An Interview with Virginia Watts.

 Virginia Watts' story, 'Emily', will open Dark Lane Anthology Vol.11.  Her stories and poetry can be found in Illuminations, The Florida Review, CRAFT, Sunspot Literary Journal, and others.  Her poetry chapbook, The Werewolves of Elk Creek, is published by Moonstone Press.

Q: What are your working methods?  Do you sit down every day to write?  Do you have a designated place to work?

A: I have no specific schedule or location for writing and I don’t think about writing in terms of process or method. I am a bit superstitious that way. I try not to think about writing at all if you want the whole truth. Writing is something that happens to me more than anything else. What I do is when an idea arrives for a story or a poem, I sit down somewhere quiet and start in with immense gratitude and hope. I love every minute of the process from rough draft to critique editing to letting go of something knowing I have done the best I could for the idea that came to me. I have taken plenty of writing classes, workshops, and getaways but there is something about learning too much about the “craft” of writing that I battle against. It’s important for me to stay close to my gut and my heart as a writer.

 Q: Tell us about one of your favourite short stories and why you like it (not one of your own).

A: This answer will surely elicit some groans from memories of dreaded middle school summer reading assignments, but I have to chose Hemingway’s “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.” I read this story when I was young too and the thing is I have never forgotten it. I am sure it was required school reading but there’s a reason the greats are the greats. Hemingway is so direct and crystal clear in his characters and story that you can’t look away from the courage of it all even when you long to. In Francis Macomber we face our own human weakness and cowardice. What reader hasn’t wondered. Maybe I would have run away from the lion too! And Margot his wife so cruel and greedy and domineering. And of course, Wilson. The ultimate user. We may not be any of these characters overall, but we have all been these people at times and we have the capacity to be like them again. This story is upsetting and troubling and true. It is you and me and everyone whether we like it or not. If the characters in a story never leave you, then it was very simply a damn good story.

Q: Tell us about one of your favourite short stories (written by you).

A: It is difficult to choose a favourite, but I am proud of a short story entitled “The Bitterest Winter” which will appear in a collection of short stories of mine that will be published by The Devil’s Party Press in the spring of 2023. In this story, the narrator is a young woman with a new baby girl. She lives in a high-rise apartment in the city of Chicago. She comes from a rural background and living in a big city is akin to living on the surface of the moon. And all these strange balconies. Little spaces floating in the air all around her that begin to haunt her as she becomes more and more isolated, alone most of the time with the baby while her husband pursues a high-profile legal career and one of his attractive and smartly dressed assistants. In the final scene of the story the young mother is outside walking on her balcony with the baby in her arms getting closer and closer to the railing. My critique group all had different ideas about what happened next and that became the success of that story to me. The ending depends on the reader and just how much they are willing to imagine and feel.

Q: Where do your ideas come from?  Do you go looking for ideas – for example by brainstorming, or do you wait for inspiration?

My ideas come from all sorts of things and sometimes I am not sure where they came from. I never brainstorm or use any technique to drum up ideas to write about because that seems like it wouldn’t be a “real idea” to me. Ideas that inspire my writing have come from past experiences, news articles, tv shows, songs, things I see walking, things people say that I overhear, thoughts I have in silent rooms. The story I mention above was written after I visited my daughter in Chicago. She was attending the University of Chicago as a graduate student at the time and while there was no husband or baby, there was a balcony and a city all around us so big it felt like it might swallow us up.

 Q: Are you a full-time writer? If you have another job, what is it and would you like to become a full-time writer if you could?

A: I do consider myself a full-time writer of almost ten years and I feel very lucky to be able to say that. I am a lawyer by education. I have learned a lot in ten years mostly from the company of other writers who have read my work for me and given me theirs to read. You cannot be your best if you don’t have a critique group of some kind. At least, that is what I believe.

 Q: What is the most difficult part of your creative process?

A: The tensest part for me is the rough draft because I am always hoping, just hoping, that I can take an idea all the way to the end. I never have an outline or a destination. I never know where I am going so, I just hope I find my way somewhere that matters. The other challenge is endings. I don’t want someone to read one of my stories or poems and get to the end and be let down or frustrated. That’s your last chance as a writer so you have to try very hard to get the ending as right as it can be.

Q: If you could go back in time, what would you say to your younger self about becoming a writer?

A: I have been asked this before and the answer always makes me sad. I always loved to write. From the sixth grade. I wrote here and there throughout my life but not like I have recently where I have finally let myself become dedicated to this. So I would tell her to not wait for the future. Write whenever you can now no matter what else you have going on in your life.

Thank you for inviting me to be interviewed here. I am honoured and thrilled to have my story appear with those of the other authors in Dark Lane Anthology Volume 11!

               

An interview with Rebecca Lloyd

We were lucky enough to have Rebecca Lloyd open Volume Two with her story 'Hagbound'.  Rebecca's books include two collections of short stories published by Tartarus Press, one of which 'Mercy' was nominated for a World Fantasy Award.  Her latest work is the novella The Bellboy, published by Zagava.

Q: What are your working methods?  Do you sit down every day to write?  Do you have a designated place to work?

A: I certainly have a designated place to write and it is my small writing room with a big window overlooking my garden, just a strip of a room, too small for a bedroom and fairly roughly painted. And there was a time when I would’ve been writing every day when I had to work for a living in the outside world and so by necessity, I wrote in the early mornings every day. These days, I tend to write novellas and novels that need extensive research, and so I make a list of research topics around the story I am hoping to conjure up, and address them systematically before I begin to write. There comes a point in time when I feel that I’ve read enough and that writing should start, then I launch off.

Q: Tell us about one of your favourite short stories and why you like it (not one of your own).

A: I have always liked ‘Puddle’ by Arthur Porges because it is written in a very unpretentious manner and yet the story idea is so terrific that after reading it, I felt slightly jealous that I hadn’t thought of it myself because it was very much up my street.

Q: Tell us about one of your favourite short stories (done by you).

A: ‘Shuck’ is a story I hold dear, and it’s probably one of my most chilling stories. But as the writer, I’m not sure that having a favourite story really fits in with how it is to be a writer. Some stories are moving for different reasons, The River has a lot of resonance, for example, and some stories are more accomplished than others, but the trickier stories if pulled off feel good to acknowledge. So, you can see that I can’t honestly answer the question, and really after so very many years of writing, and not going back to read them, I’m a bit stuck with remembering tone, mood and detail anyway.

Q: Where do your ideas come from?  Do you go looking for ideas – for example by brainstorming, or do you wait for inspiration?

A: I guess if a writer did know where her ideas were coming from, she could catch them in a pan and keep them on the go. I think a writer might well know what he or she is moved by, but even then, not be able to know why a particular incident was captivating enough to produce an idea for a story. In general, I think that I become interested in some human oddity I stumble across and, I am anyway very interested in superstition, and so there is a wealth of ideas arounds that… so I’m not sure that that is either brainstorming or inspiration.

Q: Are you a full-time writer? If you have another job, what is it and would you like to become a full-time writer if you could?

A: Not sure what ‘full-time writer’ actually means, does it mean someone who writes from 9 to 5, or does it mean someone who lives of the proceeds of her writing? I now longer work in the outside world for money, but even when I did, I wrote for three or four hours a day, and so would consider that full-time anyway. I’m probably being deliberately obtuse, but that’s what writers are like sometimes. I would say though, that it’s mentally healthier not to just write all day, it’s much better to have a working job and write as well.

Q: What is the most difficult part of your creative process?

A: That depends upon the story that I’m tackling. As each story is different, the part of the creative process that is difficult might also be different.

Q: If you could go back in time, what would you say to your younger self about becoming a writer?

A: Just go on exactly as you are, be generous in your support for other writers, and be true to what really excites you to write irrespective of how the industry attempts to mould you into a writing shape that better suits them and brings them profit.

An interview with Charles Wilkinson

Weird fiction fans need no introduction to Charles Wilkinson.  His fiction first appeared in Dark Lane Anthology Vol. 2.  His work has appeared in every volume since.  Egaeus Press have released two limited edition collections of Charles Wilkinson's short fiction in hardback: A Twist in the Eye, and the recently released Splendid in Ash.

What are your working methods?  Do you sit down every day to write?  Do you have a designated place to write?

Many thanks for asking me to do this interview, Tim. I’m very pleased to have appeared regularly in your excellent Dark Lane Anthology series.

A poet, who has a background in science, advised me to write in the same place and at the same time every day. He claimed that by doing this one could train the mind to be receptive to the writing mode when required. I certainly think it’s important to establish when one writes best. Although I’d prefer to work in the mornings, I’ve now come to accept that I get much more done in the afternoons. I start at more or less the same time and always in the same place, an office on an industrial estate. There’s no internet connection, which ensures that I’m less easily distracted. Having a place to write that isn’t my home increases the sense of ‘going into work,’ I find. There’s less temptation to take too many tea breaks.

Tell us about one of your favourite short stories and why you like it (not one of your own).

Although I’m tempted to go for one of Robert Aickman’s stories, such as ‘The Hospice’, I suspect that many of your readers will already be very familiar with his work, and so I’ve decided to pick ‘Bestiary’ by Julio Cortazar, which is included in Blow-up and Other Stories. The title story was the inspiration for Antonioni’s film Blowup. Cortazar was a literary writer of an experimental bent; however, his short stories often blur the boundaries between genre and literary fiction. I’ve come across his work in horror anthologies. ‘Bestiary’ is the story of a young girl who stays with the same family every summer. They have a large house and there is another child. It’s seen from the girl’s point of view, which enables the author to suggest that there are tensions between the adults that she is too young to comprehend. The children busy themselves by collecting ants, bugs and insects; the adults perform everyday domestic tasks. The story might almost be a realist text if it were not for the fact that a tiger is roaming around, not only in the grounds but also in the house. The characters are apparently able to avoid this animal because a family servant gives regular bulletins as to its whereabouts. If the tiger is in the library, for example, they will avoid that room until the servant tells them the creature has left. No attempt is made to explain the presence of the tiger. Many readers have wondered what Cortazar meant by it. When I first came across the story, I assumed the tiger was some sort of embodiment of the anger and frustrations of the adults; however, Cortazar said that he did not intend the tiger to symbolize anything specific. Some of his ideas came from dreams, which I believe was also true of Aickman. The effect is to allow space for multiple readings, which means that while my interpretation of the tiger’s significance is not wrong, there are other theories that may also be valid; moreover, since it’s a riddle with no solution we’re not being asked come up with any explanation. For some readers the frisson of the weird and mysterious will be enough.

Tell us about one of your favourite short stories (written by you).

 As my work is quite various, it’s very hard to pick one.  My first collection had two stories that could be categorised as genre pieces and just one that was offbeat in a way that might be considered ‘weird’. ‘The Pain Tree’, which is the long title story,

was partly based on my childhood visits to a dentist who drilled my teeth without deigning to use anaesthetics. Dark but not a genre piece, it might be the best thing I’ve written – I’m not sure. ‘Boxing the Breakable’, which is in Splendid in Ash, my most recent anthology from Egaeus Press, is one of my current favourites. It’s about an elderly couple who have put their house on the market. When the wife, who is in better physical and mental health than the husband, shows them round, they behave

in such a bizarre fashion that she phones the estate agent to find out more about them,

only to discover that no appointment was ever made. The husband then disappears. Various people visit the house and there seems to be a link between them, but it’s not entirely clear what that could be. As with Cortazar, a great deal is left to the reader to fill in. On one level, it’s the quotidian world of prospective buyers, estate agents, doctors and the police, but it should gradually become plain to the reader that something else is going on that defies easy analysis. I was hoping to create a sense of the everyday permeated by the strange.

Where do your ideas come from?  Do you go looking for ideas – for example by brainstorming, or do you wait for inspiration?

.

There’s no straightforward answer to this question. Occasionally there are happy accidents: a remark overheard on a bus or a train; an article in a newspaper; a science programme on the television – that kind of thing. Sometimes one consciously mines one’s past. The germ of ‘Boxing the Breakable’ was a visit that a relative and I paid to a property in the Forest of Dean when one of us was house-hunting. The initial visit had been made by appointment and went well, but when we returned unannounced an hour later, explaining that there were a few details we wished to check, the owner was furious and refused to have anything more to do with us. I remembered this incident well over twenty years later and used it as the basis for what happened next.

Quite often an arresting first line will occur to me and that will be enough to begin the process. Whilst my weird fiction is far from autobiographical (thank heavens!), there have been events, such as the one that initiated ‘Boxing the Breakable,’ that I have used to provide a starting point. Places where I’ve lived are important too.  If I’m stuck for inspiration I make a conscious effort to invoke the dark muse; often a long walk helps!  Researching a topic that interests me can also prove effective. Now that I’m trying to be more professional I have to be prepared to ‘go to the mountain.’

Are you a full-time author? If you have another job, what is it and would you like to become a fulltime author if you could?

In order to write full time, I resigned from the day job six years before I would have been obliged to step down; however, I now have not inconsiderable domestic responsibilities, which mean that I write in the afternoon five days a week. I was sorry that until eight years ago I was unable to become even a semi-professional writer, although I did take a year out to do a Masters in Creative Writing when I was in my early thirties, as well as another year, just before I turned forty, to take a second course, which included a writing module.  One of my tutors, the Irish poet Eavan Boland, told me that she had seen too many people wreck their lives in the belief that they would become great writers, or at least make a decent living from the trade. She was right. I think it’s fine to take a year or so out to write, but be very careful to have a realistic Plan B in case you don’t make a breakthrough. If you have a family, you have to be even more cautious.

What is the most difficult part of your writing process?

It’s changed over the years. I used to suffer from writers’ block, but now I’m acutely aware that I no longer have time to indulge my uncertainties. Strangely enough, I think it’s the final stage of the process that causes me most angst. I’m a poor proof-reader of my own work. A particular problem is a tendency to omit small words, such as articles and prepositions. I’m someone who is grateful to have good editors (thanks, Tim!).

If you could go back in time, what would you say to your younger self about becoming an author?

First of all, get on with it! I spent too much time staring out of the window. I was also inclined to agonise over every line instead of writing a decent number of words per day. I lost literary agents because I simply wasn’t producing enough work for them to send round to publishers. Secondly, don’t neglect the small presses and little

magazines. It’s not the end of the world if Faber and Faber say no. If it’s not happening for you, you’re probably better off without an agent. Then you can do

your own research and send manuscripts to places that agents aren’t interested in as the financial rewards involved are insufficient. Starting small is better than making no start at all.

An interview with L.S. Johnson

 L.S. Johnson's fiction first appeared in Dark Lane Anthology Volume Two.  She later opened Volume Five with her story 'Ada Awake'.  Her short fiction collection, Vacui Magia, was nominated for a World Fantasy Award in 2017.

Q: What are your working methods?  Do you sit down every day to write?  Do you have a designated place to write?

A: I am currently blessed with a piecemeal freelance career. It’s stressful in regards to financial stability, but it allows me to control my schedule and thus carve out writing time every day. Before this, I tried to schedule my day jobs for either very early or very late starts, but that was hit or miss. Weekends I get up before my spouse and write. I was a night owl as a child, but circumstances have conspired to make me a morning person.

I took over the spare bedroom in our house for my writing space, but I have difficulty sitting at a desk for long stretches. Thus I usually draft on a cheap netbook and move around the house, writing on the floor, standing up, etc. Once the piece I’m working on feels solid, I’ll move it onto the computer in my writing space and put it in Scrivener or Word for revision.

I’m hoping one of these days I’ll be earning enough from writing to invest in an adjustable desk. Life goals!

Q: Tell us about one of your favourite short stories and why you like it (not one of your own).

A: Well, I can whittle it down to two, and I’ll mostly talk about one of them.

The two stories are “1986” by Yu Hua and “Rare Bird” by Andrea Barrett. Together, I think they form a kind of bracketing of my aesthetic.

I come back to “1986” often, because it’s so painfully precise and so mannered in its pacing and yet it is so, so brutal. It took me many years to let go of the idea that Proper Writers only write literary fiction, but “1986” was pivotal in that process. I think of the story as horror, though I first found it via a comparative lit class; more to the point, I think “1986” says something about war and trauma that can only be said through horror. My father was a painter, but in his early twenties he was drafted and sent to Vietnam, just before the Tet Offensive. When he returned he didn’t talk about the war for decades, but it … leaked out, in a sense? It showed in his temper and his art, and when I read “1986” I felt a kind of resonance for something I hadn’t been able to describe before: a sense of disjunction between my sheltered, loving childhood and this unspoken, brutal history. I haven’t found that resonance anywhere else, certainly not in the many literary novels or essay collections I’ve read about the war.

“Rare Bird” is at the opposite end of my aesthetic spectrum, a lovely piece of historical fiction. It shares the precision and mannered pacing, but it’s a quiet story—a domestic story, really—about repression and intellect and women. I think it says a great deal in the space around the story, if that makes sense. I struggle a lot with clarity vs. opacity – when to reveal, when to be explicit, when to hold back, elide? and when I’m really struggling I re-read Barrett to see it done well.

Q: Tell us about one of your favourite short stories (written by you).

A: I can’t choose! I love all my stories, both the great and the terrible. Whether they fail or succeed, they each have a tiny bit of life in them. How do you choose among them? Every one of them is a relationship. It’s like ranking friends.

Q: Where do your ideas come from?  Do you go looking for ideas – for example by brainstorming, or do you wait for inspiration?

A: A story usually starts with an image or two that’s stuck in my head. I can’t write a story until I’m immersed in it, like being inside a movie; fiction is very cinematic for me. So I’ll see things, or I’ll imagine something based on what I’m reading, and that will spark, oh, not even a scene so much as a moment—but it’s a moment I can enter, I can be the character in that moment. From there I can start imagining the emotional core of a story.

An example: I have a novelette that I’m working on whose initial seed was a video I saw a few years ago, about spider eggs hatching beneath a person’s skin. That video lingered in all sorts of gross and delightful ways in my head; I wrote “spider thing?” in a journal and tried to write a story with that as an element but got nowhere. Years later, I was describing the pine forest near where I went to college and I suddenly remembered that video, and at once I was in the moment: I was standing in the forest, the cool damp of it, and I was looking down at my bare forearms and watching the skin move and feeling those bodies wriggling inside. Then I was able to start building the story.

Sometimes, too, those initial scenes don’t make it to the final draft. Sometimes they’re just scaffolding. I write a lot of scaffolding.

Q: Are you a full-time author? If you have another job, what is it and would you like to become a full-time author if you could?

A: I mostly write book indexes. I’ve indexed everything from history to critical theory to automotive repair. I also proofread books and copy, write copy for retailers, provide story critiques, and read exams to dyslexic and blind students. It’s a hodgepodge income stream, but I burned out very badly at my job in publishing, so I’m trying to avoid a return to full-time office work.

I’ve had a taste of writing full-time now in the lull between freelance projects, and I like it, but it’s much harder than it looks. It takes a great deal of discipline to stay consistently productive.

Q: What is the most difficult part of your writing process?

A: First drafts. I hate how far they are from the thing in my head, and I have to be careful that I don’t psych myself out of the story completely. It’s easy to reread a garbage scene, see only an endless parade of revisions to be done, and abandon the whole damn thing, who wants to do that much work? I just keep reminding myself of that glorious moment, usually second or third draft, when it actually starts to polish up a little. Then all the enthusiasm kicks in.

Q: If you could go back in time, what would you say to your younger self about becoming an author?

A: That all that stuff you’re writing with the mysterious filenames, so no one would twig what they’re about? The sword and sorcery, the fairy tale adventures, the fanfiction? Trust your heart and don’t stop. You just haven’t found your tribe yet.

An interview with Vikki Yeates

Vikki Yeates' artwork first appeared in the original Dark Lane Magazine. Her work has since graced all six volumes of the Dark Lane Anthologies. You can find out more about her work on her website.

Q: What are your working methods? Do you sit down every day to work? Do you have a designated place to work?

A: I usually start work after I’ve walked the dogs and had a coffee, so usually at about 10am. I work at home, on my dining room table, which is a rough wood slab, covered in ink and paint splatters. This table has a personality of its own and is ingrained with character.

Q: Tell us about one of your favourite artworks and why you like it (not one of your own).

It’s difficult to bring it down to one piece, but I really like the woodcut of ‘Potsdamer Platz’ by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, 1914. The figures are so stylized, angular and dramatic; he invents his own proportions and doesn’t care if they look realistic – it’s the feelings underneath that are important. He also did a painting of this, that I like as well, but I love the direct effect of the black and white.

A: Tell us about one of your favourite artwork (done by you).

Q: One of my favourite pieces is ‘Hagbound’, which is in Dark Lane Anthology Vol 2. I loved creating the angular figure, twisting her body around to make her menacing even in her nakedness. I think it’s obvious to see that I’ve been influenced by the Japanese version of ‘The Ring’, which absolutely terrified and transfixed me; I think it was the first time I’d seen the jerky movements and strange special effects. This has embedded itself in my own creative centre, so that whenever I think of eerie figures they all seem to have to be emaciated, contorted and to have long black hair! The ‘Hagbound’ picture has lots of other symbols, which probably only make sense to me, but I decided that didn’t matter.

Q: Where do your ideas come from? Do you go looking for ideas – for example by brainstorming, or do you wait for inspiration?

A: I don’t always have the luxury of waiting for inspiration, but I keep a sketchbook full of ideas and starting points, so if I need to come up with something in a hurry I can nearly always find something there.

I get my inspiration from reading, watching films and listening to music.

When I get a story to illustrate, I usually read through first, underlining sections that appeal to me and that I know will work visually. On the second read through I make doodles in the margin, trying to avoid thinking too deeply. I then redraw the doodles in my sketchbook and either work one up into a workable idea, or merge a few together, to get a more overall illustration.

Q: Are you a full-time artist? If you have another job, what is it and would you like to become a full-time artist if you could?

A: I am a full time artist, but most of my paid work comes from my animal paintings.

Q: What is the most difficult part of your creative process?

A: Probably getting a good idea in the first place – once that’s there the rest just follows.

Q: If you could go back in time, what would you say to your younger self about becoming an artist?

A: That if I wanted to be rich, forget it!

But also to be true to myself and not to try to change my artwork to fit in with somebody else, or just to be more popular; the work always suffers if you do that.

An interview with Robert Pope

Robert Pope’s fiction first appeared in Dark Lane Anthology Volume Three.  Since then he’s made regular appearances in subsequent volumes.

Q: What are your working methods?  Do you sit down every day to write?  Do you have a designated place to write?

A: I sit down everyday and give attention to writing, but I don’t write every day unless I have a story in the works. Then I sit down a couple of times each day to do as much as I can. As it has been too cold to work in my attic this winter, I write in a large leather chair in the living room, with the laptop on my lap—early in the morning. I often come down to Nervous Dog coffee shop when I find it tempting to play with the dog or daydream. At the coffee shop I sit in a stiff-backed chair, so I will not get too comfortable. People talking or working around me gives me the sense I’m getting somewhere.

Q: Tell us about one of your favourite short stories and why you like it (not one of your own).

A: At the time I read “The Nose” by Nikolai Gogol, I might have been twenty, but the experience of wonder and delight at the purposeful wackiness of the story gave me a bit of a thrill. Since then, there have been many highlights, and often the stories share this quality of purposeful wackiness as well as intensity in forward motion. The sense of wonder found in strange situations and comedy in tragic moments satisfies the mourner and the fool in me.

Q: Tell us about one of your favourite short stories (written by you).

A: In recent years, my favourite stories appeared in Dark Lane, “The Detective’s Son” and “The Rose Is Red the Grass Is Green.” Both had qualities I want to balance: a developed, dense sense of both the realistic and imaginative levels. “The Detective’s Son” was an apotheosis of what I most desired to achieve at the time, but “The Rose Is Red…” had a more complex development. I wrote the sections from varying viewpoints, as they occurred to me. In rewriting, I chose the dominant point-of-view, Farrell Flynn, a lawyer running for political office, and each section fell in place naturally. I ended up with a file of pieces that didn’t make it but have not looked back at them with remorse. Writing it did exhaust me, I will admit. Perhaps because I had to put in more time and effort, I have to like it best, for the same reason that troublesome children are so often most loved by their parents.

Q: Where do your ideas come from?  Do you go looking for ideas – for example by brainstorming, or do you wait for inspiration?

A: I do what every reasonable writer says you should not: wait for inspiration. Once I finish a story, I have a couple of days of ecstasy that slowly evolve into desperation. But I always trust another story will present itself to my imagination, and I have to be ready. I have to recognize it as a story worth developing, and it has to take root firmly for me to stick with it. Of course, everything you do, hear, read, seek, dream comes into the formation of the idea, but all bets are off once you wade into it. I might actually have thoughts such as, wouldn’t it be nice to write something that did such-and-such, but conscious desires of this nature must be blended in with an idea that comes with sufficient force to demand attention. Eventually, your unconscious mind will come to the idea your conscious mind suggested at the point at which the unconscious mind believes he or she came up with it on its own. Never contradict the unconscious mind, for she or he is the source of all good things. I suppose I am a bit of a Jungian, but only because my unconscious thinks he or she invented it.

Q: Are you a full-time author? If you have another job, what is it and would you like to become a full-time author if you could?

A: I write full time now and would like to be a full-time author if I could. Yes. Teaching has supported my vice throughout the years. I just got a letter (meaning a long email) from a former student and present friend who asked me why I continue to write when I do not have to do so any longer. My first response is best represented by three large question marks appearing over my head. Evidently, when she took my fiction writing class, she thought I was kidding. I write stories. This is what I do.

Q: What is the most difficult part of your writing process?

A: The most difficult part of the writing process is a triumvirate: waiting, writing, and obstacles. In the space between writing one story and starting another, I often question myself most severely.  In the writing, I usually take Advil at least once a day because my back or neck hurts. In the living of any life at all, there are situations that demand attention if you hope to be a decent, law-abiding citizen. If you are neither decent nor law-abiding, you don’t have time for writing stories.

Q: If you could go back in time, what would you say to your younger self about becoming an author?

A: If I could go back in time, and if I could find myself again, I would nod to my younger self in passing, and I would smile and point at him. That would give him enough to think about for years.