Posts Tagged ‘interviews’
See me. . . elsewhere!
Posted on: February 18, 2020
Shhh!!! don’t tell anyone, but *whispers* there are other websites on the internet besides Little Red Reviewer */whispers*
I know, crazy, right? But? here’s the good news, sometimes I have stuff on those other websites too!
I had a ton of fun doing The Questioning with Timy at RockStarlit Book Asylum, come on over to find out why I was put into an asylum, what book I’d take with me, and what fictional world I’d like to visit!
Over at Nerds of a Feather, I got to interview Jess Nevins, author of 20th Century Horror, and A.K. Larkwood, author of The Unspoken Name. Woah, did you know Nerds of a Feather has a newsletter? They’ll tell you when I have a new interview up there! check it out!
if you don’t get enough of me here at Little Red Reviewer, go check out some of those posts!
If you’ve not heard already, Jason Sizemore, Editor in Chief of Apex Magazine went in for some pretty major surgery earlier this week. He’s recovering and doing fine, but poor dude has another few days before they’ll release him from the hospital. He goes into more detail in his Words from the Editor in Chief introduction to the February issue of Apex Magazine.
Because it’s fun to surprise Jason (seriously. he startles very easily. surprising him at events is way. too. much. fun), his managing editor Lesley Conner (Hi Lesley!!!) is running a surprise subscription drive (twitter link) (buy it here link)
And this got me thinking: how many of my blog readers know about my connection with Apex Magazine?
I’m the author interviewer at Apex. Every month, for nearly 5 years, I’ve interviewed an author who is being featured in Apex Magazine. It’s been an amazing experience, and I have Jason to thank for it.
Who have I interviewed? oh, just some people. maybe you’ve heard of them?
Adam R Shannon (read his story if you want to cry forever)
Robert Sawyer (!! I am STILL star struck!)
and somehow I got lucky enough to interview Seth Dickinson?? how did that happen?
and dozens more. And my interviews? I’m proud of them, but seriously, they are the most boring part of Apex Magazine. Do yourself a solid and check out Apex. The fiction is weird, surreal, off kilter. It makes you think. You can read all their old stuff for free on the website. like what you see? Get a subscription. buy a single issue. they might even have some print issues still floating around.
Magazines not your thing, but SFF in Translation is? here. you’re welcome. oh, that’s volume 5, which means there are four more.
Jason took a chance on me. I was a total stranger who had nothing but enthusiasm. And now my buddy who has opened so many doors for me and spoiled me and is just the world’s super nicest guy is in the hospital. His doctors say he’s recovering exactly as he should, but I am still worried. He’ll be fine, and in 5 years we’ll be laughing about this. I’ve got my resting bitch face on, but inside I’m freaking out.
An interview with World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Winner Chelsea Quinn Yarbro
Posted on: November 20, 2014
The World Fantasy Convention was held earlier this month, and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro was presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award. Her name will be familiar to fans of historical fiction, as she’s the author behind the famous Saint-Germain Cycle. The first novel in the Cycle, Hotel Transylvania, was published in 1978, and there are now over 25 volumes. She’s written over 80 books, and over 70 works of short fiction. No stranger to awards either, she’s received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Horror Writers Association, the Grand Master award from the World Horror Association, and she was the first woman to be enrolled as a Living Legend of the International Horror Guild.
Chelsea was kind enough to take a few minutes out of her busy day to answer a few of my questions on her famous series, music, and the occult. Wanna learn more about this amazing author? I do! let’s go!
LRR: Your bio briefly mentions you are also a musical composer. Could you tell us a little more about this? Personally, I believe there are a lot of connections between music and other means of communication. Have you found any similarities between writing music and writing fiction?
CQY: There are many things that cannot be said with words, and it seems to me that’s where music comes in. When I get worded – out, I do music to deal with all the things that words cannot express. Words and music are powerful communicators, but they communicate different kinds of things. So while composition and writing are at the opposite end of the communication scale, they serve the same basic purpose. At least that’s my opinion.
Interviews are cool.
Posted on: August 1, 2014
- In: interviews
- 8 Comments
You read their book, and you thought it was really cool. Why not learn more about the author? Here’s some recent interviews online of authors whose work has received rave reviews. Check ’em out!
SFSignal has an ongoing series of interviews of the authors found in the Apex Book of World SF. So far they’ve interviewed Karin Tidbeck and Athena Andreadis, Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Benjanun Sriduangkaew, Myra Cakan and Nelly Geraldine García-Rosas, and Fadzlishah Johanabas and Ika Koeck. You can check this link for updates!
Also over at SFSignal, Neil Clarke (editor and creator of Clarkesworld Magazine) gets interviewed about his new anthology Upgraded.
My Bookish Ways interviews Dan Abnett and Nik Vincent about Fiefdom
Amazing Stories interviews Hal Duncan
Adventures of a Bookonaut interviews Michelle E. Goldsmith
Ebon Shores interviews Cheryl Morgan
Liberty Voice interviews Michael West
Dab of Darkness interviews David Lee Summers
Words and Pictures interviews Liz De Jager
The Black Library interviews David Annandale
Randomly Yours, Alex, interviews Kathleen Jennings
Bloody Cake News interviews Sebastien De Castell
I recently reviewed King David and the Spiders from Mars, and last year I got a kick out of She Nailed a Stake Through His Head, the first two anthologies in Tim Lieder’s series of Biblical horror story collections. It’s easy to say “The Bible is full of violence”, because yes, it is. But what about the violence we don’t see? What about the horrific reasonings behind why people did the oh so strange things that they did? Is that *really* the a Temple of Dagon over in the next valley? Why yes, yes it is. This is what makes historical fantasy so much fun – the authors have free range to take the tiny details that speak to them and go crazy with them. The result? Stories that speak to me.
In my interview with Tim Lieder, we discussed lessons learned in the publishing industry, the Bible as Literature (and seeking different translations), the importance of diversity in your TOCs, and more. So let’s get to it!
LRR: Tell us a little about yourself.
T.L.: I’m a writer. I live in New York. When I was in college I decided to convert to Judaism which was a surprise to everyone, including me, especially since the original inspiration was from an academic class on Biblical literature. I did convert but it took a long time. I have four cats. I started Dybbuk Press (Dybbuk Press facebook page) back in 2004 and I have published 9 books through it. I named it after the Ansky play The Dybbuk which takes liberties with the Jewish legends of the Dybbuk put is one of the spookiest plays ever written (the movie was put on by the 1939 Warsaw Yiddish Theater so that adds even more disturbing subtext). Currently, I make a living at writing but most of the writing is freelance for several clients and includes personal statements, editing jobs and term papers. Still, I manage to sell a few stories every year and I keep working on the fiction.
LRR: How did you get involved with editing and publishing? Any big lessons you’d like to pass on to anyone thinking of a career in editing?
T.L.: Ten years ago, I thought it’d be fun to edit a multi-author anthology and stick my story in it. I was unpublished and thought that it’d be my big break. I think I made every mistake that you could make when trying to edit an anthology. I didn’t offer much money. I tried to work with friends who were also amateurs. I agreed to work with a small press publisher whose only interest was self-publishing (something I learned when I realized that he had thought that his girlfriend’s terrible vampire story was going into the anthology). I didn’t even copy edit. About the only thing I did right was naming the book Teddy Bear Cannibal Massacre. I think that’s the only reason why it ever made a profit.
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As the Book of Apex Book 4 tour continues, I find myself interacting with more and more of the authors, be it on twitter, or reading their guest posts and interview on other blogs, or interviewing them here. I’ll let you in on a little secret about how I come up with interview questions: I check out the author’s website. I read their recent blog posts, I look at different projects they are involved in, I wanna know what their deal is. After a quick glance through Cecil Castellucci’s website, I e-mailed a friend of mine and said “have you looked at her website? this woman is awesome!”. The more I looked at Cecil’s site and everything she’s involved with, the more often I found myself picking my jaw up off the floor. This woman is involved with everything, she does everything, she’s passionate about literature and storytelling and youth literacy programs. She does everything. It’s inspirational, is what it is.
Wanna know more about Cecil Castellucci? Of course you do! let’s get to the interview!
LRR: I’m not usually a fan of zombie stories, but I really enjoyed your Apex story, “Always The Same. Until It Is Not”. Did I interpret it right? Is the guy a zombie? And what inspired this story?
C.C. Yes! You got it right. He is a zombie. To be honest, I’m a little freaked out by zombies. They really are creepy. Writing this story was a way for me to try to confront my fear of zombies. I tried to think of it as a way to own my fear. The idea came after I’d talked with an acquaintance who writes for The Walking Dead. I swore I’d never watch the show. Then she sort of challenged me on that because she knows I like a good story. I started thinking about how it’s always an infection that takes over like wildfire and then descends the world into a nightmare. I thought, what if I switch what “infection” and “descent” means? So in this story the infection is humanity and the descent is the rise of it. It’s sort of the after of the after.
LRR: I’m also a huge fan of your short story “We Have Always Lived on Mars” (Tor.com May 2013). What inspired this story, and without spoiling the ending, can you tell us how you hit on that twist?
CC: Oh, I’m so glad that you like that story! I think it’s safe to say that Mars has always been a place where we humans have longed to settle. It’s close enough to us that we could actually go there, but far away enough that if something happened there or here it’d be hard to get to or get off of. Right now, there is a lot of Mars love and attention with things like that Mars One and us landing Curiousity on Mars and the Mock Mars missions that they have on Earth in Antarctica, Northern Canada and Utah. It was a combination of these things that inspired the story. I wondered what it would be like to be a girl born on Mars who had been cut off from Earth, living in a colony that had no room to grow because it had no supplies with which to expand. I can’t say more than that or I’ll spoil it!
LRR: Congratulations on your soon to be released Tin Star! What’s the quick elevator pitch for Tin Star?
CC: Tin Star is the story of a girl named Tula Bane, a colonist from Earth who gets abandoned on an alien space station by the charismatic cult leader of her ship at the brink of a Galactic war. She’s the only human there and human’s are not well liked.
LRR: You’re incredibly active in your local community, hosting teen writing workshops at the library, being continually active in the local arts scene, even reading at local elementary schools. Can you tell us a little about your passion for the local arts scene and especially youth fiction and reading?
CC: Yes it is true that I am super active in the LA literary scene. I am very passionate about reading and literacy because I love stories and I really believe that books and stories allow us to see past the boundaries of our day to day life. It allows us to dream and stretch and grow and travel and see possibilities for different ways of living. That is especially important when you are in low economic circumstances. I work at a Title One elementary school doing read aloud to first and second graders. I’ve been doing it for 12 years now, working with the same two teachers and it is one of the best things I’ve ever done. I read books, this year it’s The Tale of Desperaux by Kate DiCamillo to the first graders and A Wrinkle in Time with the second graders. We take forever reading the book because I stop and talk about every little detail and we use the book to talk about how stories are told, style, history, science, everything! As for the LAPL Teen Author Reading series that I run, there is one in NY and I know a lot of authors here, so I work with Mary McCoy at LAPL and we coordinate the series together. I thought LA needed one! Also, I co edit the LA Review of Books YA / Children’s section. Mostly we run essays and thought pieces about young people’s literature. I do these things because I am passionate about young people’s literature and these are ways that I can get our field to be sitting at the big kids table in the larger literary world. Also, because I think that we fall in love with reading when we are young and that is when we become life long readers.
LRR: You manage the fascinating “Letters for Kids”, where kids get a letter in the mail from an author. What a fantastic idea! What other authors are involved in this, and what’s the most creative letter that has been sent?
CC: It is a great idea! Stephen Elliot who runs the Rumpus asked me to coordinate the Rumpus Letters for Kids, after the wildly succesful Letters in the Mail for adults. It’s kind of a perfect thing, because I think our sweet spot is about 6 -10 and that’s a perfect age to be getting letters in the mail. By they way, you don’t have to be a kid to subscribe, anyone can subscribe! Even classrooms! You get a letter from middle grade author twice a month. It’s great fun! Some of the authors who have written letters are Rebecca Stead, Susan Patron, Natalie Standiford, Lisa Yee, Janet Tashijian, Arthur Slade, Bobbledy Books. They are so good! I have a few favorites, but of course, it’s hard because they are all so different! But Adam Rex did an original comic story. (you can see it here http://therumpus.net/2012/12/letters-for-kids/ ) Sherri L Smith wrote an original short story and this guy Nolan O’Brien did an amazing thing with circles. It’s truly a brilliant thing, and I would have totally subscribed to Letters for Kids when I was young.
LRR: Your graphic novel Plain Janes was a kick-off publication for the D.C. Comics Minx imprint. The imprint didn’t last, but Plain Janes did very well. Would you consider doing graphic novels again?
CC: Of course! And I still have! For the record, Vertigo reprinted The Plain Janes, so it’s still available. And you can still get the sequel Janes in Love. I have actually written many other comics! I did a hybrid novel called The Year of the Beasts with Nate Powell. It’s alternating chapters of prose and graphic novel. I also had a ghost story in Vertigo’s ghost anthology, a comet story in the SPACE anthology over at IDW, an Aquaman/ Mera love story in the Young Romance issue #1, I wrote Green Lantern: The Animated Series issue #11 and most recently I had a comic book for little kids called Odd Duck illustrated by Sara Varon on First Second. Upcoming in early 2015 I have a graphic novel called Pearl in the Rough illustrated by Joe Infurnari out on Dark Horse. It’s about a girl who rides the rails in 1932 with an old hobo. So I’d say that at this point I consider myself a YA author and a comic book writer!
well, that’s what I get for not researching Cecil enough on her website. Otherwise I would have known about Odd Duck, Year of the Beasts, and her other graphic novels. Don’t make the same mistake I did! Learn more about Cecil on her website, or by following her on twitter.
Interview with Alethea Kontis
Posted on: February 19, 2014
As part of the Book of Apex Vol 4 blog tour, I feel very lucky to be able to interview Alethea Kontis. An award winning author, she describes herself as among other things, a princess and a force of nature. Alethea was kind enough to answer a few of my questions, and give me more information on her short story “Blood From Stone”, her current projects, adventures on YouTube, and how she stays sane.
Let’s get to the interview!
LRR: Your story, “Blood from Stone,” is a dark fantasy about a woman who seduces the man she loves and they succeed with their alchemical magic. What inspired this story?
A.K: “Blood from Stone” is based on the Grimm Brothers’ “Fitcher’s Bird” (some are more familiar with Perrault’s “Bluebeard”). “Fitcher’s Bird” is the tale of Fitcher’s last three wives, all sisters, the last of whom ultimately reveals his true nature (because she heeds the warning of a noisy bird) and leads the townspeople to murder him at his wedding. But what about Fitcher’s first wife? What kind of woman twisted this man into such a serial killer? Had he always been a sociopath? And if so, what sort of woman would have fallen in love with him in the first place?
Few have tried their hand at telling this part of Fitcher’s tale, and I am honored to be one of them. To prepare for this story, I researched the real-life historical figure that Perrault’s Bluebeard was based on: Gilles de Rais. Gilles de Rais was a baron who fought beside Joan of Arc, but he went on to squander his fortune until his family was forced to place him under something similar to house arrest.
His get-rich-quick schemes then turned to summoning demons, with the help of an Italian magician called Prelati, dark magicks that involved the sacrifice of countless children, whose bodies they subsequently burned in the fireplace (which is why no exact number is known). Once an author hears a history like that, how does she not write it?
I encourage readers who enjoyed “Blood from Stone” to explore further into the real life of Gilles de Rais.
LRR: I found “Blood from Stone” to be dark and very adult. But you also write a lot of children’s and YA fiction. Is writing for different ages a different mindset? What’s the trick to being able to write kid’s stuff one day, and very adult fiction the next day?
It was just about a month ago that I met author Matthew Thyer at Confusion. We hit it off, he sent me home with a copy of his new novella The Big Red Buckle (review will be posted later this week), and we’ve been emailing and tweeting back and forth a bit since them. After some initial confusion on my part, we ended up trading interviews. You can learn more about Matt by following him on twitter, or checking out his blog, Feet For Brains, where he talks about writing, publishing, technology, traveling the world, parenting, and more. He’s a pretty cool guy, and I’m looking forward to seeing him again at ConText later this year.
In our extensive interview, we talk publishing, sports, influential authors, NaNoWriMo, getting into science fiction, and more!
LRR: The Big Red Buckle is a novella in the scifi subgenre of “sports in space”. How did you come to the decision to make sports a large part of the story?
MT: It was not so much a decision as a happy circumstance. The Big Red Buckle was a short story I took to a critique group for fun. I am a huge fan of endurance sports, and I had written this piece because I could not shake the idea. The critique group liked it, way more than I had expected anyone would, they gave me some feedback and I went home and let it mature. Soon it had doubled, then tripled in size and the concept, “sports in space”, seemed like more and more like a series.
In the days before NaNoWriMo I was doing a great deal of preparation work for a novel idea and in tandem with that I finished the first one and outlined three more stories in the “sports in space” series. All the stories are based on sports I enjoy, but they were also world building exercises.
Why sports? Well, think about all the hubbub that we just lived through. Another Super Bowl is done and gone. High enough anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere it’s hockey and the Stanley Cup that are celebrated with equal vigor. Europe and South America have soccer. Sport is a huge part of any contemporary human society.
If fiction is supposed to be a mirror for self observation than this particular sub-genre seems underrepresented. With the series, I hoped to address a couple of issues. With The Big Red Buckle, in particular, what happens to sports that have a money problem (see Professional Bicycle Racing). I wanted to juxtapose athletes with elite levels of funding next to the people who compete because they love the activity. Book two, Up Slope, is more about a sport that is used as a utility, how it affects us mentally and physically, and becomes a part of our lives which can bridge functional gaps. How a sport, especially in a non-professional setting, makes better people.
Books three and four, will have similar thought experiments going within them.
Interview with Steven Brust
Posted on: September 7, 2013
Way back when I didn’t know epic fantasy from high fantasy, or an orc from a soulsword, my husband gave me a book and said something along the lines of “This is weird, but you might like it. It’s fantasy, but it hasn’t got any orcs or quests or stuff. It’s about a guy who is an assassin, but he doesn’t like, like it. It’s just his job, and he doesn’t nejoy being so good at it, and there’s some cool magic. It’s by that same guy who wrote that book you really liked, The Sun, The Moon and The Stars“. This was like eight or ten years ago, but it really did go something like that. My memory for these kinds of things is awful.
That book was The Book of Jhereg, and I have been a huge fan of Steven Brust ever since. I have yet to find another author whose voice affects me so strongly. I haven’t read everything he’s written, but I am working on it. A little while ago Steven tweeted that he’d be interested in being interviewed about his upcoming novel, The Incrementalists, co-written with Skyler White. After all the big-name famous bloggers chimed in, I quietly raised my hand. One day I’ll realize my favorite authors are just regular people. But until that day, they can stay up on their pedestal and remain superheroes. Before I say anything too much more embarrassing, let’s get to the interview, shall we?
Feeling lost? Go check out my interview with Skyler White, my review of The Incrementalists, or if you have some time on your hands check out all my Steven Brust reviews. You might notice I asked both authors some of the same questions. that was on purpose.
Photo swiped from Wikipedia.
Q: I’ve been a huge fan of yours for years. I’m nuts for Vlad Taltos, nearly ended a friendship because she thought Greg from The Sun, The Moon, and The Stars was an asshole, and I pretty much follow you around twitter. But everyone else reading this might not be like that, so would you introduce yourself, and tell everyone a little bit about yourself?
A: This is tough for a Minnesotan; we get really uncomfortable talking about ourselves. Um. I’ll do my best. I’ve been writing for 30 years, full time for about 26 of them. I’m an amateur musician and poker player. Politically, I consider myself a Red. I’m not an incrementalist.
Q: How did the idea for The Incrementalists come about?
A: I was involved in a sort of complex shared world open source creative commons multi-media project a while ago. Being that far over my head (I understand almost nothing about any of those things), I went out asking for advice. One of the people I asked–because one always asks him–was Tappan King. In the course of the conversation, he mentioned the idea of a secret society operating through all of history and dedicated to making things a little better.
The idea stayed with me long after the collapse of the other project. I was hanging out with Skyler talking about writing process and writer tools and tricks and How To Do It Gooder and stuff, and she mentioned how much she missed the collaboration that is inherent in theater. I remembered what a joy it had been to write with Megan and Emma, so I mentioned Tappan’s idea. We drank whiskey.
Kurt Vonnegut: The Last Interview, and Other Conversations, edited by Tom McCartan
published in 2011
where I got it: purchased new
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It’s been a while since I read any Vonnegut, but as soon as I saw this book I knew I had to have it. Sure, I’ve read plenty of Vonnegut, but I could count on one hand the things I knew about his personal life: he was very close with his sister, he studied chemistry, he was a prisoner of war in Dresden when it was bombed by the Allies. I accidentally learned that his family thought he was very strange. *
The Last Interview actually contains six interviews, spanning thirty years, from 1977 to 2007, and it’s interesting to see what changes over the years, and what says the same. In the first interview, a special edition of Slaughterhouse Five is coming out, and he’s been asked to write a special introduction for it. In a later interview, Playboy is interviewing Vonnegut and Joseph Heller at Heller’s home, and in a yet later interview, Heller has already passed away. Vonnegut’s opinions on war and family never changes (he’s against the first, and for the second).
After the small talk of “what are you working on now?” and the like, every interviewer wants to ask the same thing: what was it like being in Dresden? Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut’s most famous work, was inspired by his experiences there, and all the interviewers want to know what it was really like. And in his casual, newspaperman, just-the-facts way, Vonnegut tells them. that Dresden was a beautiful city. and then it was gone. He wonders how he survived it. He offhandedly remarks that due to the profits of Slaughterhouse Five, he actually made money off the bombing. Like when I was reading Slapstick, I had no idea if I was supposed to laugh or not.
Other topics that come up again and again are Vonnegut’s feeling that everyone should have an extended family, and that the closest he came to studying writing was being the editor of the student run newspaper at his high school. he was pushed into studying chemistry, and then after returning from the war he studying anthropology. He jokes that when asked where the best new authors are, he says something along the lines of “not in the English departments”. ouch. but as always, brutally honest.
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