Worlds; and writing; and worlds without writing

Guest post by Juliet Kemp

For me, at least in English, ‘language’ and ‘written language’ are very nearly the same thing—when I think of words I see them written down (perhaps partly due to the fact that I read absurdly young). But even among literate people that experience is far from universal; and even in our highly literacy-dependent culture not everyone is literate; and then there are plenty of cultures (past and present) whose traditions are primarily or entirely oral, with the written word an afterthought or non-existent.

None of which I was thinking about when I first began to write my novella Song, Stone, Scale, Bone. I started off with a mental image of a knight guiding a noble through a catacomb, in search of a magic bone… and then I thought: why? Not why they were going there (that was the magic bone, although admittedly at that point I wasn’t quite sure what that was for either), but why was Sir Cade a guide as well as a guard, and why was she using a song to orient herself?

Perhaps, I thought, there’s no map. Perhaps, even, there can’t be a map. Perhaps directions, in this world, are kept in purely oral form, as songs and rhymes, and Cade’s order of knights holds the responsibility of keeping those directions.

Perhaps, I thought, they don’t have writing at all.

It’s harder than you might think—as someone from a very literacy-heavy culture—to remember all the things that aren’t there if you don’t have writing. Signposts, for example. What about coins? Drawings but no words? Numbers? Ideograms don’t quite count as writing, so coins could have something on those lines. (I fudged this slightly by not describing the money Cade uses.)

Given Cade’s job, I spent a while thinking about maps—which are basically drawings—but the use and accuracy of maps even in Western culture has varied substantially over the centuries. You’d struggle to use the Imago Mundi (below) to travel by, for example; although the Tabula Peutingeriana did a decent job of being a stylised route map (less good once you’re off-road).

Some questions which didn’t come up in the story but which I’ve thought about since: the first known uses of writing were bureaucratic (recording agricultural products and contracts); with other functions of government like taxation swiftly following. Cade’s nearby city houses an Emperor; how is the Empire managed without writing? Do tally-sticks count as writing? As above, what about ideograms, or mnemonics, which aren’t quite writing (but might develop into writing in the future)? Perhaps the Empire employs rememberers to keep track of these bureaucratic issues and what people owe, just as Lady Arel has to recite the treaty she is trying to use to prevent war. Presumably storytellers are important in this culture, just as they were in (for example) Ancient Greece and in pre-10th centure Britain (the Iliad and Odyssey, and Beowulf, are all thought to have been later writings-down of stories told as part of an oral tradition).

The final thing that occupied me for a while when I was writing was that there’s no way, in a book with a close-third-person POV, of saying that this is a part of the worldbuilding. Because, obviously, my narrator, Sir Cade, doesn’t know that she doesn’t have the concept of the written word, because, well, she doesn’t have the concept of the written word. So here I am, telling people about it outside the book; but if you read it, I’m interested to hear about how it came across to you. (And I hope you enjoy the story!)

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Song, Stone, Scale, Bone

Sir Cade expected an easy afternoon’s guiding job. She didn’t expect it to end up sneaking her client over a border to avert a war, whilst being trailed by a bored dragon. And becoming haunted by the ghost of her best friend and sword-brother, that was definitely a surprise.

But if it’s all her responsibility, well, that means it’s all down to her to fix it. Whatever the cost.
Right?

“Song, Stone, Scale, Bone is a deceptively rich and fulfilling work that blends together explorations of grief, friendship, obligation, and mutual support. With its combination of classic fantasy motifs, some lightly crafted magic, and a nuanced sense of where the personal and familial can meet the machinations of leadership and politics, I found Song an intriguing, well-constructed, and satisfying read.”—Andi C. Buchanan, author of Sanctuary

Buy links: Amazon UK (ebook/print), Amazon US (ebook/print), or order from your local bookshop.

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Juliet Kemp (they/them) is a queer, non-binary, writer. They live in London by the river, with their partners, kid, and dog. The first book of their fantasy series, The Deep And Shining Dark was on the Locus 2018 Recommended Reads list; the fourth and final book, The City Revealed came out in 2023. Their short fiction has appeared in venues including Uncanny, Analog, Cast of Wonders, as well of course as the three stories (“I Thought of You”, “Dragon Years”, “Just as You Are”) here in The Future Fire, and they were short-listed for the WSFA Small Press Award 2020. When not writing or child-wrangling, Juliet knits, indulges their fountain pen habit, and tries to fit an ever-increasing number of plants into a microscopic back garden. They can be found at julietkemp.com, @julietk.bsky.social and @juliet@zirk.us.

Companions and Earthbound double anthology

We’re very pleased to receive a visit from Olivia Dreisinger, who recently published a pair of linked anthologies through Painwise Press: Companions and Earthbound. The volumes group together stories on the themes of disability and the environment (themes that have long been dear to us at TFF), in creative nonfiction and SFF respectively. We asked Olivia to tell us a bit about the books (and if you read to the end, there’s a little gift for TFF readers as well).

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Companions & Earthbound
A paired anthology of new disability writing

Edited by Olivia Dreisinger

Painwise Press, 2021. 168 pages.

This 2-in-1 anthology collects writing by nine authors about disability, animals, and the environment. A werewolf with PTSD and an environmentally ill AI are featured alongside human characters living with brain injury, chronic pain, neurodivergence, and more.

Contributors: Alexandra Box, Olivia Dreisinger, Sophie Helf, Bára Hladík, Cypress Marrs, Koyote Moone, seeley quest, Vanessa Santos, and George Wu Teng.

Cover concept by Sasha Zamani
Artwork by Audrey Leshay

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Endorsements

“You might think that an anthology centered on disabled people and animal companions, captured with a wide-angle eco lens, might end up too narrowly focused. In Companions and Earthbound, the opposite is true: from its chosen center point, the stories and essays burst outwards with energy, complexity, and tender, thoughtful detail, all different, all unique, all worth spending time with.”
—Lori Selke, editor of Outlaw Bodies

“The experience of reading the stories and creative essays in Olivia Dreisinger’s Companions and Earthbound dual anthologies is akin to sitting down with a friend who intimately knows both the pleasures and pains that come with disability. The catch, however, is that friend is a shape-shifter: sometimes animal, human, or imagined intelligence. No matter their shape or space of residence, the voices of these narratives underscore the connections of sinew, blood, dirt, and spirit that bind us together, reminding us that disabled bodies, animal bodies, are expansive and whole and beautiful.”
—Kathryn Allan, editor of Accessing the Future and Disability in Science Fiction: Representations of Technology as Cure

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I’m a first-time editor. While assembling this anthology, I found myself constantly referring back to my well-worn (and much-loved) copy of Accessing the Future. How could I ever pull off something as amazing as this, I thought to myself. The stories in Accessing the Future pushed me—hard. I’d be lying if I said this anthology measured up to Accessing the Future, but maybe let’s just say they’re different.

This 2-in-1 anthology looks at disability, animals, and the environment. An encounter with a therapy horse and, later, a service dog in my life really got me thinking more seriously about what disability and animal liberation had in common. Most of the stories inside don’t push for liberation (well, some do). Instead, they focus on our proximities to animals in sometimes banal—or overlooked—ways. (There is something to be said about the banal.)

The anthology is split into two sections: contemporary non/fiction and speculative fiction. I wanted to be open to different styles of writing and telling stories—styles that may very well be informed by the writer’s disabilities. Maybe it’d be accurate to describe the anthology as a disabled hodge-podge—something that I hope you will find generative. May these stories matter.

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You can buy Companions and Earthbound from Painwise Press. As a special gift to TFF readers, if you use the code TFF10 at the checkout you can receive a 10% discount.

Meekling Press fundraiser

We welcome this visit from Rachel Linn, whose wonderful story “Glow in the Dark” we published a few years ago, and who has since illustrated several pieces for us. Rachel is here to talk about the Meekling Press fundraiser, and we'll let her tell you what that’s all about.

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I first heard about Meekling Press from an editor at The Coachella Review who had accepted one of my illustrated nonfiction pieces. She said that she liked my illustrations as they were, but thought I should consider making handmade books to create more play between content and form. Meekling Press is dedicated to producing books in creative formats (I particularly love On the Stairs and Muscles Involved, both of which you can see at meeklingpress.com/books). I sent them a proposal for a project, a surreal series of linked stories (an earlier draft was a choose-your-own-adventure story) with moving illustrations, which was accepted and will be coming out around this time next year. The video and image in this post are some of the prototypes for this book (not the finished illustrations, which we’ll be working on over the spring and summer). I would love to see additional fantastical stories housed in strange book formats—and I particularly enjoy creating books that encourage reader interaction.

Concept video for Household Tales

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Here’s their fundraiser pitch:

Meekling has been making and publishing weird and nifty books and objects since 2012. We started with a tiny little 3x5 letterpress, and with the help of our awesome community, we’ve made more than 20 publications, from hand-sewn chapbooks to floppy disk ebooks, to an accordion book that stretches all the way across the room, and a manifesto in the shape of a trash can. We’ve also turned our fictional lecture series, Meekling TALKS, into an annual tradition. We love making publications that play with the relationship between form and content and we’re hoping to continue doing that while bringing it to a bigger audience. We’re starting to travel outside of Chicago and make lots of new friends, and we’re also starting to get all Legitimate, doing things like getting ISBN numbers and Forming a Business and getting better Distribution for our Books—stuff that will help us help our authors spread their words farther and wider.

We’ve got seven books lined up for the next couple years, and we need your help to take this gosh darn press to the next level and get these dang bloody books printed and out into the world. With lots & lots of wild and woolly “Prizes,” we’re putting the FUN back in FUNdraiser…

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Here’s how Meekling describe my forthcoming book (which you can also pick up through the fundraiser):

Household Tales, by Rachel Linn: Feral children, a polar bear, scissors and paper, a snowstorm, a disorienting free fall. This one’s going to be a pop-up book.

“It wasn’t the bear that had scarred her, but it would do. She even preferred this animal because it was a mythic, previously unknown species—perhaps the only one of its kind. Her hands balled into fists and she punched quietly at the snowy walls of her hiding place, biding her time. She did not want to die, she wanted to kill.”

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You can see more examples of my work or get in touch through my website at rslinn.com.

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Find out more about Meekling Press at meeklingpress.com, or support their fundraiser at Indiegogo.

Interview with Chloe N. Clark

Back in 2015 we published a lovely, dark, surreal, horror-kitsch-dystopia-escapist adventure short story titled “All Along the Mall” by Chloe N. Clark (which is well worth pausing here and going to read, by the way). Now Chloe’s second poetry collection is available from Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, and she has come to speak to us about speculative fiction and poetry, beauty, dystopia and art.

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Chloe N. Clark’s Your Strange Fortune is our good fortune. This debut volume of rare sympathy and imagination leaps easily from myths to monsters, ghosts to zombies, fairy tales to the Apocalypse that, for this poet and so many today, is “just/the fact of life.” Clark’s inventive, unforgettable voice ranges widely—from up-to-the-moment poems like “Googolplex,” in which curiosity becomes dark compulsion, to the far future when museums feature the relics of our own time: “the things we could not bear/to leave behind us:/ pieces of highways, signs/ …one single spike from Lady/ Liberty’s crown.” Clark understands that time speeds forward and that myth and popular culture are close kin that offer the songs of ghosts who once were us, “the ones who/ had such beautiful voices but only when/ they thought no one was listening.” Like the poet’s “clockwork nightingale” whose song is both dystopian and beautiful, Chloe Clark’s voice rises above the usual din to bring us a debut volume that is rich with unsettling questions but always unflinchingly alive. (Blurb by Ned Balbo, author of The Cylburn, Touch-Me-Nots and 3 Nights of the Perseids.)

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Chloe N. Clark is a writer, editor, and teacher. She is the author of The Science of Unvanishing Objects and Your Strange Fortune. Her work has appeared in Booth, Glass, The Future Fire, Little Fiction, Uncanny, and more. She is a founding co-editor-in-chief of online journal Cotton Xenomorph. Find her on Twitter @PintsNCupcakes or her website chloenclark.com.

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TFF: Your Strange Fortune is a diverse, wide-ranging collection of poems. Did you just bring together a selection of your best poems from other places, or was it conceived as a single, coherent piece of work from the start?

Chloe N. Clark: This question sort of has multiple answers. Almost everything I write has some connection to something else I’m writing, even if I don’t sit down with that intention (my brain works in large pictures and patterns, it’s why I’m so fond of interconnected novel-in-stories). So I found that I was writing a lot of poems centering on apocalypse and disaster (large scale and personal). As I realized this, I began to picture a plot arc for the poems and then began to put them into a single cohesive overall book. Something I’m very concerned with, always, when putting together poetry collections is “how is this telling a story?” I want the poems to stand alone, but when put together also serve a larger purpose. The best poetry collections, like story collections, novels, or albums, should be able to be read as one piece and have that work on some level (whether it’s an emotional arc of an actual plot driven one).

TFF: Both Wallace and Balbo’s blurbs note that your work combines themes of horror/dystopia/apocalypse along with beautiful or hopeful tones (which I think is true of “All Along the Mall” as well). Do you think we need to see the joy and the hope in the world to cope with and indeed fight back against the dystopia galloping towards us?

CNC: Absolutely. The world is a not-great place, for so many reasons, and I think the things that help us to cope with that and to fight back against the not-great things are hope and joy. If you’re hopeless about the future, you don’t really have the drive to make it better for yourself/for the next generation/etc. I write about a lot of darker subjects and so I think I try to be very purposeful about lacing those subjects with light. I need to be able to see a way out and I think it helps to show that in writing as well. It’s one of the reasons I teach, as well, I focus on injustice and rhetorics of violence in my classes, but I’m always careful to think about solution-based approaches to these problems—to show why we keep fighting. Being hopeful and finding joy are not at odds with being realistic about the world, if anything they keep you more able to understand what’s at stake.

“All Along the Mall” illustration © 2015 by L.E. Badillo

TFF: Poetry is almost by definition non-realist, in the sense that imagery and analogy are such ubiquitous techniques; does this make it an especially powerful medium for science fiction, or is “speculative poetry” a tautology?

CNC: I think this goes both ways honestly. In my mind, all writing is in some ways speculative (even non-fiction because it often is based out of the writer seeking answers and also having to incorporate their own view/analysis of those answers and questions). I think poetry is a great venue for sci-fi though because it allows the ideas room to be ideas, rather than needing maybe the plot or explanation behind them that a story might require. So it’s a great playground for those ideas and images without binding them to something larger.

At the same time, I think all my poetry is speculative, even the realistic pieces. I’ve never been able to view the world without seeing the strange inside it. There’s so much miraculous in the everyday of life, that it sometimes seems hard not to write things in a way that comes off as speculative.

TFF: What, to you, most essentially characterizes the difference between “literary” and “genre” fiction?

CNC: This is a question that always gets me fired up, because I think it’s in many ways a question that’s already been broken. Many of the best “literary” writers today are ones who fully incorporate genre techniques into their work (Colson Whitehead, Kelly Link, Victor LaValle) and many of the best “genre” writers are ones who write work that is also very literary—in that it focuses on character and writing as much as it focuses on plot momentum. Sometimes, the distinction that I think works best is: do you want to read it for the story or for the writing? If it’s both, it’s probably good literature. If it’s one or the other but not both, it probably falls into “genre” or “literary.”

TFF: Have you ever seen a statue or a piece of art that you wished was alive?

CNC: I think I wish this of a lot of art and statues, when I really like a painting, I often wish I could climb inside it and see it from another angle. Good art is an invitation—to wonder and wander in. But, if I had to pick a single piece, I would definitely go with the works of Dr Evermor, an outsider artist from Wisconsin. I grew up going to see these pieces and now I take my nephews there. They are strange and wonderful and filled with all the magic of what I think childhood dreams feel like—giant insects made of old musical instruments, a telescope to the stars, pieces of trash and discarded junk turned into something new and strange. I don’t think the giant insects would become menaces, if alive, they feel too kind and filled with delight to do so.

TFF: Would you like to visit another planet?

CNC: I want to answer this question in all-caps, so: YES. My obsession with space and the universe began as a small child, watching Aliens for the 400th time and listening to audio plays of Ray Bradbury stories. And it was a joy and fascination with space that grew even more when I began to actually understand what space and planets and the ways we get there actually meant. Nothing delights my brain as much as reading some fact about the difficulties of space exploration and the ways in which we seek planets away from our own. I love Earth and I’m not a person who thinks colonizing other planets is the way to save the world, but what I wouldn’t give to take a step on another planet—to see some new beauty of the universe in front of me. What a wonder that must be—I don’t think there’s enough poetry in the world I could write to come close to what that must be like.

Thank you for joining us, Chloe!

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Check out Chloe N. Clark's new poetry collection Your Strange Fortune from Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, also sold at all online booksellers (and some shops). Her previous poetry chapbook The Science of Unvanishing Objects is still available from Finishing Line Press.

Kate Viola's Elementals novels

We’re delighted to welcome to the TFF Press blog author Kate Viola (who illustrates for TFF—including the gorgeous cover of #43—as Katharine A. Viola) to talk about her series of fantasy novels, Elementals. The first two novels, Leah Bailey and the Fire Demon and Leah Bailey and the Earthen Beast are available now in Kindle and paperback formats. Three further volumes are forthcoming.

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The Elementals is a five book series about the adventurous life of Leah Bailey. This historical fantasy takes place during the late 1600s in Puritan, North America. After moving from London, England at the age of eighteen, Leah and her family settle in the most northern British colony of New Ashford. It is here that Leah discovers more about the world and herself as she bravely conquers the four elements of Fire, Earth, Water and Air—and then eventually, the magical fifth element, Spirit. Along the way, Leah meets three young women who, like her, have been gifted with the abilities of the elements. Together they uncover the secrets of a world they had no idea existed.

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Reviewers’ comments:

“A great first novel from a promising new writer.”

“Leah Bailey combusts onto the pages as a fierce new heroine.”

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I chose to write my historical fantasy book series, The Elementals, based around the four elements of Fire, Earth, Water and Air, with the final book about the mysterious fifth element of Spirit. The elements are great resources to use for any magical or fantasy story because these elements never change; it is the protagonist who changes (for better or for worse) because of these elements.

The elements, in their purest forms, do not have souls, they do not learn and thus they do not change. Additionally, they cannot be controlled; they just are. We cannot escape these elements as they are everywhere. This is important to understand, especially in the series. The magic therefore is not actually in the elements, but within the souls of mankind. 

Elements are often found in fantasy and science-fiction genres, but they aren't fantasy concepts; earth, fire, water and air are real. We deal with them everyday of our lives, both the good and/or the bad sides of each one. The best fantasy ideas are ones that are based on fact and reality, which is another reason why the series is based on our historical past. There is nothing better than reading a fantasy book and thinking that could one day happen to me because it already happened to someone else.

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Kate is a prolific writer and artist who has varied and unique portfolios for both her writing and art. She has a wide array of interests that span from realism to the fantastic. Her writings include short stories, flash fiction, internet content and novels.

Terry Pratchett's «Trois sœurcières»

Today we’re joined by an old friend of TFF, Serge Keller, who is directing a stage version of Terry Pratchett’s Weird Sisters (translated into French) for performance in Fribourg, Switzerland this spring. Here is a bit of information about the production, and then below that Serge answers a few questions—as you can see, it’s a topic he’s very excited about!

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Illustration by Cécile Matthey

Terry Pratchett in French? Mais oui!

Probably for the very first time in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, the Théâtre de la Cité presents an amateur production of:

Trois sœurcières (Wyrd Sisters)
by Terry Pratchett®
Adapted by Stephen Briggs
French translation of the novel by Patrick Couton, for Librairie L'Atalante
At the Théâtre de la Cité, Grandes-Rames 36, Fribourg (Switzerland)
19th of April – 12th of May 2018
More information: tcf.ch

Alison Littlewood on The Hidden People

Alison Littlewood (whose satirical short story “Always Look on the Bright Side” was published in TFF #12 back in 2008, and reprinted in TFF-X last year) has a new novel out, a dark fairy tale titled The Hidden People and published by Quercus. Alison joins us to tell us a bit about the inspiration for the book, but first, the blurb…

Pretty Lizzie Higgs is gone, burned to death on her own hearth

But was she really a fairy changeling, stolen away by the Hidden People under the Hill, as her husband insists?

Albie Mirralls met his cousin Lizzie only once, at the Great Exhibition in 1851, when she enchanted him singing a hymn under the grand glass and iron arches of the Crystal Palace. Unable to countenance the rumours that surround her murder, he leaves his young wife in London and travels to the Yorkshire village where his cousin lived. Halfoak may look picture-perfect in the blowsy, sun-drenched days of high summer, but it’s steeped in superstition and older, darker beliefs.

Albie is a modern man, a rational man of science, but as he begins to dig into Lizzie’s death, he discovers far more than he could ever have imagined, for in this place where the old holds sway and the Hidden People supposedly roam, answers are slippery and further tragedy is just half a step away.

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It seems a long time since I first had the inspiration for The Hidden People. It began with reading about the case of Bridget Cleary, who was burned to death in 1895 by her husband. He believed her to be stolen away by the fairies and replaced by a changeling, and claimed he was merely trying to drive it out and reclaim his true wife.

I’ve adored fairy tales since I was a child. As a writer, I’ve long been fascinated by the little folk, particularly in their darker aspects. Bridget Cleary’s case was too real for me to write about directly—she was an actual person after all, and what happened to her was horrific and tragic. I used the concept as a starting point however, and it encompassed several of my interests. It takes place when the old tales have intersected with and intruded upon reality. Stories are changing people’s lives. And changeling lore is fascinating—what if the people around us were not who we believed them to be? Not being able to take anything at face value, having to delve beneath, can be at once intriguing and disturbing. And it raised issues of the nature of belief itself—why do we believe, and what is the relationship between those beliefs and reality? And all this at a time when the coming of the railways and new technologies, the march of progress across the land, was meant to have driven out such superstition.

My subject raised more questions than I had originally anticipated. I was halfway through the book before I realised it was going to turn out a rather different creature than the one I’d expected. But perhaps that’s what happens when you mess with the folk! Now, I might go and scatter a little milk for them on the hillside, to keep them happy…

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The Hidden People can be pre-ordered from Quercus Books, or picked up from October 6th at your favorite bookseller.

Nisi Shawl's Everfair

Tomorrow sees the US release of Nisi Shawl’s long-awaited African steampunk novel Everfair, a book that asks the question: what if the people of the Congo had access to steam power and technology in the nineteenth century, before they were colonized by Belgium? We invited Nisi to come say a few words about her book here.

I told Djibril I would write a paragraph about my novel Everfair. I’d rather offer you something different to read, though: thoughts on this novel’s growth medium. Everfair, I’d better first tell you, is a steampunk novel that’s primarily set in an imaginary Utopia in late 19th and early 20th century central Africa.

So where’d it come from? Yes, I’m the one who wrote my novel’s text. I had help, though. People gave me money, and ideas, and medicine, and food. Books. Flowers. Tea. Places to stay. They combed my hair, treated me with acupuncture, trimmed my toenails. That nurturing environment is what I’m calling Everfair’s growth medium. It holds my novel’s roots.

In my WisCon 35 Guest of Honor speech I proposed the idea that genius is not the manifestation of a single being but of a whole community. I said the same thing on Everfair’s acknowledgments page. I don’t know if what I’m manifesting is genius, but I’m very sure it’s an expression of my community and our concerns, from the pleasures of steeping ourselves in the sensory delights of technology to the ambiguities of fully nuanced interactions between a supposedly united mind’s conflicting yet simultaneously held beliefs.

My community is where Everfair is rooted, where it derives from.

And, in a truly fair turnabout, my community is also the atmosphere into which my novel unfurls itself and the light towards which it reaches.

When you read it, Everfair is fulfilled.

One early reviewer claims my novel is an “important entry in the movement for greater diversity in sf.” It only enters the movement through your eyes, though. It’s only important when it’s important to you.

Thank you for reading my book.

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In a starred review, Publishers Weekly said of Everfair, “A compelling debut novel … Shawl deftly wields a diverse cast of characters to impressive effect, taking readers from the Victorian era to WWI and its aftermath. This highly original story blends steampunk and political intrigue in a compelling new view of a dark piece of human history.”

Nisi Shawl has posted on her website various teasers and extras, including photos of objects that inspired the story, an essay on sexuality and morals in 19th century Congo, the outline of a play performed in the novel, and other materials. There is also an extract of Everfair at the Macmillan website, where you can buy or preorder the novel.

Storm Born teaser and Amy Braun Q&A

We welcome to TFF Amy Braun, author of the new dark fantasy novel Storm Born.

Storm Born, a 354 page standalone novel, is set in an alternate world where humanity endures the Centennial—a barrage of storms that wreck havoc across the world. But as a young woman learns when she’s violently cursed with supernatural powers, there is more to the Centennial than humanity understands, and if she is going to survive its aftermath and the secret societies battling for control, she must find her own courage and strength before her powers destroy her…

Amy Braun is a Canadian urban fantasy and horror author. Her work revolves around monsters, magic, mythology, and mayhem. She started writing in her early teens, and never stopped. She loves building unique worlds filled with fun characters and intense action. She is the recipient of April Moon Books Editor Award for “author voice, world-building and general bad-assery,” and the One Book Two Standout Award in 2015 for her Cursed trilogy. She has been featured on various author blogs and publishing websites, and is an active member of the Writing GIAM and Weekend Writing Warrior communities. When she isn't writing, she's reading, watching movies, taking photos, gaming, and struggling with chocoholism and ice cream addiction.

Amazon Kindle | Paperback | Createspace | Kobo 
Barnes & Noble  | Goodreads | Smashwords | iBookstore

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Question: What was the writing process like for Storm Born?

Amy Braun: In a word? Exhausting. I spent a lot of time thinking, researching, and envisioning new ways to make the story more in depth, and I definitely felt the time crunch of NaNoWriMo. I had a month to plan the story before I started writing, which is nowhere near as much time as it sounds like. Once all that was done, I dove headfirst into writing. New ideas were able to flow and I was able to tweak my original idea so it wasn’t as complex. I definitely had a lot going on, and there are parts that I wish I’d continue to include, but I’m still happy with the story I wrote. It’s too late to go back!

What inspired the design of the Stormkind?

A multitude of things. Aliens, ghosts, cartoons where a character gets zapped and you see their whole skeleton in jarring flashes. My mind goes to some weird places. I made a point to make sure each Stormkind could be identified by the type of storm they mastered. For example, thunder-Stormkind have what one might consider to be electric skin. I wanted it to be clear that even though they have human forms and carry a light against their skeleton, they’re nowhere close to human. I count them among the most creative characters I’ve created thusfar.

What kind of research did you do?

Most of the research went into the settings, to be honest. I’ve never been to Florida and am dreadful with maps, so I had to make sure that my settings and locations were in reasonable locations. GoogleMaps saved me. I also had to research the kinds of storms I could create and what kind of damage they could do so I could adapt that to the story. I based some of the history of the Stormkind on the creation myth from Greek mythology, which was also a lot of fun to re-read.

Which power did you have the most fun writing?

That’s a hard choice. I love the ice-powers and frost, but I was also really fond of the dust-storms that are used later in the novel. It was a fantastic challenge to sit back and think, “This person has this power. What should they do with it now?” Using the destructive powers with Stormkind that controlled water and wind was a lot of fun too, throwing them in situations where I knew their powers would cause serious problems for the heroes.

Thanks for joining us, Amy! Good luck with the release of Storm Born.

Flyers for Accessing the Future fundraiser

As we go into the second half of the Accessing the Future fundraiser, and the last few weeks of the summer convention season, we're calling on the army of TFF supporters and allies to help spread the word in the offline world. Are you going to a con in the next three weeks? Do you work or hang out in a library, a genre bookstore, a creative writing or literature department, a trendy café, or anywhere else where potential readers, writers or supporters might pick up a colorful flyer?

Would you be willing to print out a few copies of the flyer to the left, and put them on a leaflet table, hand them out to fellow con-goers, or airdrop them over a receptive crowd?

(Background artwork by the wonderful Carmen Moran, by the way; flyer design by Valeria Vitale.)

We've also uploaded a PDF with 4 copies to a page, which is how I prefer to print them and cut them out. I took a couple hundred of these to #NineWorlds and #LonCon3 this month and practically papered the halls with them!

Shout if you want another format, or if you're in London and would like me to give you a handful of paper copies in person to save you printing them. We'll be eternally grateful either way!

Let's make this happen!