Five minutes with Nick Wood

I've had the opportunity to read one or two of Nick's short stories, and he really has a lovely way with words, and his great love for Africa is very apparent. So, without further ado, I welcome him over to my blog today. He's going to chat about his short story which appears in the Something Wicked Volume 2 anthology. Welcome, Nick!

Tell us a little about your short story.

Of Hearts and Monkeys (OHAM) was inspired, if that's indeed the right word, by stories of 'corrective rape' in South Africa. I wondered what could I write, that might challenge the dreadful discourses around this practice and the practice itself, but within a story, and not in an obviously didactic form? The story didn't arrive at first, though - initially it was as if someone was whispering something to me - and, on one particular walk along a Silvermine Nature Reserve track in the mountains near Muizenberg in Cape Town, the voice grew stronger on the South Easter breeze and I could 'hear her’ more clearly, all of a sudden. (‘Her’ being Noluthando Ngobo Bhele, telling me stories.)

What gets you writing? Tell us a little bit more about your approach.

Passion and grit. Passion when I feel my blood stirring about something and I know I need to write it out somehow. Grit, most of the time, when I force myself to write, despite being tired and in pain - knowing I can't wait for passion, if I'm hoping to be good enough to be read a bit more widely one day.

What do you think are particular challenges associated with short stories as a form? 

Making sure each word is absolutely necessary and layering the story so themes are harmonized and integrated, *perhaps* even eventually enabling a one sentence summary of the essence of the story. That way, you have a stronger sense that the story is sharp, focused and has meaning that you wish will end up resonating with a reader, long beyond the reading. That takes a lot of redrafting and where editors are often invaluable - Vianne Venter gave me some great tightening advice at various points of OHAM.

As for longer works, do you have anything planned? 

I've written part of a YA book set on the moon, a chapter of which won the Accessible Futures Award and was published in Redstone Science Fiction. As a 3rd book option; I really want to follow MamBhele further along on her journey, above and beyond OHAM and the denuded Western Cape.

What's the one short story or novel you keep going back to (we all have them), and what makes it stand out above all the rest? 

The so-called gospels, including the apocryphal ones such as St. Thomas, which was highlighted epigrammatically in RD Laing's The Politics of Experience and the Bird of Paradise. Jesus remains an enduringly inspirational character to me, although I am allergic to organized religion and the dogma that has ossified over hundreds of years to - in my opinion - effectively strangle him. I used to have an old hippie book around Jesus the Revolutionary, which spoke about the radical nature of his teachings, including the call to get involved in socio-political protest/change. He is Jesus the Jew too - and, as some say, perhaps likely to have been a 'black' (or at least dark) Jew, i.e. an 'Other', but who has subsequently been co-opted by conservative white Western ideologies. I think the 'gospels' stand out for me, because they are still in many ways moral, fresh and radical - that's if you can decouple the books from their organized religious trappings and aspects of its imperialistic history. Apart from the gospels, the Revelation of St. John is a fantastic source for Fantastika!

What scares you?

The fragility of the human body. I've been learning a lot about that these past 6 years and am only now slowly learning to partially live with it. I read an interesting debate between a Westerner and a Buddhist a while back, both with major chronic health problems - they argued around the use of 'hope'. The Westerner said it was what kept him going. The Eastern Buddhist said hope implies a lack of acceptance of the now and a painful yearning for something better. I realized then, much though I like to stretch the boundaries of my own cultural conditioning and experience, I remain a Westernised white English speaking South African male, who just writes in hope for an even 'better' world to come.

Links:
http://nickwood.frogwrite.co.nz/
Twitter: nick45wood

Five Minutes with Cat Hellisen

Many of you will know Cat Hellisen as the author of the fantasy novel When the Sea is Rising Red. If you haven't read that book yet, then shame on you. Add it to your TBR pile NOW. But she's also got a story in the Something Wicked anthology volume #2, and is here today to trade a little banter about her craft. Welcome, Cat!

Tell us a little about your short story for Something Wicked volume 2.

Jack of Spades, Reversed is a weird little thing that happened. I was
originally writing a novel that was Edward Lear meets Lovecraft, but naturally it became its own monster with Cat-like tendencies. Two of the main characters are transmogrifying into animal-human hybrids because of the spore from alien invaders from another dimension, and everyone has gone mad. The two MCs are being used by scientists to pilot a ship into the other dimension to attack the invaders. But everyone has their own agenda. I guess it's mostly about finding salvation in insanity. Mostly.

Maybe.

And about learning what makes us human, which is a pretty huge theme in just about everything I write.


What gets you writing? Tell us a little bit more about your approach.

Dreams and images, play-acting stories in my head. Newspaper reports, books, lyrics, artworks. Everything feeds into my work. Generally I start with a visual of a character in some odd situation, and take it from there. The visual for Jack of Spades. Reversed was of Louise spitting out her teeth as her head reshapes itself.

Carrying on and finishing anything is my big problem. I can start with
all the enthusiasm in the world, but the grind of the middle of stories can get me down. Just have to tell myself to grit my teeth and keep going. And that I can fix all the crap in revisions.

What do you think are particular challenges associated with short stories as a form? As for longer works, do you have anything planned?

Short stories are hard. It might seem like they're going to be easier but short /= easy. I find them a particularly difficult medium and I tend to avoid them. Longer works give me more room to play, to stretch out character and plot and world-building (which I love.)

I'm always working on novels. I currently have one on sub, two in revision, and I'm first-drafting a fourth. They vary in their levels of odd. Some are more straightforward fantasy - like House of Sand and Secrets which is mostly a sequel to my book When the Sea is Rising Red - others are closer to the weirdness of Jack of Spades, Reversed.

What's the one short story or novel you keep going back to (we all have them), and what makes it stand out above all the rest?

Oh man, Clive Barker's Imajica. A beautiful, unfurling bomb of a book.
It's just one of those stories that hits my every kink - godhood, gender-queering, murder, and magic; strange and ugly and fantastical in equal measure. I also have a huge crush on Tanith Lee's Secret Books of Paradys which fuelled my teen-goth sense of drama. I should probably not admit I am reading them again. AGAIN.

My favourite of my own books is the one that's currently on sub. It's about falling in love after you're dead. So it might be a hard sell.

What scares you?

A world without cheese. I love cheese. But mostly I'm scared of being skinned alive and then put in a freezer. Or dying in a car crash (Thanks, J.G. Ballard...)

Links...
I am a social monster. I'm on tumblr, twitter, facebook, and my own blog (how weird).

Five minutes with RWW Greene

A big welcome today to RWW Greene, who's one of the contributing authors to the Something Wicked volume #2 anthology. 

RWW Greene and wife Brenda Noiseux

So, tell us a little about your short story...

The idea hit me in wake of an argument about Joss Whedon’s Firefly. The opposition claimed there was no reason for latter-day humans to develop American cowboy-like speech patterns, and I set out to write something that, as a side note, proved him wrong.  Throw in some characters inspired by my students, add my worries about climate change, and -- BAM! -- story. There was much revising.

What gets you writing? Tell us a little bit more about your approach.

I keep little notebooks everywhere, and any idea I have goes in whichever one is closest. When I have time, I write the ideas into three-act outlines, and, when I have even more time, I turn them into stories. An idea can come from a name, an article, a long-wait for fried chicken, riffing, something I overhear in the coffee shop line … It all goes into the hopper, gets mashed up with all the other stuff, and sometimes the results make sense.

What do you think are particular challenges associated with short stories as a form? As for longer works, do you have anything planned? 

The shorter you try to make a complicated narrative the harder it gets. There’s plenty of time to play and wander in a novel, less in a novella, far less in short story. By the time you are squeezing a narrative down to a poem or a piece of flash, you’re really having to work. Short fiction relies so much on evocation and white space. You have to carve it right down to what is important.

I turned It Pays to Read the Safety Cards, the story in Something Wicked, Volume Two, into a 93 000-word novel called Leaving Home, and now I’m looking for someone to represent it. I’m also working on an alternative-history novella wherein the Vietnam War never happened because would-be conquerors from the planet Mercury set their sights on Earth.

What's the one short story or novel you keep going back to (we all have them), and what makes it stand out above all the rest?

I can’t pick. There are so many books and stories that I’ve read repeatedly. Probably the first book of that kind, though, was The Prince of Central Park by Evan H Rhodes.  It’s about a kid who runs away from his abusive foster mother, quits school, and goes to live in a tree. I think my takeaways from it are: You don’t have sit there and take it, and you don’t need much in the way of material things to have a good life.

What scares you?

I’m afraid that humanity will never get its act together, and we’ll waste all of our potential.

Links...

I blog about writing, teaching, and the 21st century at RWWGreene.com and live Tweet various award shows and political debates at @rwwgreene

Five Minutes with Clint Smith

Today I welcome Clint Smith to my spot. He's one of the contributing authors published in the Something Wicked Volume 2 anthology. Tell us a little about your short story.

The story Double Back was a workshop piece I drafted for a university creative writing class in the winter of 2009. During the first few days of that course, I was sizing up my peers, trying to gauge who was going to write what that semester.  I admired (and still admire) the methodic short story writers—Tobias Wolff, Dan Chaon, Cheever, James Lasdun, Lauren Groff, Marlin Barton, to name a scant few.  But I identified more with the scholarly work of ST Joshi and the craft of scribblers like Dan Simmons, Joe Hill, Norman Partridge, Joe Lansdale, and William Browning Spencer.

After a few workshops, it took little time to register that I might end up being the only horror writer in class.  And I was.  I won’t say the pieces I produced for that class were unpopular; but I think they were a bit too strange for both the academes and my fellow campus comrades.  To put another way, it was clear I was a writer for the "pulps," not the "slicks," and that suited me just fine.

Regardless, I submitted my modest tale to a magazine in South Africa in June, 2009. Then I moved on to drafting different material, and the story faded from my radar. That’s until I got an e-mail from Joe Vaz announcing that my story Double Back would make an appearance in the new incarnation of his publication, Something Wicked, Volume 2.

Double Back is a love letter to the spirit-of-Christmas-past portions of A Christmas Carol paired with a reverent nod to Dostoevsky’s The Double, and his illustration of Ivan Karamazov’s encounter with the devil in book four of The Brothers Karamazov.

What gets you writing? Tell us a little bit more about your approach.

In part what gets me writing is the compulsion of exploration and challenge—exploration in the sense that, when I isolate an image or idea, and a challenge in assembling a premise or story “shape” that I’ve never constructed before.

The stories I’ve produced in these past few years have had a strong auto-biographic bend to them. Not unusual for many writers. But I’ve really tried to make an effort to dismantle to those composites I’ve known and those characters I’ve been. The most instinctive thing for me to do is isolate a trait that unsettles me from my past and place it on a collision course with an issue that I dwell on now—the responsibility (or lack thereof, as the case may be) of  fatherhood, substance abuse, war, fidelity, infidelity, the fragility and stamina of family. These are not special or novel notions to discuss; but more than anything, I do the best I can to create centrifugal cores my material to give it some gravity, and often that process elicits writing that is inexorably adorned with elements quiet horror. I’d like to utilize the medium and traditions of horror to not only repair the past but fortify the future.

Short stories seem to be your thing. What do you think are particular challenges associated with the form? As for longer works, do you have anything planned? 

In a word:  backstory.

Lately I’ve really tried to examine how to better weave background elements into the wider fabric of a short story.

Last year, in a column for Poets & Writers Magazine, Benjamin Percy discussed the A-B-D-C-E method for structuring stories: Action, Background, Development, Conflict, and Ending. And just like many horror films contain a “monster problem” (see Jason Zinoman’s wonderful book Shock Value for more on this), many short stories have a background problem, or at least a background placement problem.  I really admire Téa Obreht’s chilling short story The Laugh—that’s a really impressive example of well-crafted distribution of backstory.

As for longer works, I’m currently drafting a longer work that may very well emerge as a novel (if I can refrain from prematurely steering my characters toward the safe harbor of a short story’s conclusion). But a different sort of longer work is scheduled for 2014. I received word last winter that my short story collection, Ghouljaw ahd other Stories, will be released through Hippocampus Press sometime next year.

What's the one short story you keep going back to (we all have them), and what makes it stand out above all the rest? 

Funny you should ask.  I just finished the final draft of a story I first penned about four years ago. Corbin's Gore is the title I settled on, although there’d been dozens between interceding drafts. I kept returning to this one because I never felt that I’d provided enough thematic insulation to send it out. There were elements and set pieces that (to give a wink to Nabokov) I didn’t want to lose to the darlings of oblivion, but I also knew it’d take some interaction with these characters and circumstances I’d neglected.

I’m not sure that Corbin's Gore stands out from the rest of my work, but there was a I needed to take the story more seriously because of the potential that I had a lot to lose—that the characters had a lot to lose.

What scares you?

Henry James said that a writer is someone on whom nothing is lost.

And what scares me most is something bad—bad—happening to my kids.  I think what scares me more than anything is not providing a safe enough world for my kids. Clearly, there’s no defanging the world (nor should there be), but my fears habitually return to the self-conscious compulsion that I’ll miss something, that I’ll neglect my fatherly vigilance and something will be lost. I don’t want to miss an opportunity to assist my kids (or any kids for that matter) in coping with the chimera of life, and by writing about what I’ve experienced, I’d like to think that the craft provides some resistance and guidance for when the “bad” moments inevitably emerge.

When you write, that reflective radar is constantly rotating over the illuminated grid of your life. Hopefully, nothing is lost.

Links:
Clint Smith Fiction:  clintsmithfiction.com
Clint Smith’s Amazon.com Author’s Page

In Conversation with Grey Freeman

Today Grey Freeman, one of the Something Wicked volume #2 anthology authors is stopping by for a little Q&A, so without further ado...


Tell us a little about your short story for Something Wicked volume 2.

Promises is a bitter-sweet story about a man who is visited at night by his dead fiancée  who died the week before their wedding. I wanted it to be about love and sex and how the latter is one of the most profound ways to express the former. But, you know, without being all sleazy and stuff. As far as I know I succeeded. I once sent around an early draft to people in my office and included the new girl to make her feel welcome. I was worried it would freak her out! Luckily it didn't (probably saving on a trip to HR). Instead we discussed the story and sometimes we still do, though it's a lot easier now, seeing as how we live together. There are few authors, I think, who can point to a story and say, that one got me the love of my life!

What gets you writing? Tell us a little bit more about your approach.

I love telling stories and you eventually have to stop letting your imagination run away with you, stop babbling things that don't make sense to anyone else and commit them to paper. I write an hour in the morning before
work and an hour after. Then I do six hours over the weekend. First draft is when I'm striking out into the wilderness with a handful of ideas and characters. Then once I've covered the ground and found out what the story was about I go back and refine everything so that it's all pointing in the right direction. Characters first and foremost are key. If the reader doesn't like your characters then they won't care about the story.

What do you think are particular challenges associated with short stories as a form? As for longer works, do you have anything planned? 

With short stories you need to be precise, you need to get to the point as soon as possible while still allowing some room for the reader to get into the narrative, getting to know the character and appreciate his or her dilemma. So many things are about context and you need to be very quick to the point of emotional short-hand to get that across in 5,000 words. You have a bit more luxury to take your time with a novel.

Speaking of novels, I've just swept the ashes of my last attempt from the desk. It went around agents and though it got a little interest, sadly, it didn't get enough. I'm now working on a new one that's currently called End of the Line (that will definitely change). It's a supernatural thriller and I've set myself the challenge of having it mostly set in a single room. It's shaping up well so far, I have a literary agent still interested in me from the last endeavour and I'm off for coffee with an editor who's worked on quite a best-sellers in his time to discuss it. It's scaring the pants off me!

What's the one short story or novel you keep going back to (we all have them), and what makes it stand out above all the rest?


The book that immediately springs to mind for me is A Big Boy Did it and Ran Away by Christopher Brookmyre. On the surface its a thriller of an everyman against terrorists but Brookmyre is happy to break the rules and spends entire chapters outlining each major character's life story but he does it with such wit and charm that you can't help but be swept along. The theme of the story essentially rails against the 'ordinary' life. Why be a family man with a wife and screaming baby when you could be a secret agent? By the finale, you're about to give up your day job and then the author deftly points out 'that's why' and you're suddenly super pleased to be a normal person. Love it.

What scares you?

Plenty of things. I'm scared of spending my whole life in an office, either never having a book published or having a book published but never earning enough to become a full-time author, it's certainly happened to plenty of current authors. I'm also terrified of becoming a full-time author and being incredibly lonely and unhappy in it. I'm a people person! And a worrier, it seems.

Links:
My blog: http://greyfreeman.blogspot.co.uk/
My Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/GreyFreemanauthor
My Twitter: https://twitter.com/GreyFreeman

Five Minutes with CS Fuqua

Today I've got Chris Fuqua, one of the Something Wicked Volume #2 anthology authors stopping by my blog for a little Q&A. Welcome, Chris, and tell us a little about your short story for the anthology.

Demons is a sequel to the story Occasional Demons that featured the phooka starring in Demons. At the end of Occasional Demons, the phooka was left to deteriorate in a cage within a bricked-in, windowless room. And that’s where he stayed for more than 15 years. Then the US invaded Iraq, and troops began returning, suffering PTSD and other mental and physical problems associated with war. I then decided to use the phooka and its situation to explore several issues, from illegitimate war to political and religious hypocrisy, while working within a fragile framework of compassion that even the most wounded and tortured can maintain for others.

What gets you writing? Tell us a little bit more about your approach.

I like to explore deeply personal issues that people face every day, issues that have wider social bearing, where ordinary persons react extraordinarily to triumph over challenges. Of course, triumph isn’t always what it seems and can even appear to be failure. Each story is a journey to find out a little more about what makes humans tick, and sometimes the best way to explore these traits is through surreal beings and settings.

What do you think are particular challenges associated with short stories as a form? As for longer works, do you have anything planned? 

The primary challenge for me is finding publishers who are still willing to publish short works. In technical aspects of short story writing, I find the main challenge to be the inclusion of all required information while making characters real without blowing the length out of proportion. With that said, the short story and poem are my favorite forms, always challenging and forever rewarding when the challenge is met successfully. Regarding other projects, I’m working on several now, including a collection of connected stories, a nonfiction book, and a novel, with several other projects roughly outlined.

What's the one short story or novel you keep going back to (we all have them), and what makes it stand out above all the rest?

It would have to be Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. It has everything: satire, comedy, tragedy, science fiction, horror, love, hate... It’s just about perfect in nailing society for what it is and probably always will be. Now...if I could only writing something even half as good...

What scares you?

Willful ignorance and stupidity -- rather, the effects. For example, once upon a not so short time ago, science was considered for what it is, science, an exercise based in empirical fact. Today, at least in the US, thanks to corporations, politicians, and conservative religious groups, science has been cast as a faith-based proposition rather than reality. And because of this at least partially successful attempt to make science something one “believes” or “disbelieves” as though it were a religious myth, we humans choose to deny threats that could ultimately wipe us out. We ignore the evidence day after day -- rising global temperature, melting icecaps, rise in sea level, increased greenhouse gases, mega-storms, and on and on. Science -- empirical facts -- warns us that we’re in danger. And yet, we deny the reality. We choose to be willfully ignorant, willfully foolish, willfully stupid. And that’s extremely scary.

Links:
Website: http://csfuqua.comxa.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/csfuqua
Goodreads.com: http://www.goodreads.com/CSFuqua
Librarything.com: http://www.librarything.com/author/fuquacs
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/C.S.Fuqua.Author

Bio:
CS Fuqua’s books include Rise Up, Big Daddy’s Gadgets, If I Were... (children’s poems), Alabama Musicians: Musical Heritage from the Heart of Dixie, Trust Walk, The Swing: Poems of Fatherhood, and Notes to My Becca, among others. His work has appeared in publications as diverse as The Christian Science Monitor, Naval History, Main Street Rag, and Year's Best Horror Stories. Please visit http://csfuqua.comxa.com.

In conversation with Dan Campbell

Dan Campbell, one of the Something Wicked volume #2 anthology authors is dropping by today. I totally recommend you get your copy on pre-order already. 

So, Dan, tell us a little about your short story for Something Wicked volume 2.

Redemption's Edge got sparked as I was working on character backgrounds for a novel. I needed to know the origin of Johnston's flaws, the weaknesses that fractured against his strengths. I'm reluctant to say much more, due to spoilers, but the story is a test of character.

What gets you writing? Tell us a little bit more about your approach.

Usually, I'll get gripped by a mood or an idea and then, if a plot connected to that occurs to me, I have a story (otherwise, it might end up as a poem). I tend to get material all in one go: an outline either of what could / should happen or a sense of the emotional points that must be hit. With that as a scaffold, I'll get to work on the story or the poem and flesh out the details. Writing something novel length requires me to also outline things as much as I can, but then follow one word to the next and hope I can either stay on target
or revise my course to suit things I didn't anticipate in the unfolding story.

What do you think are particular challenges associated with short stories as a form? As for longer works, do you have anything planned?

The thing that strikes me most about short fiction is the amount of time you have to get story-telling done. Quite simply, you don't have enough time. The story has to immediately engage the reader, to grab and hold their attention, and then it has to continue to pull them in. The writing never gets a chance to relax the way it can in something novel length, where a reader might keep reading just because they've gotten to know a character or they want to explore the world you're creating or some similar "let's explore this together" motivation. Of course, a good novel should also immediately engage the reader, hold their attention and continue to draw them - but the pacing in the two forms is quite different. Short fiction is liking getting a glimpse that stays with you forever, whereas the novel is like studying a scene until you can re-create it.

I have two novels in progress at present: the one with Johnston as a secondary character (which is on hold), and a newer one that I'm gradually working my way through, playing the game of writing according to my outline except when I change the outline to suit the story that gets written. Both are science fiction, with a focus on character development, emotion, and the consequences of choice and action.

What's the one short story or novel you keep going back to (we all have them), and what makes it stand out above all the rest?

I hate to sound cliche, but: The Lord of the Rings. I read it during a formative time in my life, and absorbed a lot of the values and culture portrayed in the books. I've since gone on to study Old Norse literature in my spare time, so Tolkien's work has a lot of resonance for me, now that I understand the source material he was drawing on. Tolkien blended heroic ideals with modern sensibilities in a way that I find offers a sense of depth, of history, of being rooted in tradition while adapting to the winds of change that drive the present.

What scares you?


Losing control, especially due to illness or insanity - becoming a captive in one's own body (or mind), unable to choose how one acts.

Thanks for stopping by, Dan! All the best!

Follow Dan's blog here...

In conversation with Faith Bicknell-Brown

Today I've got Faith Bicknell-Brown, one of the Something Wicked Volume #2 anthology authors visiting. Welcome, Faith, pull up a hot seat for a little Q&A...

Tell us a little about your short story in the anthology.

My story is called Trashcans. It’s about a young man named Toby, who is under his older sister’s guardianship. He’s on the verge of becoming eighteen and he can’t wait to get away from her. Vanessa is controlling as well as verbally and emotionally abusive. Everything culminates one night when she forces him to take the trash out to the curb. Toby discovers “help” can manifest in unexpected ways.

What gets you writing? Tell us a little bit more about your approach.

I write nearly every day from about 8am until 3pm. Once my feet hit the floor in the mornings, the first thing to get me going is several cups of strong, black coffee and reading email. After that, I open whatever manuscript I’m working on and start writing. There’s either rock, pop or bluegrass music playing in the background. Sometimes if I find one of my favorite programs on one of the history channels, I’ll listen to the dialog as I write. I find many odd things from history to science very inspiring.

What do you think are particular challenges associated with short stories as a form? As for longer works, do you have anything planned? 

With short fiction, a writer must deliver the plot and characters in as short a word count as possible without skimping on plot and characterization. However, I still find readers saying, ‘I wish this story had been longer.’ That’s frustrating to read or hear, but short fiction is just that—short.

And longer works? Well, I’m currently working on a new novel. It’s paranormal with some horror and sci-fi elements woven into it.


What's the one short story or novel you keep going back to (we all have them), and what makes it stand out above all the rest?

One I’ve read by another author is The Truth about Unicorns by Bonnie Jones Reynolds. It’s historical horror and fantasy. The atmosphere and style of the novel, plus how the author blended magic and witchcraft, sucks me in every time I re-read it. It’s an old book that’s out of circulation, but I managed to find an autographed copy for my bookshelves.

However, when it comes to my material, my favorite would be my novel my agent has been holding on to called Moone Spell. It’s about a werewolf curse accidentally placed on a man because his wife wanted him to be home more often. The heroine has escaped from a sadistic ex-husband, so she faces him and the werewolves in an effort to protect her children and find true love.

What scares you?

If you mean typical jump-out-of-your-skin topics, it would have to be snakes. I hate 'em. I can’t even stand to watch anything about them on TV or to come across a picture of one in a book!

Linkage: 
www.facebook.com/faithbicknellbrown
www.facebook.com/flbicknell
www.twitter.com/flbicknell
www.myspace.com/faith_zinnia
www.pinterest.com/flbicknell
www.authorgraph.com/authors/FLBicknell

A dash of Something Wicked with Joe Vaz.

Joe Vaz and I go back a long way. I've had a short story called Last Woman Standing published in his Something Wicked magazine ages ago (issue #9 I think) but since I started with the SA HorrorFest Bloody Parchment short story competition and anthology, Joe has offered his support by judging the competition. Of course now I'm totally tickled pink that he's bringing out horror anthologies now (and is on volume two already), so I absolutely had to have him over to share a little Q&A about what he's up to. You can get volume one here.

So, Joe, while you were pulling together the anthology, did you discover (as some editors do) an underlying theme occur? 

Not during Vol One of the anthology, but probably because it was made up from the six individual issues of Something Wicked Magazine from 2011. I’d have to look at the issues themselves to see if there are any underlying themes, there usually is.

What are the hallmarks of a great story, in your opinion? 

I think believable characters that the reader can empathise with (or detest) are central to a good story everything else is bonus. Give me a character I care about, whether that’s because I like her or detest her, and you’ll have me interested in your story.

Having said that, the stuff that blows me away are stories that take me where I don’t expect to go. As I am sure you know, one of the downsides of slush reading is, over the years, you develop a sixth sense for obvious storylines, so, when a story surprises, it’s always a good thing.

If you had sixteen words to tell someone what the Something Wicked Speculative Fiction Anthology, Volume Two is all about, what would you say? (Yeah, this is a bitch of a question, I know)

Imagination. Adventure. Terror. Fear. Sorrow. Loss. Anger. Disbelief. Displacement. Revenge. Horror. Awe. Space. Gods. Empathy. Love.

I’m guessing that’s not what you wanted. :)

In sixteen words that make a sentence, I would say:
A place to let your imagination run wild; experience fantastical stories, great emotions and beautiful writing.

Your cover artist for volume one and two has walked a long way with Something Wicked. Tell us more about what makes the collaboration so outstanding.

Well for starters, Vincent Sammy is outstanding – his art is incredible and we were so blessed to be the first magazine to find him (and exploit him) because he is well on his way to becoming an international phenomenon. Just in the last year he has had art featured in a Hollywood movie (the Issue 8 cover, actually) and he has illustrated stories for Black Static and for Pandemonium’s Lost Souls anthology – (a hardcover copy of which is sitting right beside me as I type this – jealous? You should be).

The collaboration we have with Vincent is similar to the ones we have with our other cover artists, they all have an understanding of cinema language. As an actor, it’s the only way I know how to describe images when commissioning art, and it is no coincidence that four of the five primary cover artists all work within the film industry in some way (Pierre Smit is a scenic artist, Jesca Marisa is a director and animator, Hendrik Gericke is a matte painter and Vianne is a scriptwriter) in fact the only one that doesn’t work in film is Vincent.

Having said that though, Vincent has an inherent sense of mood and texture, he can deliver a pencil illustration that looks like a 19th-century photograph, complete with negative scratches and faded edges, or a holographic image or, well, anything really. Our communication is usually very sparse, I tend to describe a mood or a scene in the story, perhaps the angle of the shot, or the lighting, and Vincent adds his own touches and inspiration and then delivers a masterpiece – every time.

What does 2013 have in store for Something Wicked? 

2013 kicks off with a bang with Volume Two of our annual anthologies which is being co-published by eKhaya. They will be handling the digital and South African distribution of Volume Two.

Volume Two is currently available for pre-orders here.

And yes, Vincent has illustrated our cover.

Submissions? What are you looking for? When do they open for the next anthology? 

This is always such a difficult questions because my love of stories is so organic – technically we’re after science fiction and horror, but any kind of speculative fiction is good. Over the years we’ve published a couple of really dark and urban fantasies that blew me away (Freemantle Mons and Sky Painter by Michael John Grist and Jack of Spades, reversed by Cat Hellisen which is featured in volume two). I also love gothic, contemporary, humorous, supernatural and psychological horror.

Science fiction of all types, from surreal alternate reality stuff, to the mundane, from hard space-opera to political and social – I love it all.

At the end of the day it has less to do with the type of story and more to do with the story itself – if the story blows me away, I will publish it, regardless of genre.

We’ve haven’t got an official date for re-opening submissions, but it will be sometime in June. Subs will be open for a six-week period and we’ll be looking for twenty-four or so original, never-before-published stories for 2014’s Volume Three.

While we’re running our pre-order special, you can get all our books and magazines at hefty discounts, including exclusive and extremely limited hardcovers of Volume One and Two.
Special ends on March 25. See this link...