by Ted Kosmatka
Why do you see Blue Canary as the future of your writing?
You keep a blog, and in that blog you say shit, and the shit comes back to haunt you. I don’t recall saying that Blue Canary is the future of my writing. But maybe I did. Whatever. It isn’t. What it is, at this point, is an idea for a YA novel that I very much want to write. Doesn’t mean I’ll ever find time to write it. I’m hardly considered a YA author. Though, my agent recently pointed out that were Silk to be published today, instead of having been published in 1998, it would be considered YA. I’m not going to get into the concept of Blue Canary, because I’m insanely protective of it. My partner knows it, and Neil Gaiman knows it—he encouraged me to write it, that it needed to be written—and my agent, she knows the concept, but that’s pretty much it. I’d love to write YA, because I see YA audiences as, in many ways, smarter and more open-minded than a lot of my potential adult audience. But will it happen? I do not know. Many factors come into play. Whether or not I could sell a YA novel. Whether or not I can find time to do a book I’d almost have to do on spec. All sorts of financial considerations. But, no. Obviously not the future of my writing. I have no goddamn idea what the future of my writing will be, and I’m not sure I want to know.
Of all of your stories, which would you most like to see made for the big screen?
Probably most of what I’ve written would be very difficult to translate into film. There have been a lot of nibbles. Some big nibbles. Threshold was a very big nibble. And "The Dry Salvages," surprisingly. And my lit and film agent both seem to think Blood Oranges will get attention. I was actually asked by a producer to write a screenplay for my short story “Onion,” but I only made it a few pages in before I decided it was a highly dubious undertaking and abandoned the project. I love film, and I’d love to see this happen. But I also fear the mess that could be made. Hollywood is bloody good at making messes of books, and I say that as a great fan of cinema. Books can make good movies, but they can also be perverted into terrible movies. I’d have to sell the rights, take the money, and probably never look back. That said, right now I think my graphic novel Alabaster: Wolves is probably my most filmable book, and maybe if Tarantino or Robert Rodríguez would take on Blood Oranges, or, as long as we’re dreaming, Lars Von Trier could do an incredible job of adapting The Red Tree. Though he already covered a lot of that same ground in Antichrist.
Do you have any upcoming projects you want to discuss?
I’m working on the next Alabaster graphic novel, Boxcar Tales, which is being serialized this year. My next short story collection, The Ape’s Wife and Other Stories, will be released by Subterranean Press this summer. I’m working with Centipede Press on what are going to be beautiful limited editions of both The Drowning Girl: A Memoir and The Red Tree. There are other projects in the works, but those are the only ones that I bring up.
Jude Griffin is an envirogeek, writer, photographer, and an expert in learning and knowledge management. She has trained llamas at the Bronx Zoo, was a volunteer EMT and firefighter, accompanied journalists into combat in Central America, lived in a haunted village in Thailand, ran an international amphibian monitoring network, volunteers with the National Park Service habitat restoration program on the Boston Harbor Islands, reads slush for Nightmare and Lightspeed magazines, and is working on a novel that might be sci fi, might be fantasy. She cannot parallel park, lies about how far she runs in the morning, and still has her Gloria Vanderbilt jeans from high school. Folded. In a box.
Paul DesCombaz is a writer and educator, working with children with special needs. He is a graduate of the 2011 Odyssey Writing Workshop. He reads slush for Nightmare and Lightspeed. Currently, he is working on a novel and submitting short stories to various publications.
Author Spotlight: Ted Kosmatka
E.C. Myers
I understand you have roots in Indiana, where this story is set. Are you Mitch? What inspired this story?
Yeah, there’s no point in denying it. I’m very much the Mitch of this story, and the premise was drawn, as you might expect, from my experiences trying to deal with a toddler in church. When you are getting glared at by a hundred old people, your mind begins searching for any escape, and somehow this story kind of appeared in my head during the course of one very traumatizing baptism. The cry room was real, by the way, and my daughter and I were really banished to it. Where real life ends and the fiction begins is probably farther into the story than you’d expect.
It seems like you’ve written just about everything: plays for the stage and screen, short stories in every genre, novels, and video games. Is there a particular format and length that feels more natural to you?
I think long novelettes are probably a good natural length for most of my ideas. I’m always excited when I come up with ideas that I can pull off at shorter lengths than that, but it doesn’t happen often. As for novels, I have several backed up in my head, so I’m doing my best to actually write them all before I die of old age, but they certainly do take a long time. Novels are kind of the opposite of immediate gratification, and you’re just sitting there at the computer as the seasons change, and the calendar switches over, and it’s still the same story, and at some point you start questioning your sanity in tackling this enormous task. But then the novel is eventually finished, and you’re staring at a book—an actual honest to goodness physical object—and all the hard work is worth it.
What’s your writing process and approach for a very short piece like “The Cry Room” as opposed to longer works like novels?
“Cry Room” was basically written in just a week or so. I started it, writing the first few pages in just one sitting, and then put it away for the night. The next day I looked at what I’d written, and I thought I might have something there, so I kept at it, and wrote more. Over the next couple of days, I came up with the ending, and then I had a story. Novels are a lot different. It’s less about a burst of inspiration, and more about remembering to bring your hammer and chisel to work every day. In the end, you’re trying to do the same thing—to tell a story that people want to read—but the process is totally different.
How are you enjoying life as a new novelist, with another book on the way? How do you balance your time with family, a full-time writing job, book promotion, and fiction writing?
Honestly, life is very much the same. I just keep my head down and write what I write, and I try to live pretty much like I always have. The main difference now is that my stories are getting published rather than just going into a trunk, like they did for the first decade or so when I started writing seriously. I’m lucky that I’ve been given this opportunity to get my stories out, so I’m very thankful for that. As for how I balance a family and full-time writing, well, that is a tough one. I don’t think I do a very good job. It seems like I’m always borrowing time for one or the other, and there’s not really enough hours in the day. This is why so many writers have cats, I think. You never feel guilty for diving into a story and ignoring your cat. Your cat appreciates it. Families, less so. Finding balance is something I’m going to really have to figure out how to get better at in the future.
It seems that many writers’ short story output drops once they start writing and selling novels, but you have a few short story publications coming up. Is continuing to write shorter fiction a priority for you?
Yes, I’d say it is a priority. When I sold my novel, I was fortunate enough to immediately sign a deal for a second novel, and so I jumped right into writing that, and the end result was that I didn’t write any short fiction for a full year. This really bothered me. In previous years, I’d had a long run of stories reprinted in Year’s Best anthologies, and now here I was not even writing anything short. I feel like I cut my teeth on short fiction, so it will always be special to me, and I hope that I’ll always be able to write it.
Please tell us a little about your forthcoming novel, The Prophet of Bones, and some of the other publications we can expect to see from you so
on.
The Prophet of Bones is an alternate history scientific thriller. The quick elevator pitch is this: The story grants young-earth creationists their argument. In the 1950s, carbon-14 dating proved that the earth was really 5,800 years old. Religious and scientific orthodoxies are inverted; evolution is proven false, and creationism is taught in science classes throughout the world. But there’s still the problem of the fossil record to contend with, and when a strange new fossil on the island of Flores is discovered, it triggers a firestorm that threatens the lives of everyone involved.
In addition to my next novel, I also have another short story coming out with Sheila Williams at Asimov’s called “Haplotype 1402,” and my novelette “The Color Least Used by Nature,” first printed this year in F&SF, will be reprinted in Jonathan Strahan’s upcoming Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year.
E.C. Myers was assembled in the U.S. from Korean and German parts and raised by a single mother and a public library in Yonkers, New York. He has published short fiction in a variety of print and online magazines and anthologies, and his young adult novels, Fair Coin and Quantum Coin, are available now from Pyr Books. He currently lives with his wife, a doofy cat, and a mild-mannered dog in Philadelphia and shares way too much information about his personal life at ecmyers.net and on Twitter @ecmyers.
Author Spotlight: Margo Lanagan
Seamus Bayne
In “The Goosle,” you revisit a classic tale, likely familiar to many readers. What drew you to “Hansel and Gretel”? Are there any other stories you’d like to retell?
What drew me to “Hansel and Gretel” was a Yiddish word, “gunsel,” that I happened upon in the dictionary. One of its several definitions went something like, “a youth, particularly a homosexual one, kept by a tramp.” So there’d been a time and place in which tramps commonly kept boys for sexual purposes—so commonly that there was a word for it? I immediately wanted to set a story there, and to tell it from the point of view of a gunsel.
From there I jumped to Hansel and Gretel simply because “gunsel” sounded similar to “Hansel.” Most of the energy of a short story comes from the challenge of fitting two disparate things together, and the idea of cramming a gunsel into the structure of “Hansel and Gretel” certainly gave off sparks for me.
I can’t say that there’s an array of traditional tales that I’m ticking off one by one as I retell them—although so far I’ve made over “Snow White and Rose Red” (in Tender Morsels), “Rapunzel” (in “The Golden Shroud”), “Red Riding Hood” (in “Titty Anne and the Very, Very Hairy Man”), selkie legends (in Sea Hearts/The Brides of Rollrock Island) and a few others. Generally it works the way it worked with “The Goosle;” a cool half-idea comes along, demanding some kind of structure and drive, which a particular fairy- or folk-tale then steps forward to offer.
The world Hanny describes is as visceral and disturbing as any I have read, and I say that as a compliment. Did you have this in mind when you started writing this story, or did it evolve as you wrote it?
Thank you—disturbance was what I was after.
Probably the most disturbing element, the unwholesome relationship between Grinny and Hansel, was there at the start; the whole “gunsel” thing and the world in which that operated. It had to be permissible, so times had to be fairly lawless, so I set the story in the time of the Black Plague, when child welfare was not really high on anyone’s agenda. That made sense of the Hansel and Gretel setting, where a few people had chosen to live very isolated lives in a trackless forest; it made sense of the witch’s choice to do so, to avoid the marauding gangs of survivors who were roaming the country.
I had that much in mind when I made Hanny and Grinny front up at the witch’s cottage. And I knew that in the end Hanny was going to gain some kind of victory over the witch and over Grinny. The rest worked itself out as I went, from the basis of those first few decisions about the heartless, dog-eat-dog-and-worse world in which it was all going to happen.
Does the eating of earth have significance beyond the contextual reference to the cottage made of sweets in the original tale?
I wanted to make the edible house credible in the way that the gunsel-keeping was credible. And I wanted to show that despite his reassuring himself that all was well in his world, Hansel was needy in peculiar, private ways that indicated the damage that had been done to him.
Also, I wanted to get those sensations into the story—the mouthful of grit, the compulsive, unhealthy feeding. Looking back, I guess I was trying to make people literally gag, in the way that I hoped they’d be morally gagging at the world being laid out before them. At the time it just felt right, that Hanny was fulfilling the requirements of the older story while exhibiting something quite different from Hansel’s and Gretel’s innocent gingerbread-theft.
Without giving too much away, this is a tale of redemption, of sorts. Do you agree that this story marks a turning point in the life of the protagonist?
Oh yes, he goes in puzzled and doubtful, trapped into being someone’s accessory, and he comes out a free man, literally in his own territory, fulfilling his true responsibilities. And in the very last sentence his unwholesome appetite is transferred to an object outside himself. He’ll be fine from now on—compromised by what he’s seen and done, but no worse than any other person in that chaotic world.
We love this creepy, horrifying story. What else do you have in the works?
I’m writing a historical fantasy novel set in Ireland and Australia; that’s the most I should say about that. I don’t have a contract for it yet, and I’m really not sure how dark I’ll go, whether it’s going to be young-adult or just straight adult. We’ll see.
And I’m booked to write a Christmas novelette in 2013. I’ve made a couple of false starts with that, and I’m not really sure what direction I’ll take, so I can’t be very specific there, either, about the degree to which it’ll be creepy or horrifying.
Beyond that, it’s refreshing to be able to tell you that I have no other plans. I’ve had a few years when the story deadlines were coming thick and fast, but next year’s looking wonderfully clear, and I’m hoping to keep it that way as far as possible. A novel and half a day job is plenty to fill up my days with, at least for the next six months.
Seamus Bayne got his start writing during the ’90s working in the roleplaying game industry. In 2010, he attended the Viable Paradise writer’s workshop. Seamus is the co-founder and host of the Paradise Lost writing retreat held annually in Texas. You can learn more about him, and his writing at www.seamusbayne.net.
Author Spotlight: Norman Partridge
Erika Holt
Why blackbirds?
“Blackbirds” was written for an Alan M. Clark anthology called Imagination: Fully Dilated. The idea was to take one of Alan’s paintings and write a story for it. I chose a piece called “The One on the Roof.” It featured a blackbird picking through a nest made from a jump rope, twisted sticks, a baseball, and skinned human faces. So that was the central image, and the blackbird became the key to creating a dark logic that would complement Alan’s painting and drive the story.
Who is the man in black? Is he a mere servant, or does he have an agenda of his own?
I’m not trying to be coy, but both . . . or maybe neither. Meaning as a writer I don’t always like to answer all the questions a story presents, or every question readers might have. Of course, I want the logic of the story to operate . . . but I want to leave room for a few mysteries, too. To me, that’s a key element to much of the horror fiction I enjoy—the questions that keep readers coming back to a piece, especially the ones that might make them see it a little differently the next time they read it.
Billy is the only one who figures out what’s going on and who puts up a fight. Was he just in the right place at the right time, or is there something special about him? Does he share something in common with the man in black?
