1. When you start a new project, what comes first for you: character, incident, or atmosphere?
Incident makes the story. It usually begins with me thinking up a really gross image, then trying to build a story around that. The atmosphere and characters come out of the research stage (probably my favorite part of the whole process) when details from real life start to flesh out what I’m trying to say. I have a lot of research for cool worlds and fun characters to populate them, but without something for them to do there’s no story.
2. How do you know when an idea has enough weight to become a book instead of a short story?
I treat the books I write like a collection of short stories. Each chapter should have enough happening that it feels self-contained, then acquire more significance in sequence. It also helps to tell myself that I just have to write a short story before psyching myself up to add to it.
3. What tricks do you use to keep tension rising without burning out the reader too early?
A killer prologue. It’s a lesson I learned from horror movies. A great cold open before the realstory starts will sustain a reader through the first act. Peppering in a few laughs helps too.
4. How do you decide what to reveal versus what to withhold in a horror narrative?
I leave out a bunch of stuff because I don’t think it’s important and then my editor tells me to add them back in. Jokes aside, I think about it in terms of production. A monster or a big effect is expensive, so you want to build to a full reveal. There are smaller elements like sound effects and glimpses of just parts of the big scary thing that are often scarier than the full reveal.
5. What advice would you give regarding showing not telling?
If you’re making a big point, just fucking say it. There’s a difference between telling a story artfully and giving your reader a message. Do both in balance.
6. Do you outline or discover the story as you go and how has that changed over time?
Outline all the way, then revise the outline again and again, even as I’m drafting. All my booksstarted as spreadsheets because that’s the best way for me to organize a story.
7. How do you build a character’s fear response and what informs the way they unravel?
Largely that depends on the emotional age I’ve decided that character is at. A character who makes all the right choices or is too aware of their feelings isn’t interesting to me. It doesn’t allow for a ton of growth. What are the things that they can’t control? Given the circumstances they’re in right now, what would be the normal response? Okay, now how do I make them not do that and still be someone worth rooting for?
8. Do your characters ever surprise you and force the story to change?
Of course. Designing a character to me feels like an exercise in empathy building. I want the reader to want to come along with these characters. How do I want each character to make the reader feel? Is this the person they should be seeing themselves in? Is this the person I see myself in? Using a cast to represent different facets of yourself can lead to some unexpected insights.
You have to teach your reader how to feel about the characters and sometimes the intended lesson isn’t what people get out of it. Early feedback from beta readers led to a lot of interesting directions for the characters of Humboldt Cut. In horror– and with Humboldt Cut especially as a story about how society villainizes people for systemic reasons they can’t control– I try to be sensitive to not punishing characters by the narrative. It’s fun to have creative kills, but you can’t kill everybody. I wouldn’t want to.
9. What is one character trait you think every compelling horror protagonist must have?
Every horror protagonist should be a little bit of a freak. Just something small that makes them more unhinged and less predictable. Closer to a reality TV contestant than an on-the-page character. People are unpredictable. Have you ever met someone whose actions make 100% sense? If I did, I’d probably think they’re a serial killer.
10. How do you balance subtle psychological horror with more visceral moments?
With very little subtlety, at first, then a lot of revisions.
11. What is your writing process like on a week when motivation is gone?
A lot of sleeping and a lot of drawing. During weeks like that, I catch up on admin work for the book by making sure my spreadsheet is filled out correctly. It helps me think about the story from new angles. If I can diversify the work I’m putting into thinking about the project then it creates a little runway to get back to drafting or revising or whatever the task is that I don’t want to do.
12. How do you protect your creativity when the business side gets loud?
I don’t see the two as separate. It’s all different facets of the same thing. Work is work. Procrastinating one kind of work with a different kind is still working. If I’m working on book stuff, that counts as some kind of progress. Editing a video is flexing a different muscle, but it’s still creative labour towards the goal of putting my ideas out there.
13. What fears do you have as a writer and how do you navigate them?
It might be because I’m mixed-race or white-passing or socialized as a woman, but I’m terrified of being misunderstood. To be read as something you aren’t, or not granted the empathy that others get automatically.
14. What is the most important boundary you’ve set around your creative time?
I’ve never regretted taking a nap.
15. What is something you wish you understood earlier about publishing?
How long it takes. My creative background started in standup comedy where you say your little joke then find out immediately what people think. Then you try it a little differently the next set to make it work better. With publishing, you’ve got years until you find out whether a joke you wrote is funny to people so it better be evergreen.
16. How do you deal with imposter syndrome?
I don’t think imposter syndrome is real. It’s like the hysteria of the 21st century: a fake name for the very real effects of living in a society built on capitalism and white supremacy. I’ve never heard of cis white guys feeling imposter syndrome. It’s always someone minoritized feeling it when they enter whiteness and capitalism. You get into these spaces and seeing the way people act in them erodes your sense of order. It’s disorienting at best to realize that no one knows what they’re doing and people aren’t book characters and we’re all forced to pretend a little bit to play our part in all of it. At worst it’s a form of cosmic horror, suffering from this feeling of unreality. There’s a huge gap between their idea of themselves and their idea of the world, and that disconnect gets called imposter syndrome.
17. What life advice stuck with you the most?
Take your meds every day at the same time.
18. What are a few of your recent favorite reads?
For fiction, I just re-read Harriet Tubman: Live in Concert by Bob the Drag Queen and it continues to blow me away with its genius concept and execution. For non-fiction I loved The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald by John U. Bacon.
19. What are a few of your recent favorite films or shows?
I fell deep into The Pitt. I’m excited for Stokercon in Pittsburgh this year so I can eat at the diner that guy choked at.
20. What was the first story that truly scared you?
Penpal by Dathan Auerbach.
21. When did you realize horror was the place your voice felt most alive?
It took a long time, but probably when Get Out came out in 2018. The jokes, the high concept horror, the social commentary of it showed me the exact wavelength I was trying to operate at. Then looking back, my script writing up until then had always had some goth/death elements. I’ve always been a death-obsessed weirdo, and in horror it’s easier to call yourself that than in comedy.
22. What is a horror trope you will never get tired of exploring?
What it means to be haunted. Shirley Jackson explored this a lot on a societal level wrt women and Mike Flanagan’s TV work does such a good job of showing all the different ways a person can be haunted–by grief, religion, regret. It’s a rich vein and there are so many systems in the world that it can extend to.
23. What’s a horror trope you would bury six feet deep?
The POC character dies first. It’s the result of lazy thinking and a deeply ignored empathy gap between the writer and the rest of the world.
24. What do you think readers misunderstand most about horror?
I don’t think horror fans misunderstand this, but it can be a barrier to new readers to the genre. Scariness is a poor measure of horror. When people ask me if they should read Humboldt Cut because they can’t handle scary stuff, I say yes because yeah it’s scary but it’s mostly characterization and story. You can’t sustain horror on every page through 300+ pages and still tell a cohesive story, so horror literature is mostly other stuff. Humboldt Cut has elements of comedy, botany, family drama… all of that is in service of making the horror pop. The monsters are scary but they’re only on a few pages because if the barkskins were on every page, you wouldn’t be scared of them anymore.
25. What scares you in real life more than anything you’ve written?
If it scares me, it’s going in the book.
26. What story do you hope people will remember you for telling?
I hope that they say I was always trying to do something in a new way.
27. What song do you want played at your funeral?
“No One Is Lost” by Stars.
28. What would be the worst way to die?
With more left to say.
29. What way would you like to go?
I’ve spent too much time being actively suicidal to not have a good answer to this question, but at the current moment I mostly just wanna stay alive. I have books to write.
30. When your time comes, what book would you want buried with you?
Dawn by Octavia Butler. It would be funny in the event that I get dug up by alien gene harvesters.
31. If there is a door after death, what do you think is on the other side of yours?
Reincarnation as a plant.
