by Cat Rambo
What would you call the defining moment in your writing career, the moment when you knew you turned pro? What story, market, or anthology had a part in that?
I got to read with Samuel R. Delany at KGB. That was a very shiny moment and one I will always, always, always treasure in my heart. I knew then I'd made the right choice when I decided to pursue writing wholeheartedly.
There aren't a lot of writer/editor combos out there, but you are one of them. How easy is it to switch the hats and how is your approach as an editor influenced by you, the writer, and vice-versa? In your career, have you had any bad or enlightening experiences with editors you'd like to mention?
It's not too hard to switch hats, but the important thing is that editing does take some writing energy. One of the things I had to think hard about is whether I was primarily a writer or primarily an editor. I chose the former, and tried to make that clear when talking about it.
Editing—as I see it—is making the story shine through and helping clear away any clutter or detritus that gets in the way of that. It's definitely a skill a writer needs to exercise at some point in their process.
As far as experiences with editors, my usual experience is that they make the story better. They catch things I wouldn't have, and even the changes I don't agree with and push back on are useful feedback to me. The only time I've had an editor damage a piece, actually, is with technical writing, when the editor didn't understand the technology.
As an editor of Fantasy Magazine, how were you defining a "perfect" story, one you would gladly accept? When you write, is the editor in you sneaking in, blocking the imagination with logic and theory?
There's so many different kinds of perfect stories, but they all do one thing: they stick with you. They come back to you long after you've read them, sometimes coaxing you to go back to reread, other times just changing the way you see something.
When I write, I turn the editor off and let the words flow. I can always make them better, but I can't do much unless I've got a lump of words to work with. There's a time and a place for the editor and first drafts aren't it. There, the editor just impedes things.
You write speculative fiction (short and long). What is your writing process? Do you have clear goals set ahead of time, or are you more of a spur of the moment kind of writer?
I usually try to write 2000 words a day. That hasn't been the case the last month, since we've been on the road as part of a six month trip, and I find myself grumpy and grouchy as a result, but will be back in the flow next week when we settle in one place for a bit.
If you were to choose one favorite novel and one favorite short story from your own works, which one would it be? Related to that, for people who haven't read your works yet - what would be the best place to start getting to know your world?
My favorite novel would be the one I'm currently shopping around, the first in a fantasy quartet, called Beasts of Tabat. As far as short stories go - I don't know. I like a lot of them. For steampunk readers, I'd point to "Clockwork Fairies." For urban fantasy, "Magnificent Pigs." For SF, "The Mermaids Singing Each to Each" or more recently, "English Muffin, Devotion on the Side."
What is your advice for young writers trying to break-through?
Persistence is pretty important. Keep your eyes open for opportunities, and grab them when you can. Research the market. And don't be a jackass. Be kind and thankful to people, because it's not incumbent on anyone but you to recognize your genius.
What's next for you? Is there anything else you'd like to add?
I'm currently trying a new experiment in self-publishing using Patreon. I'm pretty prolific normally and so I've accumulated a backlog of stories. Through Patreon, people can subscribe and get two original stories each month. (http://www.patreon.com/catrambo) If it's successful enough, I intend to use that to start a new speculative fiction magazine, but there's a way to go on that still.
Cat, thank you very much for participating in this interview!
Interview with Author Charity Tahmaseb
By day, Charity Tahmaseb is a writer of technical documentation, based in St. Paul, Minnesota. By night, she writes fiction, mostly young adult and children stories. Her published works include The Geek Girl's Guide to Cheerleading, which was a YALSA 2012 Popular Paperback pick in the Get Your Geek On category.
Q & A
Iulian: Tell us a little bit about yourself. Who is Charity Tahmaseb? How/where did you grow up, any particular influences in your life? Did you live up to your high-school yearbook quote?
Charity: I grew up in southern Minnesota. I spent twelve years as a Girl Scout and six on active duty in the Army. I think these two things explain a lot about me. As for the yearbook quote, my school didn't do that, so I have nothing to live up to (or regret).
I know your regular job involves technical writing. How did you get into that and how did you make the leap to fiction?
For part of my time in the Army, I worked as an intelligence analyst, which involves combining pieces of information so they make sense to someone else. The same is essentially true for technical writing, although the end result is (with any luck) installed software.
As for making the leap into fiction, it was simply a matter of realizing that I could write down the running narratives I had going in my head and that other people might want to read them. It took me a long time to figure this out.
Did you take part in any workshops, critique groups, or otherwise writing communities, and if so, how did that process help your writing career?
I did, and still do on occasion, although nowadays I tend toward more self-study. The best workshops/classes are the ones that get you writing and get you trying something new.
What do you consider to be the defining moment in your writing career, the moment when you knew this is what you will do for the rest of your life? What story, market, or anthology had a part in that?
After The Geek Girl's Guide to Cheerleading was published, I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease. For a while after, I wasn't sure I would be able to write, and things got dark. It's really hard to write with major brain fog.
In 2012, I returned to writing short stories again (a form I've always loved). Then I started submitting those stories. The first pro-paying market I sold to was the first volume of Unidentified Funny Objects, and the story was The Secret Life of Sleeping Beauty. In 2013, I joined Write 1/Sub 1 and really got my writing mojo back.
I sometimes feel as though I've had to retrain myself to write again. I'm grateful to the Write 1/Sub 1 community for providing a way back into the writing life.
You have published quite a number of short stories, some of them in difficult markets. What was your experience of working with editors?
I enjoy seeing how someone else perceives what I've written, and the editors I've worked with have been great at conveying how something did—or didn't—work, but also why. I use that "why" when I revise.
You write speculative fiction, mostly young adult and children stories. What drives you to the genre and have you tried writing anything else?
Until I started Write 1/Sub 1 last year, I never realized how many speculative fiction stories I had stored up in my mind. I've always read in the genre, so I'm not sure why I was so surprised to start writing in it.
I think what draws me to both speculative and young adult fiction is the sense of discovery. Everything is new, or at least, viewed through new eyes.
In this E-World, how do you see the day to day life of a writer, outside of writing? Do you use social networking and do you feel it is helpful for your writer's platform?
I like social networks for their social aspects and tend not to fret about my writer platform (which I'm sure is fairly obvious). I've always used the rule that when it comes to marketing and/or social networks, do what you enjoy and don't worry about the rest.
For people who haven't read your works yet, what would it be a good place to start? What is the favorite piece you wrote so far?
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For young adult contemporary reads, either The Geek Girl's Guide to Cheerleading or just released this past June, The Fine Art of Keeping Quiet. As far as speculative fiction goes, I think one of my favorite pieces is the (very) short Straying from the Path in the March 2014 issue of Flash Fiction Online. I'm also partial to Ghost in the Coffee Machine, which appeared in Coffee: 14 Caffeinated Tales of the Fantastic from UFO Publishing.
I am almost always trying to put this question in any interview, because I believe advice from writers to writers is very important. What is your advice for writers?
Brace for the collective groan—I highly recommend writing on a regular basis. I won't say every day, because I don't always reach that goal. But what has made a tremendous difference in both my life and writing life is weaving in the writing.
I think when writers hear "write every day," they imagine they must carve out a four-hour block of time—no one has a four-hour block of time. What is beyond helpful is grabbing twenty minutes. This is doable, and once you start doing it, the power of the approach really sinks in.
What's next for you? Is there anything else you'd like to add?
I spent last year writing a lot of short stories, many of them speculative fiction stories. I'd like to try my hand at longer pieces, with more complicated world building.
Charity, thank you very much for sharing your thoughts with us. I personally wish you good luck in your career and I hope we can read a lot more amazing stories from you soon.
Interview with Author William Meikle
William Meikle is a Scottish writer, now living in Canada, with twenty novels published in the genre press and over 300 short story credits in fifteen countries. He is the author of the ongoing Midnight Eye series and his current best seller is The Invasion, a sci/fi alien invasion tale with mass carnage, plucky survivors, and last minute rescues.
Q & A
Iulian: Tell us a few words about yourself—how did you grow up, any particular influences in your life, any strange (or overly normal) jobs you had before writing?
William: I grew up in a decaying industrial town in the West of Scotland south of Glasgow-it was a steelworking town, but when the works closed, unemployment became the main order of the day and the town stagnated. Books and a guitar were my armor against growing despair. I escaped by going to University in Glasgow, where I got a biological sciences degree, worked for a year cataloging a museum's plant fossil collection, another year in an apple orchard researching fungal diseases on fruit, then fell into a career in IT that lasted 25 years.
My influences would have to be the reading I did in the genre as a teenager in the early-seventies, before Stephen King and James Herbert came along. I graduated from Superman and Batman comics to books and I was a voracious reader of anything I could get my hands on; Alistair MacLean, Michael Moorcock, Nigel Tranter and Louis D'Amour all figured large. Pickings were thin for horror apart from the Pan Books of Horror and Dennis Wheatley, which I read with great relish. Then I found Lovecraft and things were never quite the same.
Mix that with TV watching of Thunderbirds, Doctor Who, the Man From Uncle, Lost in Space and the Time Tunnel, then later exposure on the BBC to the Universal monsters and Hammer vampires and you can see where it all came from. Oh, and Quatermass. Always Quatermass.
I also have a deep love of old places, in particular menhirs and stone circles, and I've spent quite a lot of time travelling the UK and Europe just to visit archaeological remains.
How did you start writing? Was there a sudden epiphany or a slow process? What pushed you to writing and when did you know you were ready?
When the steelworks shut and employment got worse, I could have started writing about that, but why bother? All I had to do was walk outside and I'd get it slapped in my face. That horror was all too real. But I had an itch that needed scratching.
So I took up my pen and wrote. At first it was song lyrics, designed (mostly unsuccessfully) to get me closer to girls. I tried my hand at a few short stories but had no confidence in them and hid them away. And that was that for many years.
It wasn't until I was in my 30s that it really took hold.
Back in the very early '90s I had an idea for a story… I hadn't written much of anything since the mid-70s at school, but this idea wouldn't leave me alone. I had an image in my mind of an old man watching a young woman's ghost. That image grew into a story, that story grew into other stories, and before I knew it I had an obsession in charge of my life.
So it all started with a little ghost story, "Dancers"; one that ended up winning a prize in a national ghost story competition, getting turned into a short movie, getting read on several radio stations, getting published in Greek, Spanish, Italian and Hebrew, and getting reprinted in The Weekly News in Scotland.
Since then I've sold over 300 short stories, including appearances in the likes of Nature and Daily Science Fiction among many others, and I've had 20 novels published in the horror and fantasy genre presses, with more coming over the next few years.
Did you take part in any workshops, critique groups, or otherwise writing communities, and if so, how did that process help your writing career?
Nope - I haven't had any writing training whatsoever beyond English classes at school. I'm not much of a joiner and I hate how most groups turn quickly to cliques and power-struggles. I'm happier working away on my own.
What would you call the defining moment in your writing career, the moment when you knew you turned pro? What story, market, or anthology had a part in that?
It was in 2005. I managed to place a story, Total Mental Quality in a big name Scottish science fiction anthology, Nova Scotia. I went along to the launch and got to stand next to multiple award winning writers like Charlie Stross, Hal Duncan and Ken MacLeod. That single moment was an epiphany, and taught me that I was capable of pushing a career higher than the small press in which I'd become established and rather stagnant. I've become a convert since then to the idea of aiming for the highest markets you can. There are more misses now, but the hits are so much more satisfying.
You have an impressive amount of short stories published, and a lot of them in pro-markets. This means that you submit a lot and deal with many editors along the way. Without naming names, unless you want to, do you find working with editors difficult, helpful, annoying, etc? Any bad, or enlightening, experiences you'd like to mention?
I've been mostly lucky with editors and publications. The problems mostly arise when editors bite off more than they can chew. Grand promises are made that can't be kept and the whole thing either folds with money being owed to everyone concerned, or the product is put out too fast and looks cheap and shoddy. The best editors play their cards close to their chest, never make promises they can't deliver on, and quietly go about their business putting out a quality product. They're the ones to seek out and develop relationships with.
You write speculative fiction (short and long), mostly fantasy, science fiction, and horror. Have you attempted to write other genres as well? What draws you to SF/F?
Counts quickly... I've written Horror, Fantasy, Science Fiction, Crime, Western and Thriller. Plus the subgenres, like ghost stories, occult detectives, creature features, sword and sorcery etc. But I don't really think of them as being different. It's all adventure fiction for boys who've grown up, but stayed boys. Like me.
Tarzan is the second novel I remember reading. (The first was Treasure Island, so I was already well on the way to the land of adventure even then.) I quickly read everything of Burroughs I could find. Then I devoured Wells, Dumas, Verne and Haggard. I moved on to Conan Doyle before I was twelve, and Professor Challenger's adventures in spiritualism led me, almost directly, to Dennis Wheatley, Algernon Blackwood, and then on to Lovecraft. Then Stephen King came along.
There's a separate but related thread of a deep love of detective novels running parallel to this, as Conan Doyle also gave me Holmes, then I moved on to Christie, Chandler, Hammett, Ross MacDon
ald and Ed McBain, reading everything by them I could find.
Mix all that lot together, add a hefty slug of heroic fantasy from Howard, Leiber and Moorcock, a sprinkle of fast moving Scottish thrillers from John Buchan and Alistair MacLean, and a final pinch of piratical swashbuckling. Leave to marinate for fifty years and what do you get?
A psyche with a deep love of the weird in its most basic forms, and the urge to beat up monsters. And in my case, it comes out in writing that's almost all pulp. Big beasties, swordplay, sorcery, ghosts, guns, aliens, werewolves, vampires, eldritch things from beyond and slime. Lots of slime.
I think you have to have grown up with pulp to get it. A lot of writers have been told that pulp equals bad plotting and that you have to have deep psychological insight in your work for it to be valid. They've also been told that pulp equals bad writing, and they believe it. Whereas I remember the joy I got from early Moorcock, from Mickey Spillane and further back, A E Merritt and H Rider Haggard. I'd love to have a chance to write a Tarzan, John Carter, Allan Quartermain, Mike Hammer or Conan novel, whereas a lot of writers I know would sniff and turn their noses up at the very thought of it.
I write to escape. I haven't managed it yet, but I'm working on it.
You are active in social media, on Facebook, especially. How important is social networking to the modern writer and what do you get out of it?
It's important to me, as I live in a remote corner of Eastern Newfoundland, so the opportunities to interact one to one with people in the business are limited. Social media lets me talk to editors, publishers and other writers without leaving my desk. I can't remember life without it—actually, I can—it involved scores of brown envelopes, expensive printer ribbon, reams of paper and a huge postage bill. Thankfully those days are long gone.
If you were to choose one favorite novel and one favorite short story from your own works, which one would it be? Related to that, for people who haven't read your works yet - what would be the best place to start getting to know your world?