By their titles, these stories don’t have much in common, but by their ends, you may find commonalities indeed! Kim and Ada make their Shimmer debuts in Issue #17.
Kim Neville, “The Fairy Godmother”
I attended Clarion West last summer. Our week 2 instructor, Stephen Graham Jones, sent around a story called “The Hitman” by T.C. Boyle, and invited us to write stories using the same structural framework. I was intrigued by the challenge of working within these constraints and still creating something that was entirely my own. I think “The Fairy Godmother” represents who I am better than anything else I’ve written.
Read the rest of the interview here!
Ada Hoffmann, “The Herdsman of the Dead”
I’m weird about process. I have trouble with truly open-ended time and take too long deciding what to do if I have a choice. So I make up an insanely detailed process schedule which is supposed to include and prioritize every activity I could want to do ever. Then after a while I get tired of it and make up a new one. I was setting myself a lot of sharp deadlines earlier in the year, which worked really well for a while and then turned counterproductive. Right now my process has me writing in short bursts throughout the day, with a lot of breaks for reading and chores. It mostly works. I’m sure if you check back a year from now, I’ll be telling you why this process was terrible and I needed a different one.