I did not plan to end this interview series with two writers each in possession of three names, but here we are–with two Shimmer #17 stories that have much in common.

Silvia Moreno-Garcia, “River Dreaming”

I’m a mercenary and perpetually broke, so I’ll do anything for money. You want me to write a story about tentacle porn set in Vancouver? I’ll do it. Want me to edit an anthology of punk mermaids? Hey, I’m there. The publishing and editing earns me more money than the short stories or novels, so I’ve been doing progressively more of that. I like publishing more than editing, but overall I like all three. It’s a different experience with editing than with writing. If I had a rich patron, maybe I’d do more writing. So if you’re reading this and you are a millionaire, call me, maybe.

Read the rest of the interview!

Carmen Maria Machado, “We Were Never Alone in Space”

For me, there is this constant interaction between language and narrative in fiction that very much resembles the physical considerations of photography (light, composition) balanced with the narrative of its content. I used to work as a second photographer for a friend of mine who shot weddings. She always talked about how the best wedding photography closely resembled photojournalism–not the posed shots, but the off-guard, active images that told one story (or ten, or a thousand). The stolen glance, the unintentional body language, the children playing off in the corner. She was so right. There’s a kind of honesty, a kind of realness, in that sort of photography, even when it’s during a highly staged event like a wedding. Fiction can also do this. Or not, which is, I think, when fiction can fail.

Read the rest of the interview!

 Shimmer #17 unites returning authors (Alex Wilson!) with authors new to our pages (Kristi DeMeester!). Both of these stories speak of the undead, of being haunted.

Alex Wilson, “Romeo and Meatbox”

It’s all story. I can spend more hours than is probably healthy locked in a dark room with just a blank piece of paper, but I also have a theatre background, so a community coming together for the purpose of sharing a common story is a great way to tempt me to unlock my door. I’ve enjoyed hanging lights and sewing costumes for shows with which I wasn’t otherwise involved, and in film I was  surprisingly satisfied when I spent a month playing an extra on projects like NBC’s Revolution and Iron Man 3, where they simply handed me a rubber gun and told me to run around in the background, while key players or stunt-people did more significant things in the foreground.

Read the rest of the interview here!

Kristi DeMeester, “Like Feather, Like Bone”

A friend of mine tweeted “This little girl was under my porch eating a bird,” only she forgot to attach the picture of the cat she found. The gears started turning, and my immediate thought was “What if it was an actual little girl?” From there the story just built itself in one of those rare dreamy moments where I looked down at the computer screen about an hour later to find the story sitting before me.
Read the rest of the interview here!

Damien and Yarrow both make their Shimmer debuts in issue #17, with stories that are each chilling in their own way. If you’ve missed any of the Shimmer 17 interviews so far, click the Issue 17 category link in the header and there they shall be!

Damien Angelica Walters, “Girl With Coin”
When performing to classic Arabic music, my favorite to dance to, you have to take care to correctly portray the emotions of the song. I’ve seen a dancer unfamiliar with the lyrics dance happy-happy-joy-joy to a song of sorrow and it was off-putting, to say the least. I’ve retired from public performance but I often catch myself dancing in my office or the kitchen while mulling over sticky points in stories, so it’s connected in a disconnected sort of way. I lose myself in the dance now not to music, but to the emotions I’m trying to evoke in whatever project I’m working on.

Read the rest here!

Yarrow Paisley, “The Metaphor of the Lakes”
Perhaps I thought of the line “I don’t know whether I’m alive or dead,” and somehow that blossomed into a little girl’s diary, and the characters cascaded out of the language she employed. I enjoyed the personalities that emerged and the various discoveries I made as the narrative proceeded, and that kept me going. It was like solving a puzzle…sudoku for the soul!

Read the rest here!

Shimmer #17 sees the return of Sunny Moraine and Lavie Tidhar makes his debut Shimmer appearance! Both writers give us challenging stories that may have you questioning reality. As you should!

Sunny Moraine, “Love in the Time of Vivisection”
It really started with me thinking about relationships – about mine and others’. Many of my stories deal with painful/broken relationships in some way (I swear, my own is really very happy), but what drove the imagery of this story was a meditation on honesty, about how it’s vitally important in keeping a relationship of any kind alive but can also be agonizing and even deeply destructive. Love can feel like a trap, like being forced into things you may not have otherwise done, or wanted to do. So I tried to capture some of that pain and dread with the most literal interpretation possible. I gave myself permission to go into a really dark place and see what I could bring back out.

It was also indirectly inspired by Kij Johnson’s “Mantis Wives”, which is one of my favorite short stories that I’ve read in the last few months.

Read the rest of the interview.

Lavie Tidhar, “Fishing”

It’s set in Vientiane, in Laos, where I lived for two years. That Dam (the Black Stupa) is also where Joe, the detective, has his office in my novel, Osama. It all comes from day-to-day experiences, just filtered through a slightly weird lens.

Read the rest of the interview.

Robert N. Lee and Jordan Taylor make their Shimmery debuts together in issue #17, with two completely different stories — one science fiction, and one a fairy fantasy. That’s just how Shimmer rolls, YOLO!

Robert N. Lee, “98 Ianthe”

I was doing research for Them Bones, and had to come up with a name for a  New York City analog. It figures into Them Bones and is the primary setting of a sequel, Beautiful World. It’s what New York is in movies and songs and books; the dream of New York City, I guess.

I read some of the old Bernie Krigstein 87th Precinct comic books back in the eighties, when I drew comics myself. That led me to read some of the Ed McBain books the comics were based on. Which I liked, but what lingered in my mind about them for decades after was the ersatz New York City invented for the books – to save the author fact-checking, and so they could be written in weeks.

87th Precinct’s Isola is Manhattan, except it’s not. The drive from Wall Street to the Battery doesn’t have to map to the real life version, it can go as long or short as as the author wants and the reader agrees. The bridges and boroughs all have different names and live wherever the story needs them, but they’re roughly analogous to real life. The rivers run backwards. It’s so cool…

Read the rest here!

Jordan Taylor, “The Desire of All Things”

I confess. I love fairies. I love stories about fairies, even the silly kid ones. But in my favorite fairy stories, fairies are much  more than winged sprites at the bottom of the garden – they’re ancient and strange and sometimes scary.

Read the rest here!

Each issue of Shimmer is filled with extraordinary writers. One of the best things I get to do is talk to them and see how they approach their craft. Make no mistake–we also talk a lot about cake and pie and books and if you were a cupcake, what kind of cupcake would you be? And if you were a pie? Why would you be a pie? Why wouldn’t you be a pie!

Over the next month, I’m going to introduce you to the authors of Shimmer #17. Today, A.C. Wise and our cover story author, Katherine Sparrow.

A. C. Wise, “How Bunny Came to Be”

Tell us how this story came about.

“How Bunny Came to Be” is actually a prequel to “Doctor Blood and the Ultra Fabulous Glitter Squadron,” which, conveniently enough, was just published in the June 2013 issue of Ideomancer. When I wrote “Doctor Blood,” I didn’t necessarily intend to write any other stories about the Glitter Squadron, even though the story plays with pulpy tropes and hints at the Squadron’s ongoing adventures. However the character of Bunny wouldn’t leave me alone. I started thinking about how someone goes about becoming a world-saving hero. I particularly wanted to explore a non-traditional notion of strength. We have several historical examples of women putting on men’s clothing and going to war (Mulan, Joan of Arc), but what about a man putting on women’s clothing? There’s still a stigma in our society surrounding “girly” things and “girly” behavior. More often than not, they are equated with weakness. But there are different ways to define strength, which Bunny proves to herself and the world over and over again.

Read the rest of the interview here.

Katherine Sparrow, “The Mostly True Adventures of Assman & Foxy”

What is it about the circus?
The circus. The circus! It’s the place where we  could go and become fantastic, in every meaning of the word. It’s where women fly, dogs dance, and clowns drive cars with strange quantum mechanics. It’s the dirty tent squatting on the edge of town filled with hustlers, bearded ladies, and con artists and maybe, just maybe, if you are lucky they will take you with them when they go.

Read the rest of the interview here.

Join us for two more authors on Thursday, won’t you? And be sure to peek at the gorgeousness that is Shimmer #17.

All month long, I’m going to be talking with Shimmer #17 authors! Today, I talk with Helena Bell and Alex Dally MacFarlane, two writers who constantly work in Shimmery veins. There’s an image for you. Read on!

Helena Bell, “Sincerely, Your Psychic”

Tell us how your came about.

A few years ago a friend of mine gifted me a session with an astrologer.  The entire experience was a bit weird in that she didn’t believe that she was a fortune teller, but she really believed in the accuracy of astrological charts.  I’ve always maintained that you can have really great, insightful experiences with Tarot readers, psychics, palm readers, etc, so long as the person doing your reading has an extraordinary level of empathy. So I went into it with an open mind,  but I still have an unhealthy level of snark in me and so a few of the things she said just rubbed me the wrong way. This story actually began as an attempt to poke a little fun at the whole practice, but it quickly veered into another direction entirely. It’s not fair to mock something that most people don’t take seriously to begin with, and so I became more interested in the idea of negative space: the decisions we didn’t make, or the decisions we regret, and the solace we take from wondering about ‘what ifs’.

Read the rest of the interview here.

Alex Dally MacFarlane, “Out They Come”

Tell us how your story came about.

It started with a Google image search for foxes in medieval illuminated manuscripts.  I found one of a woman with what looked like a fox falling out her mouth.  Either that or she was playing it like bagpipes.  I shared it on my blog, adding: “She speaks of them so often, out they fall!”  and then my friend Brooke Bolander and I got to talking about how it should become a story.  We both wound up writing one.

Mine started with the idea that an injustice had been done to a woman, Stey, and the foxes she vomited up would help her fight against it.  It took realizing that I wanted to write about sexual assault to get the story really going.  “Out They Come” is about anger, and it’s not a nice story: it’s not about things getting better, it’s about feeling that they never will.  Anger is something that some people like to suggest is a choice: “Why are you so angry?” or “You’d feel a lot better if you weren’t so angry.”  Well, I would, and I wouldn’t choose anger if it was a choice.  It’s not.  It’s overwhelming, sometimes, when some people suggest that sexual assault isn’t a big deal.

I also enjoyed writing about someone vomiting up foxes.

Read the rest of the interview here.

Next week, join us for four more authors!