a Newbie Writer Leopard out there somewhere. However, I’m curious how you got into using Mini Sagas.

A doctoral nursing class, believe it or not. It was a theory development course. We were assigned to read “A Whole New Mind” by Daniel Pink. (Great book, by the way.) The author introduces mini sagas in it, and we were required to craft one for the class. (I say “craft” because we didn’t just write one. We slaved over the damned thing till it was PERFECT. A lot goes into 50 words… Yeesh.) After that, I got the bright idea to punish myself further by using them as a fiction writing tool.

7b. And, how did you come to end up writing erotica? Did you sit down one day and say “I am going to write some PORN!” or was it more of things getting progressively sexier?

I pretty much sat down one day. My dear friend and writing partner, Dena Celeste, introduced me to the genre. Actually, not erotica, but erotic romance. She was having fun at it and getting published, so I thought I’d get in on the action, too. So to speak.

8. What is your dream project? Or, at least your next project. Both if you’re in the mood to discuss that much.

That’s another big question for me, but I’ll keep my answer to this one relatively short.

I have, literally, enough well-fleshed novel ideas to keep me writing for at least ten years, maybe twenty. No kidding. I started collecting my ideas when I was about thirteen. And there’s about a dozen of them that I really want and need to write before I kick the bucket, or my ghost will cry. So I guess you can say that I have multiple dream projects.

There’s a paranormal steampunk trilogy, a young adult cyberpunk fantasy series, a young adult paranormal about the Underworld, a space opera romance about an immortal…the list kinda goes on.

What’s my next project? See #3. When I’m done with all of those, I’ve got another half a dozen waiting backstage.

9. What was your childhood like? Do you come from an environment where creativity was encouraged? What did you grow up reading and writing?

In a nutshell: I grew up in Disney World. We live in South Florida and went almost every month at one point. When I wasn’t in school and we weren’t in Disney, we were on a road trip or camping in the mountains of North Carolina. And when I was home, my dad was telling me interactive stories, or I was pretending to be animals with my friends. So I kind of grew up in this Wonderland atmosphere, without the creepy grinning cat.

The first series I remember reading was Goosebumps by R. L. Stine. It was also the first thing I geeked over. The second series I read like a maniac was K. A. Applegate’s Animorphs, which was just re-released, by the way. Around that time (age 11 or 12), I started reading the Dragonriders of Pern series. Then Mercedes Lackey’s The Mage Wars. Then Michael Crichton’s Sphere, which I read in one day when we were on vacation when I was about 12. I still haven’t beat that record yet.

10. Can you tell me about anything non-writing or literature related that ended up having a big impact on your writing?

Traveling. If my stories are not set in South Florida (most are), they’re set in San Francisco or in Oregon, two places I love and wish I was at. Right now.

Also, the health professions. I’m a registered nurse, and I also practice modalities like herbalism, so a lot of nurses, physicians, and other sorts of healers pop up in my stories.

And role-play gaming. It’s a bit like group storytelling, or gaming without a computer… It’s definitely changed the way I think of stories, characters–how they’re told, what they do.

11. What do you like to read now?

I like to read…almost anything with a note of speculative fiction. Of course, I love speculative fiction romance. But honestly, it takes me months to read a novel now. I mostly suffocate under piles of articles and books for my doctoral studies. When I’m done with those, I’m sick of looking at words.

12. What is your favorite book and what thrills you about it?

Ooooh maaaaaan. Um. Hem. Er.

Okay, so if I had to pick one favorite book to be stuck on a desert island with, it would be Tad Williams’ Otherland. That’s a bit of a cheat. It’s technically four books, but it’s one continuous story that–if books could physically be made large enough to hold the massive amount of pages–would read as one book when printed as an omnibus.

If I had to put Otherland in a genre, I’d stick it firmly in cyberpunk. Most of it takes place in virtual reality–really breathtaking, really realistic virtual reality. There are several individual, parallel subplots; some of the plots don’t connect directly until the end of the series. And all of the characters–there are a LOT of them–are unique and interesting and feel like real people. Because the majority of the story takes place in virtual reality, the author was able to explore numerous different worlds–from virtual pleasure clubs to a house that never ends to an alternate South America that was never colonized by Europeans.

Pretty much, the quartet combines everything I love about speculative fiction between…eight covers. Pure love.

13. How about your favorite character that someone else created? What did you love about that person, imaginary though they may be?

Wait–let me take a breath and a drink of water.

Okay. Vanyel from Mercedes Lackey’s Valdemar series. He went through a lot of crap when he was a kid for being different. And he had this secret dream to be a bard, but that dream died pretty hard. After significant bumps in the road, he discovered his true potential as a mage and a protector of his kingdom. He really matured over the course of The Mage Wars trilogy, and because of his experiences when younger, he became this virtuous, empathetic, sometimes-too-good-for-his-own-good man…who is also very, very good looking. All the good ones are gay…

13a. I seriously have to wonder if Merceds Lackey realizes what she started with Vanyel? His stories come up a lot in conversations among this nascent generation of writers. So, how did you find Valdemar?

Ha! Does he? That doesn’t surprise me.

In a word: gryphons. I love gryphons. Mercedes Lackey books had gryphons on the covers. I thought, “Hey, these look cool.” And they were. And eventually I read some of her books that didn’t have gryphons on their covers. And that was that.

14. Only negative question I promise: what’s something you really despise when you find it in fiction, to the point where if you found it, you couldn’t read any more? Is it part of the one book you loathe above all others?

Um, I hate it when authors try to make up for really. flat. characters by over-telling the characters’ emotional states. Also, I hate when the characters feel very, very strongly about something…but act completely contrary. Honestly, “show don’t tell” isn’t just a cliche. It’s sound advice.

The story I’m thinking about went something like this, “Man acts very stoic. But inside, he is roiling. Who is this woman who has come into her life? She shakes him to his very bones. In fact, he might get a bone. But he doesn’t. Because he is acting very emotionally flat, and is not even feeling any physical effects of his attraction. But he continues to feel emotionally troubled–in every paragraph–even though it doesn’t show in his voice, expression, or body.”

I threw that book down quickly.

15. When you’re not writing, what are you doing, creatively and otherwise?

I go to school. I game when I can. Occasionally, I do something in the kitchen that could be mistaken for cooking. Even rarer still, I pull out my pen tablet and try to make graphic art. Many attempts end in utter #fail.

15a. I’m guessing based on your other answers you mean table-top RPGs, but I could be totally wrong. Either way, what do you like play?

Table-top, yes. Usually, Exalted and Star Wars d6. Computer games, too. Mostly World of Warcraft, but I grew up on Hexen and Tomb Raider. Now and then, I’ll steal some time on my boyfriend’s Xbox. I use it to play Bioshock. I’m still playing Bioshock the first. Don’t laugh.

16. Do you enjoy socializing with other authors? Is there an author out there now you’d love to meet?

Yes! I love socializing with other authors. Twitter has been wonderful for this. That’s something I highly recommend to any author who wants to network: Get on Twitter. Take it from a former skeptic. Once you get the hang of it, nothing beats it.

I’m not sure which author I’d love to meet. There are just so many. And I don’t want to meet any of my really favorite authors just because I think I’d forget how to talk.

17. Looking at your homepage (it’s really stylish, by the way) I noticed you seem to enjoy anthropomorphs and gay men. Are you into furries or yaoi culture? What do you think about those fandoms?

Ha!

Yaoi. I’ve heard of it, thought I’m not very familiar with it.

But Furry fandom–I’ve been lurking at its fringes since I was about twelve. I especially love the fiction and comics published by Sofawolf Press. I keep playing with the idea of writing something for their ‘zine Heat, just for the fun of it.

18. Oh, and speaking of fandoms: do you aspire to have one? Would you let people fanfic with your characters or your world?

*blush* Well, I just can’t imagine having one. I’m used to being the fan. But if I ever earned that kind of following…yes, I’m totally pro-fanfic. Quite a few writers that I know got their start writing fanfiction–even I did, to a limited degree. And I would never think of trying to police peoples’ imaginations. I just wrote the story. Where readers take it is up to them–just as long as they don’t take it to the bank. I like to afford the occasional piece of meat with my bread crusts.

19. As a writer, I’m sure you have opinions on free speech, and I’d like to give you a moment to speak freely about those. How about warnings and trigger tags? How do you feel about those, now that the wild, untamed internet of yesteryear is fading?

Warnings and trigger tags?

Wait, the world is changing? I didn’t notice. I’ve been hunched over my computer.

20. Do you think you can change the world? What do you WANT to changed about the world?

Do I think I can change the world? I feel like an ant, honestly. It’s one of the reasons I write. I WANT to make magic and strange technology real, so I DO make it real. In my own little worlds.

21. Now that this interview is winding down, what are you going to do? Some closing thoughts? Another martini?

A martini would be good. Also, a good stretch. And a spellchecker. But first, I’m going to scrounge together some bread crusts, because I’m hungry.

21a. Is a martini your preferred author!booze? Because if we had gotten to do this on my veranda (boo, thousands of miles), I do have an entire bar at my disposal.

Such a tease. Actually, my preferred drink is an amaretto sour. I’ve also taken a liking recently to bottled sangria. I’m a sangria snob who’s only ever liked fresh sangria in the past, but it’s been a while since I’ve been to a good Spanish restaurant and I guess my tastebuds will take what they can get now.

M: On a more serious note, I would like to thank you for the wonderful intero-… interview. You’ve been a great victim and a better sport and I’m really looking forward to see what you whip up in the future. Cheers!

CD: Thank you!

Summer Sessions 2011: Session Two

via eonism.net

What is The Summer Sessions?

The Summer Sessions is a project organised by Magen Toole with the help of Melissa Dominic, bringing authors, poets, photographers and artists together under a common theme: A desire to create. This year’s project consists of ten people, in different stages of their careers and creative development, from different cultural and educational backgrounds, who agreed to be interviewed and interview one another, with the goal of cross-posting each others’ interviews in our respective blogs. It’s a project about knowing who’s in our community, and giving back to that community by helping one another promote our own work.

SESSION TWO: NOEL GAYLE, INTERVIEWED BY MELISSA DOMINIC.

Recovering from a lack of time for writing (which he used as the focus of his blogging), Noel Gayle takes time out to discuss his influences and work, his history and goals, and how he’s taking steps to reclaim his writing process.You can find more about him at his blog, Blue Marble.

1. Who are you, what do you do, where can we find your work and what do you hope to
accomplish in this world?

Well. *looks around; coughs* My name is Noel Gayle and I am an aspiring writer from the
Caribbean, Jamaica specifically, but don’t tell anyone that; that tends to get you typecast, ugh.
Right now my work is mainly up on my blog, Blue Marble (www.lekayrnthon.wordpress.com).
My desires are simple; complete all the stories that I start, get my stories read by others than me
and be able to live off of the returns of my writing at some point…but I’ll settle for (guess which)
two out of three. : )

2. What is your writing process and space like?

Oh lord. Umm. I HAD a writing process until a few months ago, when it and school and my
hectic life ran afoul of each other and my writing process lost. Terribly. I documented this (very
painful) loss on my blog and tried to move on. I’ve decided, after a bit of experimentation, that a
return to my original writing methods is best. This was simply to carve out a solid block of time,
usually 4 hours minimum, wherein I would isolate myself from all distraction (ESPECIALLY
TWITTER), sit in a secluded area and stare at the screen or paper and pencil and will myself to
organise the images, themes and ideas in my head into a sequence and order that I could then
turn into words and put down. My ideal space is an unadorned table, with either the laptop or a
legal writing pad and pencil + giant eraser center. Silence or music loud or unique enough to
drown out background noise is essential.

3. What about your inspiration? You’ve spoken about your interest in things like comic
books and Stephen King, do they find their way into your work? What else does as well?
Do you put a lot of effort into inspiration? Finding it, cultivating it, etc?

Yes, they most certainly do. Stephen King, for instance, was one of my very early and still
influential teachers with regards to weaving a universe out of disparate pieces; see the
interconnectedness of his pre- Bag of Bones work, which culminated in Insomnia, his only Dark

Tower book that isn’t a Dark Tower book. As for comics, I fell in love with Marvel and DC upon
introduction, but it wasn’t until I found Manga and started to read Webcomics then non-
mainstream comic work like the entire Vertigo Imprint (my favourite) or anything by Alan
Moore or Grant Morrison or Warren Ellis that I REALLY realised just what could be done with
words and pictures. It all finds its way into my work one way or another; if I like something I get
it and pore over it and dig at its seams and get beneath the story to see the narration or dialogue
flows and the characters work, so that I can then use it in my own writing. I put a lot of work into
finding inspiration and I am very picky about what I want to expose myself to, so much so that
I’ve been called a snob, most pointedly by my wife. I, however, believe that with all that we have
to do outside of being able to read or watch or experience all we want, we should choose what
we do devote time to very carefully. All of my entertainment is in this vein; I cultivate very
carefully what I watch and read, though I am also guilty of staring at twitter for hours on end
when I could be reading or writing. *shame*

4. You’ve mentioned that you decided you were a writer while you were growing up in
Jamaica. Talk a bit about that, if you would? Does your location or particular experience
living there have any effect on your work? Do you feel you are a voice for Jamaica? Do you
find it seeping into your writing at all?

I fell in love with stories early on. I used to read the kid version of the British classics put out by
Penguin and MacMillan, classics such as The Fall of the House of Usher (still gives me chills).
Coming up through Disney (where I got my love for animation) and then comics (where I got my
love for, well, comics) I was always creating stories in my head, moving characters around and
spinning out scenes for fun. I enjoyed these inner flights of fantasy immensely. I cannot pinpoint
when I started saying that I wanted to be a writer, but I had always had skill with writing and
manipulating the English language and I believe I settled on being a writer because it was the
easiest and most immediately available avenue that I saw to creating stories, which is what I
REALLY love. I could do it anytime, with only paper, a pencil and an eraser; I did not have to
go to school to do it and I believed that I had some level of talent, so being a writer it was. If
anything, my location and experience with Jamaica and its authors and Caribbean authors on a
whole has made me NOT want to write anything set in the Caribbean or concerned with
Caribbean issues, or if so, only in a superficial sense. They are, by and large, a most depressing
set of writers; well, the ones that we got exposed to in school are and the few that I have
ventured to explore beyond that. Depressing and disheartening. Thinking on it now, this opinion
may be a holdover from a juvenile reaction to the levels of bitterness and despair evident in the
stories we were made to read at that time. There are so many others who are better informed and
(seem to) possess so much more insight into the Jamaican condition than me who DO strive to be
voices for Jamaica that it would be remiss of me to even consider to pretend to that role. *takes
breath* As for it seeping into my writing…I imagine that it must. There are times when I am
moved to write about Jamaica and its state of developmental stasis and frequent bouts of
regression, but to do so I would have to sort out what is factual from my emotional reactions to
same, and that is a process that would require a closer examination than I am willing to give to
certain situations.

5. Style and Genre: do you feel you fit into any one particular genre? How would you
define your style? Would you define them at all?

I would be quicker to define my (lack of a) style than the genre that I might fit in, but…hurm. A
very broad definition of Fantasy, with some Sci-Fantasy thrown in. This is in relation to the
stories that I have in mind now, however…who knows what the future may bring. My style is
annoying. Stream of consciousness with the odd complete book/story/setting bubbling up to my
conscious mind from below, leaving me scrabbling for a means to get it all down before it fades
back into the roiling purple mass that is my under-mind. I never mastered sitting down and
squeezing out that one word per minute that you need to get through the days when inspiration
has stayed in bed, that little skill that you need to actually finish stories and have successful
rewrites. I am in the process of doing so, however, so my style is still very much incomplete.

6. Is there something in literature/writing/what-have-you that you haven’t tried that you’d
really like to try? Some sort of story or genre or issue you haven’t touched on that you’d
love to get your hands on?

There’s so much. I’ve only recently, in the last year or so, achieved the confidence in myself that
I needed to stop writing what I felt I should be writing and start writing the stories that I wanted
to write. Outside of these stories there is just so much that I want to attempt and work on with
regards to writing that I don’t actively think about it; I would lock up and never get any work
done, always afraid that while I am working on something I am losing time on doing a hundred
other things. With that said…two things. I would like to write a believable, likable and even
admired (by females) female hero in a medieval fantasy setting and I would also like to write
about someone going mad, from the perspective of the person going insane; very much a work of
Ergodic Literature, a la House of Leaves. I would have so much fun with that.

7. What project, if any, is dear to your heart right now? Something you’re working on at
this exact moment. Do you have any of it you can share with everyone?

Junkie. It is one of the first two stories I wrote right after I made up my mind to be a writer. The
short of it is that he works for a shady corporation who has him by the balls because of past
discretions and his job is to be a janitor for the lives of specific human beings; wiping them out
of memory at the direction of the company. Here, he comes face to face with his current
assignment. Taken from the first draft.

[He breathed out, closed his eyes and conjured up an image of a door in his mind. The itch in his
palm intensified to a burning sensation. Oak, polished to a high sheen. It was a firebrand in his
palm, searing hot. He stood now in the center of the living area, back to the kitchen and facing
the front room and door. He lined the door in his mind with metal, hard and solid, outlined
against a white infinity behind which billions of lines of code and interminable reams of colour
roiled. He refocused on the door, felt as the connection was made by the watch between his
mind, his body and the central computers. He felt/knew that the door was solid, suspended in
some half reality/space occupied by all four at once. His palm was now a raging fire. He used his
burning palm to touch the door and it vanished in a flash of white, behind which stood the
subject...no. Behind which stood Grace McDonald. He shook her hand.] (Let me know if this is good
enough?)

8. Do you have any messages or themes you keep going back to in your work? Something
you’d like to share with the world and you hope it plays out in your words?

Not at the moment. I know what I, as a person, believe in and would like to see more of in the
world, but me as a writer, who I believe may have his own spin on my views, is still feeling
himself out. If that makes any sense to you.

9. Part of being a writer is putting yourself on par with other writers, I think, even those we
admire for their own literature. What other writers do you enjoy reading? What other
writers write things that align with your own work? What other writers would you like to
be in a short list with?

These are works which I did not expect to enjoy as much as I did. David Lukyanenko’s Night
Watch series, George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, The Tourist by Olen Steinhauer,
Bram Stoker’s Dracula (still better than all the hype, if you don’t mind the thick language),
Stephen King’s The Dark Half and Insomnia, anything by Alistair Maclean, Dick Francis or
Agatha Christie (barring Miss Marple) and, of course, the science fiction and fantasy classicists
such as Asimov, Fritz Leiber, R. E. Howard, Lovecraft, Poe and so on. Night Watch lined up
remarkably well with my ideas of an effortless and stereotype free integration of magic with a
contemporary setting, so much that I feel like not doing it anymore. Little, Big, by John Crowley,
though I’ve never read it, seems to fall very close to my views on how the world of Fae should be
presented; no hard and fast rules, but dreamy and ephemeral. Not a book but the anime No Ein
and its views on dimensional travel in a branching universe reality. In fact, I have a story up on
my blog influenced by it; it was a part of a writing project that I did with three other bloggers and
can be found here: http://bit.ly/hmMoUr. Who would I like to be on a short list with? Well. I
honestly have no idea. I would like to be on a list with people whose work resonated with mine
on a level beyond earning power or genre. It is easy for me to read my work and see what I put
into it, but it would be the readers that complete their half of the conversation that is all art and
storytelling that see it objectively, for what it is. They will ultimately determine this list. Sounds
like a BS answer, I know, but it is what I believe.

10. What would you tell a younger version of yourself, the version of yourself that just
picked up a pen and started writing, about what you know now? Some bit of wondrous
knowledge that only you could share?

Friendships are not a one way street (long story) and belief in yourself and your stories are the
greatest tool that you as a writer will ever have. Keep your ass in the chair and write through the
blank, painful, despair ridden moments as many times as is needed to get the words on the page
to match the narratives in your head. Keep at this and the rest will come.

11. Lastly, any cool things you’d like to share with us?

My backyard is the home of an ancient race of fae that split off from the Seelie Court decades
ago…um, not really. Cool things…believe in each other. Believe in people, give the persons you
meet during your day the chance to surprise you and if they disappoint you, then be forgiving.

Utopia’s are not automatic, they are built, one community minded person at a time.

Also, drink more water. Your skin loves it. : )

Words are a sawed-off shotgun.

AN OPHELIA-GIRL, SINKING I jumped ship the day I was able to reach the cumulus clouds with my fingertips. Sun-warmed floorboards under my feet. The splinter-bread sopping up my half of the ocean. When you’re a sea-hermit girl, You tend to get these notions. You start to create these worlds. Skinned-knees bent, Toes halfway dipped into brackish emotions. Singing songs of summer and pain. Grasping wildly for things you can’t touch. When you see slices of the sky through strands of hair and seaweed over your eyes, You start to develop these lies. You start to think that the universe belongs to you. When human beings don’t understand, but the ocean waves do. (I jumped ship - I tried my best. Only gravity beneath my feet, A thousand birds pummeled into my chest, Breaking my heart/fall.) XERG What element are you made of? Cast of chrome, but your kisses taste like copper in my mouth. Passionate binaries, (Love is dysfunction.) If our planets aligned in inferior conjunction, Could you ever intertwine with my heart-circuitry and splenetic malfunctions?

ETHEREAL MATHEMATICS New habits form As paradigms deform your sense of soul. There’s no way that you can recite the secrets of the universe Without sounding pretentious. Not to mention the bother of lost communication. Solving equations; long division of divinations. Chicken-scratched answers; Ink bleeding like spreading cancers. With all these scabs picked apart, Birthing new sores, You have to wonder what you’re doing these ethereal mathematics for. ANXIETY Her name is Anxiety and she runs her fingers through my hair. Bangles ‘round her wrist shake like little-girl fears. I hear them jangle as her fingertips get caught in my hair-tangles. Her perfume makes me nauseous. (She smells like nervous birds and highway drives.) I sit still as stoic statues, but too self-aware. Too overly-cautious. She breathes on my neck and I twitch. Then I cringe. I try not to look at her eyes, Dead-body blue tinged. She whispers sad soliloquies, Hums angry hymns. Speaks of untruths and fleeting whims. I start to speak up, but she won’t hear a word that I say. It isn’t until I turn around to face her, That she starts to back away.

February Art Challenge Recap

So it’s now the month of March and my February art challenge is over. I must admit, I am completely amazed that I stuck to it the whole time and didn’t miss a single day. I honestly thought I would give up before the month was over, or at the very least, miss a few days. I’m pretty good at procrastination.

This project made me realise that it is possible for me to be more productive than I thought I could be. It forced me to work harder. Though there are quite a few art-poems that I’m unhappy with, as a whole, I’m really proud of myself for doing this. It makes me want to think up a new challenge for myself. Something else that I could attempt to do each day. Not sure what I’ll be doing next yet.

I’m also really grateful to have gotten back into the habit of making collages. Before this, I really hadn’t made a proper collage for years. Collage-making was my first love, before graphic design. It has always been one of the greatest forms of self-expression for me.

& I’d like to show you this. I was going through some of my old, old files, and I found a scan of the very first collage I ever made! I made this in 1996, when I was 12 years old. It’s pretty hilarious. I was such a gothy little girl lol