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.

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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.

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 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.
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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!

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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.

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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.

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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…

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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!