Peter’s story “The Clockwork Goat and the Smokestack Magi” appears in The Clockwork Jungle Book (Issue #11).  His website is at www.petermball.com.

Did you ever want to write “just like” someone else?  Who?  Or was there any book that made you say “I can do better than this!”?

When I was thirteen I was determined to write just like RA Salvatore – I still have the horrible pastiche of The Crystal Shard I handed in as an English assignment that year floating around in my files. I was and am a huge Dungeons and Dragons geek and it rocked my world to read the first wave of novels written specifically for D&D after years of trying to jury-rig the rules to handle the worlds of Conan and Lord of the Rings.

Years later, The Crystal Shard was also the book that made me think “I can do better” in a fit of hubris. I re-read it when I was twenty-two and it remained a fun read, but books change as you get older and start figuring out how writing works. It wasn’t something I wanted to imitate anymore, but paying attention to what I still liked and what I found jarring taught me a few things about how I wanted stories to work.

Do you have favorite characters?  Any characters, yours or others, are applicable.

Hazel McNamara from Neil Gaiman’s Sandman and Death comics – there’s all these little changes to her life that go in her life while she’s a secondary character here and there that really allows her to bloom into an complex and interesting character by the time she takes centre-stage in the Time of Your Life miniseries. It takes a lot of work to be the most likable character in a comic containing Gaiman’s version of Death, but Hazel manages in the end.

Have you ever been disillusioned by a character or a book?

Constantly, although it happens far more in movies than it does in fiction.

How do you explain what writing is like?  Is it something that you think about?  Do you ever find yourself debating it with strangers?

Writing is like any other job. It’s easy to describe and summarize based on the principle activity of putting words on paper, with minutia and job-elements that are difficult to convey unless you’ve got the time to establish a proper frame of reference. I don’t think it’s a trait that’s unique to writing as a job either – I have friends who work in banks or computer programming jobs whose day-to-day activities remain mysterious to me once they move beyond my basic awareness that they work in the insurance department or write computer code.

If you could choose any five literary people — real or imagined, living or not, friends or otherwise — for a tea party… who would they be?  A night on the town, karaoke, whatever suits.

Even with the whole of literary history open to me, I’m going to go with a bunch of young writers who are just starting to get their stuff out there: Ben Francisco, Chris Green, Dan Braum, JJ Irwin, and Jason Fischer. I’ve been trading e-mail and story critiques with all of them since we did Clarion South together a few years back, but with everyone spread out across Australia and America it’s hard to catch up in person and virtually impossible to get all of them in the same room at the same time. As cool as it’d be to meet writers like Dorothy Parker and Oscar Wilde or characters like Hamlet, I’d happily trade in the experience for the opportunity to catch up with some of the smart, intelligent friends I don’t get to see anywhere near often enough.

How did writing a theme story work out?   Is it more complicated than not having to adhere to a theme — or less?

I find theme stories are either really easy to write or really hard to get started. This time around I got lucky – both the clockwork goat and the smokestack magi showed up pretty early in the brainstorming process and the combinations were just odd enough to get me writing.

What was the absolute worst piece of advice someone gave you about writing?

“It’s okay to send your first draft – editors will fix things for you.” It sounded wrong when I first heard it and I learned better after my first submission.

Is there something you do that no one ever asks you about?  This can be anything — something unusual you eat, playing poker as a day job, a hobby, whatever you like.

I’ve been working on a PhD thesis on genre and the gothic for the last few years, but I suspect the reason no-one asks me about that is the wild-eyed look of panic that crosses my face anytime they start asking.

Particular favorites for books, movies, series, comics, blogs, etc.?

One of each: Kim Newman’s Diogenes Club collections; Before Sunrise; How I Met Your Mother; Keith Giffen’s run on the Justice League titles back in the 90s; I read far to many to have a real favorite, but the most visited blog on my feed is Angela Slatter’s The Bones Remember Everything (www.angelaslatter.com) – a source of consistently smart advice about writing and links to interesting discussions.

Caleb’s story “MockMouse” appears in The Clockwork Jungle Book (Issue #11).  His website is at http://astrobolism.livejournal.com, and he can be emailed at rotifer@gmail.com.

Q: Did you ever want to write “just like” someone else?

A: In style, I don’t think so, but there are writers whose technical ability I aspire to match:  T. C. Boyle, Jeffrey Ford, Kelly Link.  And there are bodies of work I would love to equal, like Eric Kraft’s Peter Leroy stories and Steve Aylett’s Accomplice novels.

Q: Do you have favorite characters?

A: Sure, a few current favorites are Ruth Puttermesser:  “She played chess against herself, and was always victor over the color she had decided to identify with,” and Timofey Pnin:  “His life was a constant war with insensate objects that fell apart, or attacked him, or refused to function, or viciously got themselves lost as soon as they entered the sphere of his existence.”

Q: Have you ever been disillusioned by a character or a book?

A: A book yes, a character no, because maybe part of disillusionment with a book is being reminded that the characters are just words being manipulated by an author I no longer admire/trust/believe in, and then they dissolve.

Q: How do you explain what writing is like?  Is it something that you think about?  Do you ever find yourself debating it with strangers?

A: Sometimes writing is a lot like sitting motionless at a desk or walking around the block listening to earphones.  Sometimes it’s just like typing, sometimes more like collating, pruning a tree, or spackling.  In general I think house-building similes are useful.  Sometimes medical.  The artistic part of writing is harder for me to think about, I guess like trying to wrap my head around a 100,000-word metaphor.  I don’t usually discuss it with strangers, though I did once have a stranger laugh at me when I told him the amount of money that’s usually to be made by the sale of short fiction these days.  He wrote non-fiction freelance.

Q: If you could choose any five literary people — real or imagined, living or not, friends or otherwise — for a tea party… who would they be?  A night on the town, karaoke, whatever suits.

A: Thomas Pynchon would be the guest of honor, but then the other guests would ideally be blind in order to preserve his anonymity.  Say, Homer and Borges.  Though maybe Pynchon would send a surrogate, which would keep me from having to invite Milton and the later James Joyce, and in their place I could ask Edith Sitwell.

Q: How did writing a theme story work out?  Is it more complicated than not having to adhere to a theme — or less?

A: It was a bit chilling to write a story so specifically tailored that it had no chance of publication outside a particular theme anthology, and in fact would probably make no sense read out of that context.  But in this case, fables usually being short and a snowstorm that happened to keep me in Oklahoma for an extra day inspired me to write it anyway.

Q: What was the absolute worst piece of advice someone gave you about writing?

A: I dislike the advice “Show, don’t tell.” for being too simplistic.  Maybe if people phrased it “Be aware of the difference between showing and telling, and be sure you’re doing whichever is best right then,” which I guess isn’t quite as pithy… and by the way, isn’t all prose technically telling?  But if a prose description of a scene or action counts as showing, the great thing about prose (unlike a movie, unless it stoops to employing voiceover) is that it can mix showing and telling, scene and summary, in all kinds of interesting proportions.

Q: Have you ever wanted to let your character[s] run your interview?

A: I don’t think I’ve ever written a character I would trust to speak for me.

Q: 
Is there something you do that no one ever asks you about?  This can be anything — something unusual you eat, playing poker as a day job, a hobby, whatever you like.

A: I play the saxophone poorly, I paint poorly, I play chess with mediocrity, I program the beginnings of computer games, though not so often these days.

Peter M. Ball is a writer and perpetual student from Brisbane, Australia. He attended Clarion South in 2007 and his work has been published in Fantasy and the Dreaming Again anthology. He can be found online at www.petermball.com.

Peter’s Shimmer stories:

• “The Clockwork Goat and the Smokestack Magi,” in The Clockwork Jungle Book (Issue #11)
• “The Mike and Carly Story, Without the Gossip,” in Issue #12

Caleb Wilson’s fiction has appeared in places like Diagram, Weird Tales, PodCastle, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror 2007. He and his wife live in Illinois. His alter-ego works in a library.

Caleb’s Shimmer stories:

• “MockMouse,” The Clockwork Jungle Book (Issue #11)

James’ story “Message In A Bottle” appears in The Clockwork Jungle Book (Issue #11).  You can read James Maxey’s self-described “uninformed rants about politics, religion, and circus freaks” at Jamesmaxey.blogspot.com – but if you want news and information about his writing, you’ll have to go to Dragonprophet.blogspot.com.  Or you could simply email him at  Nobodynovelwriter@yahoo.com.

Q: Did you ever want to write “just like” someone else?  Who?  Or was there any book that made you say “I can do better than this!”?

A: Definitely Harlan Ellison was my model when I was younger. I shifted to wanting to be Hunter S. Thompson later on.  But, really, for the last decade or so I’ve focused on learning to write like James Maxey.  I could only go so far trying to imitate other writers.  I’m haunted by my own peculiar demons, and chase after my own odd dreams. No one else’s voice is ever going to be able to express these things.

Q: Do you have favorite characters?  Any characters, yours or others, are applicable.

A: Brainiac 5 from the Legion of Superheroes. I like him because his only superpower was that he was just really smart.  Of course, the problem with liking a comic book character from either DC or Marvel is that the personalities and even the histories of the characters morph and change with every new writer. I stopped reading most mainstream comics a few years ago because I got so frustrated with seeing characters I loved warped into people I barely recognized.

From my own work, my favorite character is usually whoever I’m writing at the moment.  In my most recent novel, Dragonseed, I think I most enjoyed writing the character of Shay.  He’s an escaped slave who’s well read and full of big ideas about liberty and honor and heroism, but is really just an average guy when it comes to being able to act on these ideas.  He loses most fights he gets into, he makes a lot of mistakes and questionable choices, but he keeps on standing up for what he believes.  He’s willing to fight the good fight, even if he doesn’t have a lot of hope of winning.

Q: Do your characters talk to you?  Do you ever argue with characters you hadn’t planned?

A: All my best characters are chatty, even the mute ones.  I have a character named Anza in Dragonforge and Dragonseed who can’t speak due to a tumor on her vocal chords, but whenever I would write her, she would tell me what it was that she wanted to do.  She’s an excellent example of a character who took control of her own destiny.  She started the book as a 12 year old, bookish boy, the son of Burke the Machinist, one of the major players in the books.  But, as I was writing, I felt like I had too many male characters and decided that it would be easy to switch this relatively minor character to female for a little balance.  As I fleshed out Burke’s back story, I soon realized that Anza would need to be older, closer to 19, to fit into Burke’s timeline.  Then, as I was writing a scene between Burke and Anza, Burke revealed a chilling secret to me:  When Anza was five, Burke captured a baby earth-dragon and had her kill it.  My books feature dragons as the oppressive rulers of humanity, and Burke is a rebel who hates dragons.  Anza is his only child, and, while he might have wanted a son, he’s decided to turn his daughter into a dragon-killing machine.  After I decided that Anza had been trained since she could walk to be a fighter, I wrote a battle scene where she kills someone in complete silence.  It was then that the character revealed to me that she never talked; she’d been mute since birth.  I had to go back and rewrite all the scenes where she spoke, which was a pain, but completely worth the effort.  With a lot of my best characters, I don’t so much design them as discover them.

Q: How did writing a theme story work out?   Is it more complicated than not having to adhere to a theme — or less?

A: I actually enjoy writing to a theme or a prompt.  I have a nearly infinite pool of story ideas, but a finite pool of time; I sometimes get paralyzed because I can’t choose which one to write about.  My imagination is like a grand buffet, and I drool over every dish I look at, but I’m afraid to put anything on my plate because then there won’t be room for something else.  When I’m asked to write a story to a theme, I can shed my paralysis and just focus on the challenge at hand.

Q: What piece of writerly advice do you wish someone had given you?

A: Quantity is more important than quality in learning to write.  Some people will agonize over a single story, or even a single sentence, wanting it to be perfect before they can move on.  But the surest path to one day writing a perfect sentence isn’t to spend a year sweating over producing a handful of words.  You need to write tens and thousands of words, and if they aren’t any good, write more.  I figured out once that I’d written about a half million words of fiction before I finally broke into print. It took me ten years to write them.  I think I would have got into print in half that time if I’d been writing 100,000 words a year on average instead of 50,000.  The most valuable part of a writer’s anatomy is his butt.  You’ve got to just put it in a chair and keep it there while you crank out words if you ever want to get good at what you’re doing.

Q: Is there something you do that no one ever asks you about?  This can be anything — something unusual you eat, playing poker as a day job, a hobby, whatever you like.

A: You know, I’ve given this question a lot of thought, and I’d say the most unusual thing I do is write.  For instance, at Dragoncon this year, there were 40,000 people wandering around in costumes, standing in line to see celebrities like Shatner and Nimoy, chatting merrily with friends—and on Sunday at the con, I found an empty table at the Hyatt bar, pulled out my laptop, and worked on my latest book, oblivious to the swirl of people around me.  I write because I have imaginary people talking in my head, and I spend long hours of my life tuning out the real world in order to hear them. This is almost certainly evidence of some deep-seated psychological problems, but the voices in my head tell me not to trust psychiatrists, so what can I do?

Here’s an addendum to my interview, discussing the origins of my story:

My specific inspiration for this story spins out of a minor plot element of the novel Dragonseed, the last book in my fantasy trilogy that began with Bitterwood.  In the course of the trilogy, I slowly unveil the underlying truth that my fantasy universe was, in fact, a science fiction universe.  The dragons were the product of genetic engineering; the magic was nanotechnology.  (I don’t regard this as spoiler information, by the way.  A lot of prominent reviews of the books—including one by Orson Scott Card—have mentioned the science underpinning the series.  And, it’s not like Planet of the Apes, where everything builds to one big reveal; the clues are there all along for readers to put together.)

Anyway, I have a race of wingless, bipedal, warm-blooded reptile-men called earth-dragons.  In Dragonseed, we learn that, rather than being a product of genetic engineering, the earth-dragons are highly evolved dinosaurs with a 65 million year head start on their technology that has allowed them to come to the Bitterwood universe from an alternate reality where the comet that wiped out the dinosaurs never hit the planet.  This was a fairly minor plot thread in the book, but I was writing it very close to the idea that I heard about the Clockwork Menagerie issue of Shimmer.  I decided to explore the issue more:  What if dinosaurs had evolved into a high tech society, capable of visiting the moon, before they were wiped out by the comet?  How would we ever know?  60 million years would completely wipe out evidence of human civilization.  Ice ages would grind most northern cities to dust.  California really would fall into the ocean.  The rise and fall of the ocean would wash away all evidence of our existence from the coast.  The constant build up of soil would bury our interstates.  If a race of squirrel men rose up 60 million years from now to a level of technology similar to our own, would they find any record of us?  Our foot print isn’t as big as we’d like to think it is.

However, if the squirrel men went to the moon, and managed to stumble onto the right few square yards out of the millions of square miles available to them, they’d find our foot prints, our moon rover, the US flag, dozens of satellites scattered over the surface, and even a few golf balls.

With this in mind, I found myself imagining a group of modern humans (relatively modern, at least) stumbling upon the remains of a dinosaur moon base and not knowing what to make of it.  I decided to place the story in the civil war era to pay tribute to some of the roots of SF, the early stories that imagined men reaching the moon by way of bullet ships or other low-tech high-tech.  I also knew that, unlike today when we revere our astronauts, if scientists in the 19th century was going to seal up someone into a big bullet and shoot them at the moon, it wouldn’t be wealthy white men making the trip (as was usually the case in Victorian era SF).  The idea of involuntary explorers who would wind up just as forgotten as their discoveries resonated with me on some deep level.  We all want to be remembered when we’re gone, but time and fate will wipe out most of us from the world’s collective memories.  On the other hand, since the message in the  bottle has been discovered, there’s a glimmer of hope that what the men in the story have done will be revealed to the world.  They may yet have the triumph of being remembered as the first men to reach the moon.

One last note:  I went to Dragoncon this year and on their science track they had a panel discussing this very idea.  There was a scientist making the case that, if the dinosaurs had evolved to be tool users, it was unlikely we’d ever know it, and, if we found evidence—a stone hammer in a dinosaurs claw, for instance—it’s highly unlikely any scientist would ever acknowledge the evidence.  I was really tempted to jump up and tell the room that I’d already used this idea in a short story and a novel.  And, it just goes to prove that no matter how original a writer might think an idea is, someone else out there is working on the very same idea.

James “Liver Eatin’” Maxey hails from the wilderness of Appalachia and is greatly feared throughout the Union as notorious horse thief, cannibal, and literary critic. Sometimes in the delirium that follows gorging on human blood, Maxey is filled with prophetic visions of horrors even greater than himself. He babbles these dreams as he tosses and turns in feverish sleep in the dark of his cavernous lair. His trained bear, Ernesto, faithfully scribes his words and trades the resulting manuscripts in the town of Big Lick for jugs of rotgut whiskey. Several short stories and novels have seen the light of day as a result, including the recently released Dragonseed.

You can read James Maxey’s self-described “uninformed rants about politics, religion, and circus freaks” at Jamesmaxey.blogspot.com – but if you want news and information about his writing, you’ll have to go to Dragonprophet.blogspot.com. Or you could simply email him at Nobodynovelwriter@yahoo.com.

James Maxey’s Shimmer stories:

• “Message in a Bottle,” in The Clockwork Jungle Book (Issue #11)

(Rajan’s first interview can be found here.)

Where can you be found on the web?
Website: www.rajankhanna.com (and my wine and beer website is www.fermentedadventures.com)

If you could talk to any author from the past, who would it be?  Why?  Who would you NOT want to talk to?

Roger Zelazny is a writing hero of mine and so he’s an easy choice. His books like the Amber series and Lord of Light are still favorites. There are, of course, others – Shakespeare, Chaucer, many more – but I’ll go with Zelazny right now.
And would you use a character to speak to that author, or yourself?

Myself. I’m selfish that way.

If you got to borrow a character [or several], who would you choose?

There are so many great characters out there and it’s often fun to sometimes play with them. I’ve written stories that use characters from Dracula or from Sherlock Holmes mysteries or the Oz books and that’s been incredibly fun. I don’t know that I would feel comfortable tackling some of my favorites, though – like Moorcock’s vast stable of excellent characters or Corwin of Amber. If writing about any of them at all, I prefer to take a character that’s on the periphery, or not nearly so defined and try to do my take on that character instead.

Do your characters talk to you?  Do you see the stories as images?  Do you ever argue with characters you hadn’t planned?

The characters don’t really talk to me, though I often hear them talking and write down what I hear. I also see scenes from stories, but not all the time. It could be a character, a setting or even action – I try to capture as much of that internal moment as I can. And I don’t argue with characters too much, but sometimes they do resist what I want them to do. Sometimes they change their very natures in the middle of the writing process.

Have you ever wished for a particular character — or idea — to walk into your story?  Has that happened?

I don’t know that I’ve ever wished for a particular character or a specific idea to come into a story, but there are many times where I’m waiting for something. Where I know there’s an element missing, something that needs to take the story to another level, but I don’t know what it is and I have to wait for my subconscious to work it out. When I’m lucky, I eventually do – usually while I’m brushing my teeth or waiting for the subway to arrive.
Do you ever get to a certain point, reading a story, and feel the click! as you have got to the point of no return/can’t stop now?  Does writing ever feel that way?  If you had to liken writing to anything, what would it be?

All the time. I often read novels at night before bed and I’ve certainly had many occasions where I tell myself, “just one more chapter” again and again until suddenly it’s hours later. For short stories, I know a story has a certain something when I start it and barrel right through to the end. Writing does sometimes feel that way. There are times you hit this rhythm, when ideas are just flowering out of you and it’s like a straight, open road in front of you and it becomes easy to just floor it and take off.

As for comparing writing to other things, it can be like a lot of things. It’s work to be sure, but there are times when it’s like eating, or planting and growing a garden, or climbing a steep mountain, or herding recalcitrant goats. But it’s also like flying over the Grand Canyon, and looking up at a sky full of stars, and swimming in an ocean of strange and beautiful creatures. And more besides.

What piece of writerly advice do you wish someone had given you?

I read a lot of writerly advice when I was first starting out. And most of the important ones were there – the big rules, the fact that you can break them if you make it good, the reminder to focus on the story and not on what you do with it – but it took a long time for some of them to really sink in. So it’s not that I feel that I missed out on some advice, but I wish I had internalized the advice I received sooner.

What kind of advice do you wish characters listened to?  Or offered?

I try to listen to my characters rather than lecture to them. And I try not to argue with them, if possible. I guess I wish that they were a little more clear up front about who they are and what they want, but since that’s difficult for anyone to know, I can’t blame them.

Is there something you do that no one ever asks you about?  This can be anything — something unusual you eat, playing poker as a day job, a hobby, whatever you like.

I have a blog dedicated to wine and beer observations that is currently flying under the radar. And I also am a musician and a songwriter, though few people hear me play.

Particular favorites for books, movies, series, comics, blogs, etc.?

My favorites tend to be constantly changing, though there is some consistency.  For books, the aforementioned Amber Chronicles from Zelazny and Dune by Herbert. For movies, Apocalypse Now (and recent favorite, Up). In television, Deadwood, Six Feet Under and Lost. My all time favorite comic book is Grimjack.

Barbara’s story “A Red One Cannot See” appears in The Clockwork Jungle Book (Issue #11).  Her website is at www.babarnett.com.

Did you ever want to write “just like” someone else?  Who?  Or was there any book that made you say “I can do better than this!”?

I don’t think I’ve ever wanted to write just like any one particular author.  I’m more for the a la carte approach: “Yes, waiter, for this story I’d like a little Connie Willis paired with the Ray Bradbury, medium rare, with some Ursula Le Guin on the side.”

There have been a few books that made me say, “I can do better than this!”  But then I look at my own stuff and think, “Or maybe not.”

Do you have favorite characters?  Any characters, yours or others, are applicable.

I’m fond of so many characters, both other people’s and my own, that it’s tough to pick favorites.  If I had to choose, a character who really stood out for me in someone else’s work was a music critic named Mal in The Three Junes by Julia Glass.  I’m a sucker for snarky-yet-tragic musicians.  Out of my own characters, there’s one in the novel I’m working on whom I absolutely adore–which of course means I torture him horribly.  And now that I think about, he’s got the snark-and-music combo going for him too.

Have you ever been disillusioned by a character or a book?

Definitely.  Some things start out great, but by the time I reach the end, I’m shaking my head and muttering, “But it was so good at first.  What happened?”  And then there’s the fantasy series that I thought was fantastic when I first read it back in high school, but upon revisiting it years later, it joined the ranks of the “I can do better than this!” books.

How do you explain what writing is like?  Is it something that you think about?  Do you ever find yourself debating it with strangers?

I come from a music and theater background, so I often find myself explaining writing in those terms. When you’re learning a song, for example, you have to pick apart all sorts of little things:  pitch, rhythm, phrasing, dynamics, tempo, etc.  But when it comes time for performance, you can’t think about all those things on the same analytical level you did during practice; you mostly just have to open your mouth and hope it all clicks.  For me, writing tends to be the same, except in reverse.  The first draft is when I just write and hope that all of my previous practice clicks, and the revision stage is when things get picked apart.

If you could choose any five literary people — real or imagined, living or not, friends or otherwise — for a tea party… who would they be?  A night on the town, karaoke, whatever suits.

Shakespeare.  Stephen King.  Oscar Wilde.  Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, but as we see them in Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead rather than Hamlet.  Though if I could throw a sixth person into the mix (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are rather interchangeable, after all), Hamlet could come along too.

How did writing a theme story work out?   Is it more complicated than not having to adhere to a theme — or less?

A lot of my stories have grown out of exercises where you take a prompt and see what you can crank out in an hour, so writing to a theme wasn’t a big stretch.  Once I got the idea, it was just like writing any other story.  For me, the key is not to feel confined by the theme.  If the story wants to stray and become something else, I’m usually better off if I let it.  Luckily, this one stayed on theme enough for me to still submit it for this issue.

What was the absolute worst piece of advice someone gave you about writing?

Just about anything that includes the words “never” or “always,” one of the exceptions being “never follow a rule off a cliff.”

Have you ever wanted to let your character[s] run your interview?

Good god, no. They’d spend the whole interview harping about how mean I am to them.

Is there something you do that no one ever asks you about?  This can be anything — something unusual you eat, playing poker as a day job, a hobby, whatever you like.

I wouldn’t say no one ever asks me about it, but in writing circles, I don’t always get to talk a lot about the music and theater part of my life.  I was a vocal performance major in college.  I met my husband while doing a Gilbert & Sullivan operetta.  For my day job, I’ve worked in various administrative capacities for an orchestra, an opera company, a music conservatory, and now a theater company.  I got to work with polka musicians while interning for the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in college.  I’m also a big film score nerd, so one of my job highlights was getting to chat on the phone with John Waxman, who’s a film music historian and the son of composer Franz Waxman.

Particular favorites for books, movies, series, comics, blogs, etc.?

My favorite books are The Last Unicorn by Peter Beagle and Doomsday Book by Connie Willis.  Theater-wise, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead is a favorite, and I love just about anything Sondheim.  My favorite movie changes depending on my mood, but to summarize my tastes, let’s just say that Han shot first.  I watch far too much geek-tastic television, particularly of the Joss Whedon oeuvre.  I also love shows like Mythbusters and NOVA scienceNOW–the latter because I have a total geek crush on Neil deGrasse Tyson, the former because I love seeing things blown up in the name of science.

Barbara A. Barnett is a 2007 graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop, where she learned valuable things about writing and the evil ways of chickens. Since earning a dual degree in English and music, she has spent most of her professional life working for various arts organizations, from cataloging for a music library to grant writing for an opera company. In the real world, she lives with her husband in southern New Jersey. Online, you can find her and a list of her publications at www.babarnett.com.

Barbara’s Shimmer stories:

• “A Red One Cannot See,” The Clockwork Jungle Book (Issue #11)