Has this summer been a crazy one for awesome books, or what! Today, we’re chatting with A.C. Wise, a Shimmer regular who is out with her first novella-length work, Catfish Lullaby! 

She’s also running a giveaway for a free copy, so as soon as you finish reading, you need to hop on over there, and enter! We still think it (and all books) should be called Badger Lullaby, but whatEVER. We enjoyed it anyhow!

Your newest release (and first longer-length work!) is Catfish Lullaby, a gorgeous Southern Gothic novella from Broken Eye Books. Tell us how this story came to be.

It started as a short story, inspired by misheard song lyrics. You know, the usual way authors go about creating novellas. My family and I were at a state fair in Florida. There was a band playing in one of the tents where we stopped to get out of the sun and have something cold to drink. Due to tent acoustics, and a questionable sound system, I couldn’t hear what the band was actually singing about, so I chose to interpret it as a song about a myth/tall-tale/legend, someone or something walking into or out of a swamp, leaving only footprints behind. It’s highly unlikely that they were singing about anything remotely of the sort, but I thank them for the inspiration nonetheless!

Much of speculative fiction deals with outsiders coming to learn their “strange” talents have value. What talent do you have that you have also discovered to be invaluable?

It hasn’t proven useful yet, but I’m really good at breaking computers and technology in unusual ways, just by interacting with them. If humanity ever finds itself in a robot uprising, or with a computer counting down to launching doomsday devices, I expect to be invaluable. Just call me Newton Pulsifer.

This book feels like a fantastic companion to Cherie Priest’s recent book The Toll, which also explores folk tales and monsters in the South. Is there something about the South that makes it perfect for these kinds of stories? The South feels like a character all its own!

I really need to read The Toll! It seems Southern Gothic has been enjoying a bit of a revival lately, or maybe it’s just because I’m paying more attention at the moment. That said, I do feel like the South lends itself to tales of the monstrous and supernatural. There’s a certain kind of Southern setting, the one I tried to capture, that is particularly perfect – a small town, surrounded by deep woods, with more trees than people, where even your closest neighbors are a drive away. It’s a setting that simultaneously breeds isolation, and a sense of claustrophobia. Everyone knows everyone else, and have for generations. Outsiders are viewed with suspicion. Secrets grow in the soil, and there are plenty of shadowy places for rumors to grow into legends, and impossible things to hide until such a time as they choose to make themselves known. You can’t discount the heat as a factor, either. Oppressive, close, it slows everything down, gets inside your skin and lungs, it makes the sense of being trapped that much worse. Or maybe that level of heat and humidity is just what horror looks like to a Canadian…

This book talks about monsters, both real and imagined. Which, do you think, is worse?

The real ones. Part of the reason why I think horror is so appealing is that it turns the monstrous into something impossible and exaggerated, but also something that can be conquered. It gives us hope that survival is possible. And even bleak cosmic horror where humanity loses out is something we can walk away from when the book is over, or the movie ends. We can leave it safely in the realm of the imaginary. Real life horrors are much more insidious and harder to defeat.

How much inspiration for your fictional monsters comes from your pets?

Ha! None yet, but I could see it. “The night the snacks ran out, the humans came to understand the true horror of…The Hungering Corgs!” I could also imagine a monster that very slowly drowns its victims in wave after wave of shed fur.

How is writing a novella different than writing a short story—or is it? This is not necessarily a trick question—but maybe it also is. Was your approach to this project any different?

It may not be a trick question, but I may give a trick answer? The novella started life as a short story, so my approach wasn’t really all that different. It was mostly a matter of expansion. One nice thing about writing at a longer length is there’s more room for scenes, characters, settings, and even individual moments to breathe. One of my favorite scenes in Catfish Lullaby is a quiet moment where Caleb and Cere talk and eat ice cream. It’s the kind of scene that might not have survived in a short story requiring a tighter focus.

There is a definite Lovecraft vibe to this story—fucked up families and secrets and such. What other works/authors might you count among your inspirations?

For dark fiction with Lovecraftian overtones, I would point to Caitlin R. Kiernan, Livia Llewellyn, John Langan, and Gemma Files as inspirational. They all write fantastic stuff in varying shades of twisted, horrific, and fucked up.

Which Hogwarts house did you get sorted into?

I haven’t been officially sorted, but I feel like I would be a Hufflepuff.

As is right and proper.

This almost feels like a new Golden Age of books because everyone is writing the most amazing stuff. What have you read lately that is Gorgeous and Outstanding and readers should absolutely get?

Aaah! So many things! I will try to limit myself to just a few suggestions… Under the Pendulum Sun by Jeannette Ng, Riverland by Fran Wilde, An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon, Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, The Luminous Dead by Caitlin Starling, and the Poppy War by R.F. Kuang. There. That was kind of restrained, right?

What’s next for you?

I recently completely my first novel and its now out on submission, looking for a good home. Eep! I’m also working on a handful of short stories/novelette type things. My laptop exists in a perpetual state of chaos, with half-finished documents in various stages of completion scattered everywhere.

Look, just consider Badger Lullaby, that’s all we’re asking. Thanks for coming by! Readers, go enter to win your copy of Catfish Lullaby, or just buy a copy, because you’re not gonna wanna wait! 

 

In 2015, Fran Wilde’s Updraft hit shelves and went on to win the Andre Norton Award and the Crompton Crook Award, as well as be nominated for the Nebula. Next week, the series concludes with Horizon (and don’t let us forget the middle volume, Cloudbound, on the Locus Recommended Reading list!).

Fran was awesome enough to stop by and talk with us about the writing and feeding of a trilogy. (Did we mention her Shimmer story, “Only Their Shining Beauty Was Left” is a finalist for the WSFA Small Press Award? It is!)

 

Talk to us about the writing of a trilogy.

Announcer’s Voice: I thought I knew where the story was going, but I didn’t really, until I wrote it: The Writing of A Trilogy By Fran Wilde.

Seriously, though, a trilogy is an opportunity to really explore the evolution of issues – it’s a great chance to play in the world you’ve built. And – especially for me – it’s a chance to layer and expand and develop plotlines that I started in Updraft in the background. I really enjoyed that part.

Updraft was your first novel so does Horizon encompass the initial vision you had for the series and its world, or did it change as you wrote Updraft and Cloudbound?

It does, I believe! The progression of many things within the three books – including who gets to speak, who gets to lead, and what community means, was really important to me from the start. Also the progression of songs being inherited things turning into something one makes anew also was an initial theme. The progression of the skymouths and the bone eaters took me by surprise, as did some of the characters’ decisions. But I knew where I was going with the cities from the very beginning.

Did Kirit go where you expected, or were there surprises on the ground for you?

Writing Kirit – hah. There were a lot of surprises with her character! I liked that enormously, actually. I think when you build a character, and then they push back against the outline (ahem, for me that’s when the writing goes a lot slower) and kind of start deciding what they want to do in the narrative (I gave Kirit a free-form writing day-off to see what she’d do if she could do anything and she totally surprised me), then you may have a character with agency. It’s not convenient sometimes from a plot perspective, but it results in a lot of interesting turns.

Which came first: Kirit or the bone towers?

The towers! And Djonn (the artifex in Cloudbound), believe it or not! He’s in the very first story. And in the story that started everything, which was more of a world building document. Kirit and Nat came later.

Related, where do you begin when it comes to world building?

I begin with what fascinates and scares me most. In the case of the Bone Universe, I began with falling, and flying – which is sort of like failing to fall. Once I know what’s caught me up, I start researching and making lists of things I don’t know, and then I continue researching those things while I write.

You shared some of the research you did for this series on your blog–you flew in a wind tunnel! What was the most unexpected thing you learned in the course of your research for the trilogy?

The most unexpected things I learned were probably that echolocation works, but not exactly the way people outside the blind community think it does. The weirdest were the facts about lammergeiers – they rub their faces with clay to look fiercer, and they’re already huge and fierce. Also the different ways bone can smell. That was pretty weird. And cephalopods. So much weird there. And…

Yeah, I like weird.

You have an MFA in poetry; how has poetry influenced your work, and do you have favorite poets we should look up after we finish this interview?

I think poetry has always influenced my writing – mostly the sounds of words hitting together and weaving together. I get very caught up in sounds. I still write poems, but they’re quick things that I post on Instagram now and then.

Favorite poets – oh gosh I have so many. Rita Dove (one of my teachers), Larry Levis (another teacher – basically all of my teachers go on this list), Gerard Manley Hopkins, Elizabeth Bishop, Wyslawa Szymborska, Pablo Neruda, Mary Szybist, Tracy K. Smith (the newest US Poet Laureate), John Berryman, Eavan Boland, Seamus Heaney, Christina Rosetti, Sofia Samatar, Lynda Hull, Whitman… not to mention Amal El-Motar, Valya Dudycz Lupescu, CSE Cooney, Rose Lemberg, and more.

What is the worst piece of writing advice you’ve ever received?

“This isn’t good enough. You should stop working on this and start something new instead.” – from Past Me.

I am learning to not listen.

You have an affinity for fountain pens and ink. Do you have a favorite pen? A favorite ink?

YES I DO. I love TWSBI demonstrators. Except now I have more pens because people are lovely and are trying to educate me about them. My new favorite favorites are a Jinhao and a Boerer 8 Horses. Both fine nib.

My favorite inks right now are the really moody Sailors and iroshizukus, and the J. Herbin 1670s.

I’m not sure that ‘affinity’ is the most accurate word…. What’s the level up from that?

What came first, sketching or writing?

Writing was fir—no wait, it was sketchi—hmm. I’m not sure. I’ve always done both, usually together. I think it’s a pretty natural thing to draw and write at the same time… something we’ve lost due to the keyboard effect.

Cooking the Books is your blog about food in works of speculative fiction; do you have a favorite speculative food, a perhaps-fictional food that made you think “oh I want to go to there”?

I’m always interested in the coffee analogs – and the things people are willing to do for coffee and spices. So many foods in Aliette de Bodard’s worlds (she’s my Cooking the Books co-host, so maybe sometime we’ll get to cook together). I remember wondering what the foods in Alice and Wonderland tasted like, and how it felt to eat words in the Phantom Tollbooth, so it started pretty early.

While reading Updraft, I had a memory of reading the Pern books; for me, they share a sense of wonder and newness and strangeness and scope. And yes, flying! What authors/books do you remember loving in your childhood?

McCaffrey, for sure was a favorite, so that’s an honor you thought of Pern! The Ship Who Sang especially – Helva was my first and best ship. Natalie Babbitt (Tuck Everlasting), Norm Juster (The Phantom Tollbooth), Richard Adams (Watership Down). I had a copy of The Annotated Alice that I loved very much. And some very early science fiction…mostly out of Gardner Dozois’ Best Of collections.  Ursula K. Le Guinn’s Earthsea. Madeline L’Engle.

Has the world of 2016/2017 changed the way you approach writing, or the kind of content you’re creating?

I have discovered I write better and more honestly when I allow myself to be angry. 2016 & 2017 have provided plenty of opportunities for writing better.

Are Kirit’s stories concluded?

I think so…. Maybe not everyone in the Bone Universe is ready to settle down yet, but I think Kirit’s pretty happy where she landed.

What’s next for you?

I’ve finished a middle grade novel that took me completely by surprise, and am working on the next two Gem Universe novellas for Tor.com as well as a number of short stories!

Fran, thank you so much for sharing your journey with us! Readers, grab Horizon if you haven’t already, and also be sure to check out Fran’s own interview with her cover artist Tommy Arnold — it contains sketches for the covers, and shows how author and artist work together to show you what you’re reading! Fran is also over at Scalzi’s The Big Idea today, so check that out, too.

Fran will be at Powell’s (Cedar Hills Crossing) to read and sign on October 18th.

Horizon can be found at: Amazon | B&N | IndieBound | Powell’s

Queers Destroy Horror is a double-issue of Nightmare that’s written, edited, and illustrated by LGBTQUIA creators. There is a former Shimmer badger among them — not to mention a couple Shimmer authors in the mix, which we love to see. Today, we’re talking to guest editor Wendy N. Wagner about the project, monsterflails!

QDH is the newest member of the Destroy family. How did this amazing journey begin?

The Destroy projects really ARE amazing. Back in 2013, Christie Yant, one of our Lightspeed Assistant Editors, got fed up with the state of genre fiction. The genre’s main trade organization, SFWA, had included some articles that were disrespectful to women; bloggers and analysts (like Nicola Griffith) were putting together uncomfortable statistics about the ways women writers don’t make recommended reading lists or get reviewed in the same ways that men do. And then an article came out that claimed Lois McMaster Bujold’s books weren’t real science fiction, because they included romance and balls and court scenes with descriptions of people’s clothes. So Christie made a joke on Twitter about how women were just DESTROYING science fiction with all our icky girl germs, and the joke sort of snowballed.

The publisher of Lightspeed and Nightmare, John Joseph Adams, thought the joke could be used to make a positive difference in the industry, so invited Christie to do a special issue of the magazine that would celebrate women’s work in science fiction. They wanted to make it really special and really inclusive, so they decided to run a Kickstarter campaign to give them some extra funds to work with. The Kickstarter exploded! They (we, by that time, because John had brought me on as the Managing/Associate Editor of his magazines, and I immediately wanted to help with Women Destroy SF) raised ten times the amount of money they had hoped to make. And the feedback was phenomenal! People wanted us to destroy everything. And everybody wanted a chance to come out of the shadows and show the world how they could contribute to the field.

Last year, we published Women Destroy Science Fiction!, Women Destroy Horror!, and Women Destroy Fantasy!; this year we’ve asked gender and sexual minorities to smash up the genres. Next year we’ll be putting people of color in the driver’s seat.

Talk to us about this cover art — it’s amazing. How did this concept come about?

When the team was working on the cover for Queers Destroy Science Fiction!, they really struggled to find an image that meant “science fiction” for them. I was just a fly on the wall, listening to their conversation, and I found myself thinking that for me, nothing said horror like a skull. And I immediately had this vision of a skull with this black beetle crawling on it, and the beetle’s carapace had this wonderful rainbow shimmer on it.

So when Cory Skerry, our art director for QDH, asked if I had any ideas about the cover art, I shared that idea, and he thought it would be cool. Neither one of us was really prepared for AJ Jones to come back to us with this image. It’s so much more nightmarish and exhilarating than what we imagined!

Why horror? What draws you to the genre?

The strongest memories I have from early childhood are all about Halloween. My mom and my sisters always made these great costumes and we decorated the house and made a big fuss about it. It seemed like Halloween was made out of some kind of magic — the kind of stuff that let three-year-old kids turn into bats and made candy into an acceptable meal. I loved (and still love!) everything about Halloween. I can not get enough of it. So much of horror looks and feels like Halloween. I can’t resist that aesthetic!

On the other hand, I’m also a super emotional person. Unhappy things affect me deeply, and the heart of horror is unhappiness and darkness and the deep injustice of bad things happening to people. And reading about that stuff in a safe, fictional way helps me cope with the real world.

Plus, being scared when I know I can hide under the covers is the most delicious feeling possible!

After choosing the stories for this issue, what advice do you have for writers working in horror?

Worry less about being original and more about being meaningful. If you infuse your work with a feeling that comes from your core, you can make any situation, any trope, any monster interesting. Look at Let the Right One In. At a time when people were rolling their eyes about vampires, this story came along and hit them over the head. Why? Because it’s such a powerful story about being isolated and lonely and finding someone who gets you. It’s very meaningful and real.

I want to read stories that make me feel. So get out there and scrape up some feelings!

What makes for a great horror story?

A main character whose feelings and thoughts come clear in the prose. Every image and plot development is only as interesting as that character’s response to it, so if your character is a piece of cardboard being dragged along by the story, your story will fail.

In your QDH editorial, you mention falling in love/horror with “The Raft,” from Stephen King’s Skeleton Crew collection. What other authors and stories have influenced your writing (and perhaps editing)?

The unintentionally big influences on my writing are Margaret Mahy, Pamela Dean, Robin McKinley, and David Eddings. These are the writers I read and re-read as a kid and I absorbed them like I was a sponge. I don’t mind writing like the first three, but I am still trying to expunge David Eddings from my brain, because I don’t think I want to write like him. (His books are still fun — they’re just not me.) Some influences I’ve tried to cultivate are Octavia Butler, David Mitchell, Tana French, and Scott Fitzgerald.

But the person who has had the biggest effect on my work as a writer (and editor) is John Joseph Adams. He’s published me a couple of times and the edits he gave me were incredibly insightful—I learned a lot just working on them. And I’ve been his editorial assistant or assistant editor or associate editor on and off since 2010. I’m hoping some of his good taste has rubbed off on me.

You recently did an amazing thing–bringing home a Hugo for the work done on Lightspeed, Nightmare’s parent pub. Is that thing heavy, or what? 

The Lightspeed team won the Hugo for Best Semiprozine, and the group included John Joseph Adams (our editor-in-chief/publisher), Stefan Rudnicki (our podcast producer), Rich Horton (our reprints editor), Christie Yant (head of special projects and Guest Editor of WDSF), and me, so there was rather a horde of us. It takes a lot of people to make the magazine come together!

The Hugo award this year weighs about 8 or 9 pounds. The base is also covered in metal triangles that are quite poky and sharp-edged. It looks like a medieval mace or something. It’s kind of terrifying.

Horror seems to be making something of a comeback with television series like Scream Queens, American Horror Story, and Hannibal. Do you think visual horror is more effective than written horror, or are they simply two sides of the same coin?

I think visual horror is a paper dollar bill and written horror is a gold one dollar coin — they’re equally effective, but most people seem to prefer using paper. Visual horror has a lot of advantages, like jump scares and musical scores, and I think it has the luxury of building on a visual language that has saturated our culture. I mean, even if you haven’t seen the movies, you’ve usually picked up some of the tropes and standard images coming out of popular horror movies. That can make a new horror film/show more accessible to new viewers.

I know a lot of people who say they don’t find themselves as frightened when they read horror as when they watch horror. But I also think that horror is about a lot more than just being scary, and that’s where writers get a chance to shine. Horror is the genre where we get to explore everything dark in the world. Fear is one part of that, but I think it’s just one corner of the playroom.

If you could invite one horror author (dead or alive, naturally) to tea and spider scones, who would it be?

Shirley Jackson! I just read Let Me Tell You, a new collection of shorts and essays by her, and I’m pretty sure we have a lot in common. Plus, I love her work. She’s the writer I most want to be when I grow up. I mean, if I have to grow up. 🙂

What’re you destroying next? What does the future hold?

I am currently revising a novel that is destroying science fiction with werewolves and philosophy. I am very excited about it. I also have a new novel coming out in August, which is a dark adventure set in the world of the Pathfinder role-playing game. It features the same main character as my first novel, Skinwalkers, although it’s not a sequel per se, and I think it’s going to be a really fun book.

Thanks, Wendy! Readers, you can get your mitts on QDH here. The issue is available online, in trade paper, and a variety of ebook formats!

 

She Walks in Shadows is the newest anthology from Innsmouth Free Press. Best dressed editor Silvia Moreno-Garcia was kind enough to sit down with me in this virtual space and talk about the project, which I and another badger have stories in.

How did She Walks in Shadows come about?

There was a discussion; it started on Facebook and trickled into some other spaces, which made it obvious most Lovecraft fans couldn’t name more than one woman Lovecraft writer (Kiernan), and some couldn’t even recall her. There was even a gross comment that women are biologically incapable of writing Lovecraftian fiction. As often happens in these discussions someone will pipe in and say “if you don’t like it why don’t you do something about it rather than whining,” so, since I actually tend to do things, we got together this anthology project to help showcase the work of women .

The cover art is striking and beautiful. Who did the art and what was the idea behind the image? Was it just “women and Lovecraft, go”?

That’s Sara K. Diesel‘s work. She did the cover for This Strange Way of Dying, my debut collection, and I contacted her for this. I asked her to do something inspired by a rather lousy movie with Barbara Steele called The Crimson Cult. Despite being kind of dull it features Steele in a distinctive headdress. I asked Sara to create a cultist or priestess inspired, but not identical, to the one in that movie. Her sketches were very good and I picked one with a profile pose because it seemed different than some of the other covers we’d done before.

With the anthology, what was it you most hoped to accomplish and what did you want to avoid?

We wanted to feature a wide variety of voices and characters. Not just women as heroes, but as villains, mothers and daughters, young and old. We didn’t want it to be too Mythos heavy. It’s always a delicate dance because some buyers love and only love the “monsters” and deities, but others want stuff that uses less places and people utilized by Lovecraft and is more about mood or ideas. So there’s that back and forth. We didn’t want to just have the Who’s Who of 1920s Lovecraft Mythos and I believe we avoided that. Cthulhu appears, but probably not the way you expect him, we get a kind of funky Asenath thanks to Molly Tanzer, and some people go ahead and spin stories like the opening one, about Lovecraft’s mother, which don’t namedrop any famous entity but are still preoccupied and responding to Lovecraft in some way. The anthology also features a good number of POC contributors, seven as I recall, and other writers who are not POC but are from outside the United States, which is obviously a dominant force in the Mythos market. So you get to meet people like Inkeri Kontro who is from Finland and I think it helps to show how widespread Lovecraft is nowadays.

After all these years, and all these beautiful anthologies from Innsmouth Free Press, why Lovecraft? What is it about him and his stories that continue to fascinate?.

To be honest I don’t know how much longer I’ll be dealing with Lovecraft. I am working on my thesis, and it involves Lovecraft and eugenic thought in the early 20th century, so I’m very much exhausted of reading about him by now. Next year, after that’s done, I think I’m going to take a long stretch of time without him, maybe I’ll even be done with him forever. I’ve had a long time to build a dialogue with him and I’ve worked hard to get more POCs and women noticed in this niche, but at some point I guess we all grow out of certain things and I’m at the point where this might be true for me and Lovecraft. On the other hand, my husband thinks I’ll never stop. I’ve been reading Lovecraft since he’s known me, which is a long time, and he can’t picture me without something vaguely related to him in my hands. We’ll see.

Do you have a favorite Lovecraft monster?

The Deep Ones. It’s not Lovecraft per se, but I liked Derleth’s Ithaqua. I live in Canada so part of the appeal is the snowy landscape.

How did you first discover Lovecraft?

Like most people, as a teenager. I read Poe and then moved onto Lovecraft, and from then on read quite a bit of pulp fiction and Gothic fiction for a while.

After reading, editing, and writing so much Lovecraftian fiction, what’s your advice for writers jumping into the genre?

Know your Lovecraft. There’s a lot out there and you want to know the original sources but also some of the newer stuff that’s been done. But knowing doesn’t meaning imitating. Trying to slavishly replicate Lovecraft’s style is not going to get you very far.

What’s next for you?

My second novel, Certain Dark Things, sold recently and will be out in 2016. It’s about a garbage collector in Mexico City who ends up involved with a narco vampire and they find themselves trying to outrun rival narcos, cops, and almost everybody.

Thanks, Silvia! Readers, you can grab She Walks in Shadows here, in a variety of formats, including a beautiful trade paperback! You should also grab Silvia’s debut novel, Signal to Noise. The badgers give it two paws up.

A.C. Wise first hit Shimmer’s pages in issue #14, with her story “Trashman.” We’ve been lucky to have her four more times, including one of her Glitter Squadron stories, “How Bunny Came to Be.”

She hails from the land of poutine (Montreal) and currently resides in the land of cheesesteaks (Philadelphia), and today we’re helping her welcome THE ULTRA FABULOUS GLITTER SQUADRON SAVES THE WORLD AGAIN. This collection debuts tomorrow, and if you didn’t pre-order like we did, you can grab your copy from Lethe Press or Amazon!

A.C. was awesome enough to sit down and chat with us about this collection. Be sure to stick around, because at the end, you’ll find a Glitter Squadron Drink Generator and an opportunity to win some glittery swag!

What was the process for putting this glittery collection together and does it collect every Glitter Squadron story to date?

As far as collections go, The Ultra Fabulous Glitter Squadron Saves the World Again is a bit of an oddity. It all started with “Doctor Blood and the Ultra Fabulous Glitter Squadron,” the first story I wrote featuring the wonderful ladies of the Glitter Squadron, which was published at Ideomancer. I thought it was a fun one-and-done kind of thing, but then along came “How Bunny Came to Be,” a prequel story, which appeared in a wonderful publication you may have heard of called Shimmer. I briefly thought I might be done after those two stories, but as it turned out, the Glitter Squadron had strong opinions to the contrary. Aside from “Doctor Blood,” and “How Bunny Came to Be,” all the stories in the collection are original. The ladies (and M) had plenty more to say, and about the same time I started writing the rest of their stories, Steve Berman at Lethe Press approached me about doing a collection. The rest is history!

What can readers expect to find in this collection? 

Sequins! Drink recipes! High heels! Ass-kicking! Friendship! Exclamation points! Okay, that last one might just apply to my answer to this question. What readers can expect is a series of inter-connected short stories about a group of queer, trans, agender, and gender fluid characters saving the world from various supernatural threats, all while looking terribly fabulous in glitter, lame, velvet, feathers, and so on. It’s a bit campy, a bit serious, a bit about gender, and hopefully a lot of fun. It is also about different ways of being strong, and about how glitter is the best thing ever and severely unappreciated when it comes to world-saving materials.

“Dr. Blood and the Ultra Fabulous Glitter Squadron” (Ideomancer, 2013) appears to be the first story in this universe; what sparked the initial idea for you?

The original story was sparked by a call for submissions for an anthology themed around B movies. I happened to see this call for submissions just over 24 hours before the deadline. Oops. My Unlikely Story co-editor and I dared each other to see what sort of story we could write within such a short time frame. And thus, the Ultra Fabulous Glitter Squadron was born.

We had the good fortune to publish “How Bunny Came to Be” (Shimmer #17); it is a story that speaks to being true to oneself, whatever that self may be. This feels, in some ways, to be the heart of the Glitter Squadron, but what other themes are in play?

Friendship, in particular, female friendship, to me is the heart of the Glitter Squadron. Too often we get dude-centric narratives where one, lone exceptional woman is allowed into the club. Said woman then has to stand for all women everywhere, because anyone outside the cis-het-white-able-bodied-male is not part of what is ‘normal’ and therefore has to answer for their entire gender/race/sexuality etc. They are not individuals. The one lone exceptional female ends up being criticized no matter what she does. If she’s too girly, she’s a stereotype. If she’s too tough, she’s just a guy with boobs. If she’s too needy, then she’s saying all women are needy. If she falls in love, well of course she does because all any woman cares about is getting married and having babies. Often times, said lone exceptional woman never even gets to speak to another woman the entire time she’s on the page or screen.

However, with more than one women, or even a whole group of women, you start to see that women are indeed human beings. They want different things. Some of may be interested in babies and relationships. Some may be worried about a bad hair day. Some may have PTSD from their time in the military. Some may know exactly who they are and carry themselves with confidence; others are insecure, and still trying to figure it out. But none of them are carrying the entire weight of their gender alone. Together, they’re stronger than they are apart. They support each other, and complement each other’s strengths and weaknesses. They don’t always get along, but ultimately they are family, and they love each other.

Aside from CeCe and M, the members of the Glitter Squadron are also very ‘girly’, which was another important theme I wanted to explore. They wear glittery dresses and high heels and makeup. They are fabulous and badass and they aren’t asked to shed the traditional trappings of femininity in order to be battle ready. Femininity isn’t demonized. In the end, the Glitter Squadron members are far from perfect. They have their insecurities and flaws, but together, when they aren’t asked to carry they entire weight of femininity on their shoulders alone they are fucking strong.

Do you have a favorite story in the collection?

Nope. I love them all for different reasons. The collection is anchored by two stories featuring the team as a whole, but most of the stories in-between take the time to explore some aspect of one of the individual characters. They were all fun to write in that they allowed me to get to know the Glitter Squadron as individuals and as a team along the way.

Picture it: Netflix wants to make a Glitter Squadron series. Any casting dreams?

Eeep. This is a hard question. Part of me thinks that largely unknown actors might be the way to go. I do have certain specific casting ‘rules’ I would insist on, presuming this is a magical world where the lowly author gets a say. Sapphire, Starlight, and Bunny would be played by trans actresses. No one would be white-washed, thin-washed, or straight-washed. Looking up various trans actresses make me think that appearance-wise, some combination of Estelle Asmodelle, Candis Cayne, Nina Arsenault, and the late Coccinelle would be perfect for Bunny. However, even though I saw Bunny as Caucasian while writing her, there’s no reason why she has to be, and I think Laverne Cox would be a brilliant Bunny. For Sapphire, someone like Ines Rau, but a bit older would be excellent. CeCe was actually directly inspired by photos of Marlene Dietrich in a tuxedo, and Renate Muller as the original star of Victor Victoria. In a modern show, I think Scarlett Johansson could totally rock that 1930s suave-butch look. Someone like Aidy Bryant would be good for Ruby. As for Penny, Starlight, and Esmeralada…I’m still thinking about those ones. And M? Well, maybe whoever wore the gimp suit in the first season of American Horror story?

Which would you rather have a squadron of: poutine or corgis?

Corgis. I love poutine, but I don’t think it would make a very good squadron. Corgis, on the other hand, can be pretty fierce (I say as my own corgi is passed out snoring beside me). People tend to think of them as small dogs, but secretly, they’re big dogs with no legs. And if you get between them and food…well you can forget about it.

Is there a soundtrack/playlist for the Glitter Squadron?

Funny you should ask! I was just thinking about what song each member of the squadron might listen to in order to get pumped up before a fight. So I went ahead and put one together, and you can find it here.

What does the future hold for the Glitter Squadron?

The Glitter Squadron fans out there (if there are any) may be pleased to know that there are at least three more stories rattling around in my head. I haven’t done anything with them yet, other than make tons of notes, so I’m not entirely sure whether they’re short story length things, longer pieces, or if any of them will ever see the light of day. I am quite enamored of my beautiful, glittering ladies however, and thrilled to keep chronicling their stories as long as they keep telling them to me.

Now that you’ve had a taste of what the Glitter Squadron is all about, don’t you want a customized cocktail recipe of your very own? All you have to do is use the Glitter Squadron name generator to create your drag name/cocktail name, and drop your results in the comments.

A winner will be chosen at random, and the Glitter Squadron’s bartender supreme, Sapphire, will create a drink recipe for you based on the name. But wait, there’s more! You’ll receive the recipe on a Glitter Squadron coaster along with a glittery flask so you can take the party with you wherever you go. Contest closes on Monday, October 26!