Slatter has two collections out this year, Sourdough & Other Stories and The Girl with No Hands & Other Tales, both in fine hardbound editions.  Until her novels hit the shelves, I’ll think of her primarily as a short story writer and of her stories as proof that the short form is thriving.

Below is a brief interview with Slatter.  There is more over at this month’s Clarkesworld Magazine and at her website.

The short story isn’t dead, it’s just _________?

Angela Slatter: Fighting a vigorous rearguard action against big publishers who don’t see any money in selling short story collections unless they’re attached to big name authors. I do think it’s a form that’s on its way back up — I think people are time-poor and a particular section of the book-buying public will be looking for something complex, satisfying and relatively fast.
Has your understanding of the short form changed much since your first efforts?

Angela Slatter: Oh yes! I read over some of my old stuff now and cringe at the repetitions of words and sometimes the word choices. I think that’s just experience and constantly engaging with the craft of writing, and also reading a lot of other people’s work (either to crit or edit, or for leisure reading) because it shows you good techniques and also mistakes other people make and how to avoid them!

What is the value of speculative fiction?  At its best, what role does it play in the world?

Angela Slatter: I’d say its value is that it gives a chance to dream, to think of something other and to maybe imagine something new. At its best it gives people a chance to see something differently and open their minds to new experiences and ideas.

What can a writer who doesn’t usually read speculative fiction learn from reading within the genre?

Angela Slatter: Plotting! And the idea that something happening outside the main character’s head isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Also how to make characters engaging even if they’re not particularly likeable. And that awesome glorious, amazing writing doesn’t just come from literary writers  — Kelly Link can totally kick any so-called big L literary writer’s arse into the middle of next week.

If you could see around corners and into the future, what do you think the literary landscape will look like in ten years?

Angela Slatter: Fewer vampires? More zombies? I think ghost stories are set to make a comeback – not the paranormal romance ones necessarily, but I think we’ll be looking at more ghost stories. I think the whole eBook thingy and new kinds of “containers” for book-ish content will really come into its own and I think spec-fic will be the genre that takes the most advantage of it.

That first line may not be the first line in the final draft but it remains the access point into the world of the story.  It is the wedge, the lever.  It comes first, gets me in the door, but then runs away from me.  And I must chase after it, across the internal landscape.

Real world sounds – voices, traffic, sirens, birds, etc. – can yank me from the secondary world of my writing, can interrupt my pursuit.  Yet music helps me stay with the chase. 

I’m still trying to figure it all out.  How and why music helps with writing offers me no end of fascination so I am still asking around to see what other writers have to say on the subject. 

Below, novelists Jaleigh Johnson, Matt Mayo, Lettie Prell and Jane Yolen talk about silence, photography, and the seduction of music.  

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Jaleigh Johnson is the author of fantasy novels The Howling Delve, Mistshore, and the recently released Unbroken Chain.

Matthew P. Mayo writes fiction and non-fiction, including the Bootleggers, Lobstermen & Lumberjacks: Fifty of the Grittiest Moments in the History of Hardscrabble New England. According to Mayo, he “plays guitar and concertina poorly—but with great gusto!”

Lettie Prell is the author of Dragon Ring.  She served as the editor of Broadsheet, the newsletter of Broad Universe, which “promot[es] science fiction, fantasy, and horror written by women.”

Jane Yolen has written more than 300 books, most of which are for children.  She has been a folksinger and has written lyrics for Boiled in Lead, June Tabor, Cats Laughing, Lui Collins, The Folk Underground and others.

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In what ways do you or have you used music to enhance your writing and creativity?

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Matthew P. Mayo:  At a basic level, music and writing and any other creative act are all the same. It’s the methods of pursuit that differ. I find it interesting that while sometimes I can listen to someone else’s creative efforts while pursuing my own, most of the time I prefer silence when I write.

Total silence is impossible, so I settle for birds, passing cars, my own breathing (difficult to avoid). Even if I’m not listening to music, I’ll still hear music in my head. More often than not, it’s the Indiana Jones theme song. Don’t know why, but it could be worse.

Sometimes I can write while listening to certain types of instrumental music (surf or jazz or slack-key guitar), but don’t do so well with sung songs. This tells me that in order to build something worth inhabiting—in order to write something worth reading—I don’t want to hear anyone else’s voice but my own. Either that or I’m just cranky.

Lettie Prell:  I took up photography as a hobby at about the same time I began writing science fiction in earnest.  I loved photography as a way to go non-verbal.  I absorbed line, color, shape, and created from those elements.  There was not even a stream of self-talk in my head when I looked through a lens.  It was deliciously freeing.  Yet within that stillness, in my head, tone and atonal passages would play – the music of my own emotions.  This inner music was fueled by one of my favorite solitary activities back then.  At night I would put on music and turn out the lights, and do my own, unschooled and spontaneous version of Tai Chi. 

Jane Yolen:  I love music–folk, folk rock, Early Music, the Romantics, lots of jazz, R&B, 60s rock, cabaret, musical theater, some opera, very little pop, and no hip-hop at all. But when I am writing, I need absolute silence. Music is too seductive and suddenly I am writing to its beat instead of my own. And writing lyrics to it in my head as well.

Jaleigh Johnson:  I usually have to have some type of music playing while I write. The only time I ever like it silent is if I’m doing a tricky bit of editing, and the song lyrics are getting stuck in my head. But the right music, whether it’s a blood-pumping rock song or a soft ballad, can really get me in the mood to write an appropriate scene. The mood of whatever piece I’m listening to gets inside me, and those feelings come out on the page. The time when I most need this effect is after a long day, when I’m tired and on deadline and I simply have to finish this scene or panic sets in. That’s when the music takes me away from everything else and shoves me fully into the scene and the setting. It fires the imagination.

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And/or what has music — listening to it, seeing it live, playing it, writing it, whichever — taught you about writing fiction?

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Jaleigh Johnson:  Music taught me–and it reminds me again and again–that art, at its best, can evoke emotions that carry people away from their troubles and the stresses of their daily lives. Good music and good fiction can be a breath of fresh air, pure and vital.  When I write, I strive to give that experience to people.

Matthew P. Mayo:  Music has always been a large and welcome presence in my life, from listening to my mother’s record collection as a tot (Herb Alpert! Bobby Vinton!) to building my own record collection (Kiss! Ramones! ‘Mats! Husker Du!) to being in bands (Toxic Crotch, anyone?) to playing college radio-station DJ to playing acoustic instruments now. It’s always been with me, working to override the tinnitus (also always here), and has probably taught me to be adventurous, take risks, and pick a few wrong notes in order to find one that sounds good.

Lettie Prell:  When my writing achieved novel-length proportions, my photography waned.  The verbal arts won out in the end.  I never play music when I write, and if I did I would probably cease to hear it after a few minutes.  My capacity to focus to the point of being unaware of my surroundings is well-known at work among my colleagues.  Yet when I pause in the writing to dream a scene – not the dialogue because that is listening to my characters talk in my head – when I see the scene, it is as if through my photographer’s eye.  I go non-verbal in those moments, and my torso sways in the chair, because the music of my emotions is playing.

Jane Yolen:  Certainly music has taught me how important (and seductive) rhythm is. It has taught me something about voice: how each character’s tone, timbre, rhythm, speech patterns is a distinguishing characteristic. Someone may be an oboe, a basso, a tenor, or a fife. It has also stretched me. When I was younger, I only liked folk and classic. My husband opened me to opera and jazz. My son Adam made me appreciate folk rock. My friend Babbie showed me cabaret. And while I’d loved the great musicals of my childhood and adolescence and can still sing many of the songs (though only in the shower these days or alone in the car) it took Stephen Sondheim to reacquaint me with the form. And so I have learned over the years to love different styles and kinds of writing–and tried many of them myself.

I think any time one starts to understand structure of any kind, since it plays such an important role in storytelling that it is of great benefit. I don’t think it’s happenstance that I published my first novel not long after I started taking music lessons. I think my writing improved in a way I could not have predicted–or forced.

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Jeremy L. C. Jones is a freelance writer, editor, and part-time professor.  Jones is a frequent contributor to Clarkesworld Magazine.  He teaches at Wofford College and Montessori Academy in Spartanburg, SC.  He is also the director of Shared Worlds, a creative writing and world-building camp for teenagers that he and Jeff VanderMeer designed in 2006.

Marly Youmans is the author of Val/Orson (novella) and the forthcoming The Throne of Psyche (poems) and Glimmerglass (novel), among other books.  She wrote the following piece the day after dropping her daughter off at her first day of college.

–JLCJ

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Rebecca

by Marly Youmans

Once upon a time I was a little girl belonging to a family that suffered a great loss.  One consequence of this loss was that I used to say that someday I would have a daughter with beautiful curly blonde hair, and that I would name her Rebecca.

Eventually I grew up and married and became pregnant. I knew in my bones that the child inside me was a boy, and he was. Then I became pregnant again, and I was sure from the start that the child was, this time, my Rebecca.  And so she was.  As a baby, Rebecca was lovely and mostly bald, with a glistening down on her head. Slowly the golden curls came on, and she and her brother with the long blond hair (“I want big hair!”) were show-stoppers in the stroller set. Another brother came along some years later, and so Rebecca was—as she always seemed—right in the middle of things.

Like me, Rebecca liked stories. Aspects of her have appeared in my stories and poems and novels in various guises, and her requests led to two young adult fantasies set in the Southern backcountry, The Curse of the Raven Mocker and Ingledove. The first of these was written in an unusual manner. Since I had no time to write with a toddler in the house, I made a pact with Rebecca.  If she would amuse her busy little brother every afternoon, I would write. The draft of that book went scorchingly fast:  I had it in sixteen days.  An eager audience is the finest sort of inebriant!

When she was little, Rebecca liked to sit on my lap and narrate stories that I typed. In the fall of first grade, she won the Stone Academy “Written in Stone” prize three times. After that, they instituted a “Hall of Fame” and put her in it to keep her from winning any more prizes. As she grew, she tried out other pursuits–dance and theatre, piano and organ and voice, drawing and pastels and painting. She was still best at writing, but drawing followed close behind.

Yesterday we took Rebecca to Bard College, where she plans to fold her many interests into a film major. Letting go of a child who I knew would exist decades before she was born is bittersweet.  Just as I knew she would be, I knew this day would come—that her golden life would stream on, apart from us.  She walked away from the car, alone, toward the peaked white tents where she would meet other freshmen.  The late afternoon sun shot slanting through the trees as she grew smaller with distance.  Light ran through her hair and turned it into a burning halo.

8 August 2010

Both of these projects were intended to benefit younger writers in general and the students at Shared Worlds 2010 in particular, but each contains material that experienced writers could benefit from, too.

This week, my daughter Molly turned seven.  She is my inspiration and my co-conspirator in many artistic adventures.  Each day, she models the creative life with bouts of extreme pretend, lavishly colored paintings, and character-driven stories so complex that they require a compendium.

Molly also loves to give me advice – lots and lots of advice.  Her advice is often practical, such as “Daddy, stories should be interesting!”  And sometimes her wisdom is downright surreal.  For instance, yesterday I was editing at the kitchen table and Molly said, “You may want to paint that fork.” There were no forks on the table or in the article I was revising. Molly nodded her head sagely.  I’m still trying to figure out what she meant.

So, I’m asking that readers answer the following question:

What writing advice have you received from a child?  And how did you use the advice in your writing?

Use the comment section below.  Answer as briefly or extensively as you like.  Be as serious or as playful as you like.  And be sure to let us know a little something about you and the child giving you the advice, too.

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Jeremy L. C. Jones is a freelance writer, editor, and teacher.  Jones is a frequent contributor to Clarkesworld Magazine.  He teaches at Wofford College and Montessori Academy in Spartanburg, SC.  He is also the director of Shared Worlds, a creative writing and world-building camp for teenagers that he and Jeff VanderMeer designed in 2006.

Though I filter the world (and my emotional response to it) through my eyes, I can’t seem to go very long without listening to music, without using my ears.  Sight is my primary sense, but music is my constant companion.  If music isn’t playing outside, then I am imagining it inside my head, hearing it from within.

Music is a nearly synesthesic experience for me – streams of color and geometric patterns, whirling, twisting, illuminating my mind’s eye.  I watch songs unfold, see them spark and flash.  Instantly, even instrumental songs take on a narrative line and paint images in the space between my ears. 

Sounds occupy space in my brain, large swathes of (endless) geography mapped out by the notes and colorful lines of light.  As the songs move through time, I move through the internal landscape, adventuring, discovering, stumbling around.

In other words, I don’t just listen to and see music, I am also moved by it.  The big challenge for me in writing (and life) has been to open up, let loose.  I am drawn to music that wanders, that takes me to unexpected places, that opens up or lifts off or just goes off.  I look for the same effects from the stories I read and write – to be immersed, to be carried away, to be surprised.

On my continued journey to understand the relationship between music and writing I have contacted four more writers to see what they think on the subject.  Below we talk about writing in quiet, daydreaming, and being transported by what we are listening to.

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J. T. Dutton is the author of the YA novels, Freaked and Stranded.  She self-identifies as a Deadhead.

N.K Jemisin is the author of The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms and the forthcoming The Broken Kingdoms.

Scott Loring Sanders is the author of The Hanging Woods and Gray Baby.

Larry Sweazy is the author of the Western novels,  The Rattlesnake Season and The Scorpion Trail.

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In what ways do you or have you used music to enhance your writing and creativity?

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Scott Loring Sanders:   I’m one of those writers who has to have absolute quiet. I’ve tried listening to music but it never worked for me. If there were lyrics, forget it, I was useless. And even classical seemed to throw me off. So I went back to total isolation and total quiet. However, I do play guitar, and what I often find myself doing is heading to my guitar stand and picking up my acoustic after I’ve just finished an intense writing section. I’ll pick and strum without thinking about what I’m playing as I review the section in my mind, looking for plot holes or plot points, trying to work out the kinks. The guitar playing seems to act as a “cool down” period for me, where my brain is resting from creative thoughts, yet the arts are still as close as my fingertips, quite literally.

J. T. Dutton:  I listened to bands before (and after) the Grateful Dead that triggered daydreams, but the Dead became the soundtrack of my happiest, most intense summer days. The few shows I was lucky enough to see were mind blowing. I made friends with strangers. I danced. I sang. I didn’t get tired and best of all the hours were real, not imagined. They were something I lived, not hoped to live. I learned that music can be an experience you take with you when you travel to new places. Pop a Dead tape in now and I’m transported, every synapse kicks into memory-mode. I’ve lost most of my hearing since I went to my first show, but I haven’t lost the recollection of how the band moved me–the moment of that time.

I wrote my first novel, Freaked, about a fifteen year old boy who sneaks out of his boarding school to see the Grateful Dead at an imagined venue in Long Island during the early 1990s. The manuscript started with the voice of one friend or another who had told me about a show. I realized as I began developing Scotty Douglas’s way of speaking, that the lyrical qualities of the Dead influenced his choice of expression and ways of seeing the world. The music made him poetic. He bent language and reached into metaphor to describe himself and his activities.

Quite a few Grateful Dead songs are narrative. I don’t know if this has to do with the bands bluegrass roots or what. Most of the sets that I saw traverse some kind of intuitive emotional arc. An advisor on my committee in graduate school suggested I title each of my chapters after a specific song and think of the entire book as a bootleg tape. It was incredibly helpful advice. It gave me a really interesting framework for creating detail and a non-traditional way of building plot.

N. K. Jemisin:  I have a “writing mix”, which I routinely listen to when I really need to immerse in writing. It includes songs I’ve decided are good for certain moods — Drowning Pool’s “Bodies” for battle scenes, Jaenelle Monae’s “Tightrope” or “Many Moons” for frenetic tension, Algerian rai for city scenes, things like that.

Larry Sweazy:  I always write with music on. Lyrics don’t bother me, but I usually prefer to listen to instrumentals. I have always been drawn to “roots” music; bluegrass, folk, some jazz and blues. Since I usually write stories set in the past, I really think the music helps to transport me to another time period, but I never started listening to certain genres or artists with that intent. Sometimes, I wonder how music affects one of my characters, what their tastes are. In the case of my series character, Josiah Wolfe, music never plays a role, unless it’s in the background, or being played at a saloon or by someone else—he’s more interested in stay alive. But I have written characters that are musicians or have strong ties to the music world. Music is an essential element in my everyday life, and I have no doubt that it always contributes consciously, or unconsciously, to what, and how I write.

J. T. Dutton:  When I left Freaked behind and started working on a second novel, I really missed the addition of music. Given the choice, I would prefer to always write around some kind of sound. Music gives an abstract shape to feeling, creates one more avenue by which hard to communicate ideas or emotions can be described.

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And/or what has music — listening to it, seeing it live, playing it, writing it, whichever — taught you about writing fiction?

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J. T. Dutton:  I worked for two years as a waitress in a Portland, Maine at a place that featured live music every night. I saw Phish play many, many times. Soundgarten. Eek-a-Mouse — a hundred or so different bands in a short period of time. I loved them all. Those were good times. I wasn’t a writer then by a long shot, but I was storing up some kind of writerly energy for the future. I think studying writing is important, but experiencing life first is more important. Life and good music are very intertwined. Go where people are listening, and chances are you are going to stumble on adventure.

N. K. Jemisin:  I used to play violin for awhile, when I was a teenager. I practiced a lot and got okay at it, but never better than okay. I liked it, but never loved it. Yet I did love writing by that point — I was already writing novels then, though they were terrible, but I kept writing them and inflicting them on friends and family. Feeling that difference between liking something and loving it helped me understand the level of passion necessary to succeed in any artistic endeavor. So I quit the violin, and kept writing.

Larry Sweazy:  I didn’t grow up in a musical household. Nobody in my family played an instrument, and singing was a talent that no one excelled at. Sure, we listened to the radio, and had some records, but no very many. One of my regrets as an adult was that I didn’t have, or take, the opportunity as a child to experience music lessons of any kind—so about five years ago I started taking guitar lessons. I thought maybe, if I was lucky, there was some musical skill, or talent, buried in the genes I didn’t know about, or that I could wake up. I was wrong. After a couple of years, the lessons didn’t take. But the lessons were incredibly valuable to my understanding of structure, theory, and of music in general. I could have never picked out chord patterns before, or known when the bridge was coming or why, not consciously anyway. I began to enjoy music on a different level. That knowledge is still growing.

Scott Loring Sanders:   Like any good politician, I’m going to answer a different question entirely while pretending to answer yours. Only because it’s an interesting observation I’ve noticed over the years. I’ve been to a few artist’s colonies/fellowships, and for whatever reason, I’ve always been drawn to and befriended composers. It’s not a conscious decision but simply one that seems to happen. And inevitably, when we’ve talked about our work and the way we go about it, I’ve found that the creative process of writing a novel versus composing a score are amazingly similar. This has happened to me three different times with three different composers. Of course the process varies, but overall, things are generally very similar.

I remember one guy who said that often he’ll sit in his studio all day, literally for hours and hours, and not write a thing. He just sits and thinks. Although I don’t do it in the same way by sitting in a studio, I generally do some of my best thinking and get some of my best ideas while riding my bike, mowing the lawn, or mindlessly strumming the guitar. My body is doing one thing while my mind is in a completely different place.

Regardless, I’ve always found it interesting that the creative process seems to be similar no matter what genre an artist works in. Fiction writing, composing music, film, visual art, whatever, it boils down to the process of creating something new that never existed before, and I love that.

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Jeremy L. C. Jones is a freelance writer, editor, and part-time professor.  Jones is a frequent contributor to Clarkesworld Magazine.  He teaches at Wofford College and Montessori Academy in Spartanburg, SC.  He is also the director of Shared Worlds, a creative writing and world-building camp for teenagers that he and Jeff VanderMeer designed in 2006.

Public readings at Shared Worlds are unique.  The audience is stocked with dozens of insatiable readers and fanatical writers.  These are young people who sign up to spend two weeks of their summer world-building, reading, and writing.  They swarm a bookstore like, as the manager of the Hub City Bookshop described them, “piranhas in a feeding frenzy” and it is awe-inspiring to behold.

During the second week of Shared Worlds 2010, we had a double bill of Holly Black, the creator of the Spiderwick Chronicles and Carrie Ryan, the author of The Forest of Hands & Teeth and the forthcoming The Dark and Hollow Places.  By 6 PM, Black and Ryan had been around the camp most of the day, teaching and leading discussions.  For hours, the students had barraged Black with questions about magic systems, plot, and writing in general.  Black’s classes are very lively, and Ryan had helped her tame the gloriously wild beast of teenage enthusiasm.

Somehow, though, Ryan had managed to keep a very important secret from the students.  I don’t know if she did so intentionally or not, but the word finally go out that Carrie Ryan writes zombie novels.  Yes, zombie novels.  YA zombie novels.

I wasn’t prepared for how exciting this bit of information was going to be for the fifty or so people in attendance. 

After Black read from her recent novel White Cat and Ryan read from The Dead-Tossed Waves, we opened the floor to questions.  Dozens of hands shot up.  Most of the questions had to do with that subject so dear to Carrie Ryan and, apparently, to the majority of the people in the audience – zombies.

I was amazed at how excited everyone got.  I like zombie novels, but this was out of control.  The questions just kept coming.  It was as though someone had announced Now is the time to discuss the undead and the students did.  There was something about the public forum that seemed to encourage them to ask more and more questions about zombies. 

I wondered why.  Why is zombie talk so lively?  And so I did what I always do when I have a burning question, I asked the nearest game designer to explain the situation.

I found Will Hindmarch hanging back toward the display of new releases.  Will, who is the creative coordinator at Shared Worlds, spent a big chunk of years thinking, talking, and writing about that other popular monster, vampires, as part of his work on White Wolf’s Vampire: The Requiem role-playing game. 

Below, Will and I have recreated the conversation we had while Black and Ryan signed books after the Q & A.

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It’s amazing how excited they get about zombie.  I wonder why?

Will Hindmarch:  The thing about zombies is that they’re incredibly easy to talk about. They are great touchstones for discussing new worlds and new stories. On the one hand we all know some of the core traits of zombies—e.g., they’re undead, they want us bad—yet on the other hand, so many of the identifying features of zombies are up for grabs. Maybe they’re slow and shambling, maybe they’re wicked fast. Maybe they’re supernaturally given some semblance of life, maybe they’re ruined by science. Maybe they want our brains, maybe they want to make more zombies.

But if there are so many different kinds…

Will Hindmarch:  When we talk about zombies, we’re comparing imaginations and creative theories. We’re able to hold a wide variety of zombies in our head at once, all coexisting under that one title: Zombies. We’re able to accept and tolerate a lot of riffs on this one grim idea of the walking dead. The zombie canon has porous borders. New kinds of zombies get let in—to our stories, to our nightmares—all the time, even while the classic ghouls keep coming back.

Zombies have important defining features (the head is usually key to taking one out) but even those features can be imagined in new ways, erased or replaced, without necessarily removing the monster’s innate zombie-ness.

When they heard a vampire story read by Nathan Ballingrud a few nights ago, they didn’t ask so many questions about vampires.  I mean, they liked the story and asked Nathan plenty of questions about the story, but they didn’t ask all these questions about vampires.  I guess hard-core zombie fans are just…  different.

Will Hindmarch:  Audiences seem willing, or more than willing, to accept new takes on the classic monster, accepting variations bent to the purpose of a particular story or imaginary world. But even with all the variations allowed by the zombie fan, the audience hardly seems to segment or fracture. Zombie fans debate the merits, ferocity, and fearsomeness of their favorite kinds of zombies, but they continue to tolerate and count new models of zombies into the expanding identity of the monster.

The result is a truly public monster, a creature with no single master, ready to be adopted by any author with a good story to tell about the waking dead. It’s modern folklore, not owned by anyone, ready to be adapted again and again, and tough enough to withstand a few missteps and stay scary even after they’ve been made funny.

But still, once the zombie talk starts it doesn’t seem to end…

Will Hindmarch:  They’re easy and fun to talk about because they’ve broken the bounds of archetype and entered remix territory. Your zombies might not be the same as my zombies, but the appreciation of new terrifying remixes is part of the appeal.

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Jeremy L. C. Jones is a freelance writer, editor, and part-time professor.  Jones is a frequent contributor to Clarkesworld Magazine.  He is also the director of Shared Worlds, a creative writing and world-building camp for teenagers that he and Jeff VanderMeer designed in 2006.

In 2006, eleven years after starting out, Hines began publishing novels with DAW.  First came the Goblin series and then the Princess series.  In his six novels (and, I assume, the seventh which is on the way), Hines takes tried-and-true fantasy tropes and turns them upside down and inside out.  He does so with a combination of affection and biting wit.  He doesn’t mock the genre, no, he just doesn’t let it takes itself too seriously.

Hines and I spoke last summer for an interview in Clarkesworld Magazine called “Doing Crappy Things to Good Characters,” the title of which should tell you an awful lot about Hines and his writing. 

Below, we pick up our conversation in the wake of his most successful novel, Red Hood’s Revenge.

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Jeremy L. C. Jones is a freelance writer, editor, and part-time professor.  Jones is a frequent contributor to Clarkesworld Magazine.  He is also the director of Shared Worlds, a creative writing and world-building camp for teenagers that he and Jeff VanderMeer designed in 2006.

The living dead.  The restless dead.  The walking dead.  No matter what you call them, zombies make for great stories.  With that in mind, we asked 11 of the contributors to James Lowder’s anthology, The Best of All Flesh, to share their thoughts on the joys of writing zombie fiction.

This and our earlier post on zombies were inspired by Christopher Davis, a student at Shared Worlds 2010, and his love of zombies. 

“Zombies are so versatile for a writer,” Davis said.  “They can be fast, slow, any number of things.  You just have to have multiple zombies.  And then things get really interesting.”

Lowder selected the stories from his previous collections, The Book of All Flesh, The Book of More Flesh, and The Book of Final Flesh, with an eye toward variety and toward showcasing stories that hadn’t been re-printed elsewhere.

Overall, the stories in The Best of All Flesh emphasize, as Michael Jasper said, “the impact [zombies] have on the people in the story.”

Below, we talk about the seemingly infinite possibilities that writing zombies offer a writer.

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What is the appeal of zombies to you as a writer?

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Michael Laimo is the author of Atmosphere and Deep in the Darkness.  Laimo’s story “Last Resort” appears in The Best of All Flesh.

Michael Laimo:  There are so many levels on which a zombie can be used in fiction, that we as writers drool at the opportunity to creatively explore them.

Jesse Bullington is the author of The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart.  Bullington’s short story “Charlie’s Hole” appears in The Best of All Flesh.

Jesse Bullington:  First and foremost, zombies can be a lot of fun [to write] — as with all monsters, the original mythology has become distorted in all sorts of ways, and while an archetypal zombie idea has solidified (thanks, George [Romero]), there’re still endless permutations and interpretations to explore. The fun in writing about such an obvious symbol-monster is seeing just how you much you can subvert the expected definition.

Mark McLaughlin is the author of Raising Demons for Fun & Profit and Slime after Slime.  McLaughlin’s story “Scenes from a Foreign Horror Video, with Zombies and Tasteful Nudity” appears in The Best of All Flesh.

Mark McLaughlin:  As a writer, I find that zombies may be the most flexible of all monsters. Vampires and werewolves have fairly specific guidelines and reader expectations, but zombies have more leeway. I’ve written stories in which zombies have been created by germs, chemicals, evil spells, mold, matter teleportation devices, and more. Zombies can be smart or stupid, have no personalities or very complex personalities.  They offer a lot of creative options.

Rebecca Brock is a librarian and the author The Giving Season and Abominations.  Brock’s short story “Night Shift” appears in The Best of All Flesh.

Rebecca Brock:  As a writer, I love zombies because they really allow me to go for the gross-out (which, I confess, I love to do) as well as the emotional/mental breakdowns of my characters.

Ed Greenwood is the author Falconfar and the forthcoming Elminster Must Die.  Greenwood’s story “One Last, Little Revenge” appears in The Best of All Flesh.

Ed Greenwood:  If voiceless, as my zombies always are, they really let me “show” rather than “tell.”  Zombies let me explore what it is to be human by showing readers the reactions of different humans to zombies, and by forcing moral choices on those humans, using a zombie menace or zombie entreaty for aid or the like.

Jim C. Hines is the author of Goblin Quest and Red Hood’s Revenge.  Hines’ story “Brainburgers and Bile Shakes” appears in The Best of All Flesh.

Jim C. Hines:  In addition to all of the deep, metaphorical stuff, zombies mean I can torment my characters in new and creative ways.  In an early draft of a story I wrote for the upcoming Zombiesque anthology, I had a zombie cop literally rip off his own arm and beat the bad guy with it. 

Rebecca Brock :  The deterioration of society–scrounging for food, gathering in ragtag groups of survivors, fighting to survive every day–is also fascinating to me, and I love getting into the details of what it might be like in that kind of nightmare world. It’s the fatalistic pessimist in me, I guess. Zombies are the worst of humanity brought to life…or unlife, as it were.

Claude Lalumière is the author of Objects of Worship and the co-creator of Lost Myths.  Lalumière’s story “The Ethical Treatment of Meat” appears in The Best of All Flesh.

Claude Lalumière:  I came to zombies by accident. I had never given much particular thought to zombies at all. But then I workshopped a friend’s zombie story, and my initial misreading of the first paragraph suggested an entirely different story to me. Which I then went and wrote.

Lana Brown is an English teacher and novelist.  Her story “Sifting out the Hearts of Men” co-written with Warren Brown appears in The Best of All Flesh.

Lana Brown:  Most of the people we meet in a day have an element of the zombie in them.  How does a zombie act at a family reunion, for instance, or when bullied in high school?  There’s a rich lode of choices there for a writer. 

Warren Brown is a short story writer.  His story “Sifting out the Hearts of Men” co-written with Lana Brown appears in The Best of All Flesh.

Warren Brown:  As writers we can extract and amplify personality traits from everyday and not so everyday people and mutate them into characters that frighten and fascinate–even amuse and inform readers.

Michael Jasper is the author of A Gathering of Doorways.  Jasper’s story “Goddamn Redneck Surfer Zombies” appears in The Best of All Flesh.

Michael Jasper:  Coming up with a way to stand out from all the other zombie stories before (and around) me is the biggest challenge of writing about zombies.  I mean, really, it’s all been done before. But if you add one or two crazy elements to the mix, like super-fast zombies instead of limping shoe-draggers, or zombies with souls, or zombified pets – BAM! You’ve got something new to share with the world.

Rebecca Brock:  Other than evil aliens, zombies are just about the only things I have nightmares about. Writing about them allows me to confront those fears, as well as get a lot of violent tendencies out of my system. Some of my stories have been hardcore bloodfests, while some have been more character-driven. It all depends on what demons need to be exorcised at the moment.

Jesse Bullington:  As with any trope, [zombies let you do] whatever you can manage to pull off. In my upcoming novel The Enterprise of Death there are things that some people will consider zombies and some people will deny on principle. I’m using them differently than I can remember seeing before, and without giving too much away, I’m attempting to emphasize the tragic and the human elements more than the horrific where the undead are concerned. Mostly.
 

Michael Jasper:  Zombies let you talk about death in a different way, and show how people respond to danger and unexpected situations when the undead are unleashed on your town. You get to mix in a bunch of emotions, as well — fear, anger, grief, despair, hope. Hopefully all tied together in a fast-pace story of heroism and tragedy.

Mark McLaughlin:  Zombies allow me to have fun and be innovative. Because they offer a lot of creative leeway, I enjoy trying to think up new ways to bring the dead back to life. Life is energy, so how can one infuse new and terrible energy into a corpse? Dr. Frankenstein used lightning, but heck, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Nuclear power, parasites, black magic, alien technology – so many energy sources to consider!

Michael Jasper:  They also give you the opportunity to be really gory and gross, and not feel so bad about it. Because, hey, zombies are already dead.

Myke Cole is the author of Latent.  His story “Shouting down the Moon” appears in The Best of All Flesh.

Myke Cole:  When I’m writing my best, I feel that all I’m doing is putting my characters through a science experiment to see how they’ll react. At the very best moments of that, it’s like taking dictation. There are lots of different ways to kick off the science experiment, but zombies are a pretty great way to get the chain reaction going. I strive to do what Robert Kirkman (and all the best SF writers) do: keep the zombies in the background and the humans in the foreground. Because, people, after all, are always the most compelling element of any story.

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Christopher L. Dinkins is a freelance writer and editor living in Spartanburg, SC.  His non-fiction has appeared in and Kobold Quarterly.  His debut short story will be appearing in the cyberpunk anthology, Foreshadows.  He is an instructor at Shared Worlds, a creative writing and world-building camp for teenagers at Wofford College.

Jeremy L. C. Jones is a freelance writer, editor, and part-time professor.  Jones is a frequent contributor to Clarkesworld Magazine and Kobold Quarterly.  He is also the director of Shared Worlds.

Zombie Boy is a student at the Shared Worlds 2010 creative writing camp.  His parents know him as Christopher Davis.  But his love of all things zombie earned him the moniker, Zombie Boy, at Shared Worlds 2009.  The name has stuck and he is proud of it. 

Zombie Boy hails from coastal California.  He is an avid gamer who likes to kick back and shoot zombies in his spare time.  We asked him, “Why are zombies scary?”

“Because they never stop coming for you,” he said.  “And your life just gets harder and harder…”

In honor of Chris’ fondness for the undead, we contacted 11 of the contributors to James Lowder’s anthology, The Best of All Flesh, which gathers stories from Lowder’s out of print classics of zombie literature, The Book of All Flesh, The Book of More Flesh, and The Book of Final Flesh.

Below, in the first of multiple posts, the contributors talk about fear, humor, loss of control, and the break-down of civilization.  In other words, they talk about why they like to read zombie stories.

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What is the appeal of zombies to you as a reader?

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Rebecca Brock is a librarian and the author The Giving Season and Abominations.  Brock’s short story “Night Shift” appears in The Best of All Flesh edited by James Lowder.

Rebecca Brock :  As a reader (and writer), zombies appeal to me because they are literally our worst fears come alive: death, corruption, helplessness, violence. We can become the monsters at any moment — all it takes is one unpleasant nip and we join the ranks. The thought of seeing friends and loved ones as rotted corpses is deeply unsettling.

With zombies, everybody is on an even playing field because we’re all human and we all have the capacity to turn into a monster upon our deaths … or sometimes before. We’re all zombies in the making.

Ed Greenwood is the author Falconfar and the forthcoming Elminster Must Die.  Greenwood’s story “One Last, Little Revenge” appears in The Best of All Flesh.

Ed Greenwood:  Zombies appeal to me as mirrors and sounding boards, as mutely vengeful forces and inexorable forces.

Rebecca Brock :  Plus, there’s the whole break-down of “civil” civilization to deal with, as well.

Lana Brown is an English teacher and novelist.  Her story “Sifting Out the Hearts of Men” co-written with Warren Brown appears in The Best of All Flesh.

Lana Brown:  Zombies are more fun than vampires or other monsters.  They appeal to that sense that we all have of a monster inside us, of course, but to my mind they are closer to the mundane world we have to live in.  It’s inherently funny to imagine a zombie working in an office or retail store, for instance, while vampires or werewolves doing the same thing is more evocative of the horror to come.  I like to be scared, but I also like to laugh.

Michael Jasper is the author of A Gathering of Doorways.  Jasper’s story “Goddamn Redneck Surfer Zombies” appears in The Best of All Flesh.

Michael Jasper:  There’s not a lot that can top the fear of being chased by a relentless, shambling pursuer who can’t be killed except at close range. A pursuer who’s losing bits and pieces of himself or herself, intent on grabbing you and eating your brains is inherently funny while being scary as hell. What’s not to love about a villain like that?

Warren Brown is a short story writer.  His story “Sifting Out the Hearts of Men” co-written with Lana Brown appears in The Best of All Flesh.

Warren Brown:  As the old line from the Pogo comic strip goes, “We have met the enemy and they is us.” Who is sitting in the office chair on the other side of your cubicle wall? You think you know, but do you? Dare you look?

Mark McLaughlin is the author of Raising Demons for Fun & Profit and Slime after Slime.  McLaughlin’s story “Scenes from a Foreign Horror Video, with Zombies and Tasteful Nudity” appears in The Best of All Flesh.

Mark McLaughlin:  As a reader, I find zombies — especially shambling masses of zombies — interesting as a metaphor for city dwellers. Often city dwellers may feel like part of a big anonymous herd, treated like cattle by major corporations and the government. Zombies may be a herd of undead cows, so to speak, but they’re damned hard to milk! They won’t settle for being pushed around. They’ll bite back.

Jim C. Hines is the author of Goblin  Quest and Red Hood’s Revenge.  Hines’ story “Brainburgers and Bile Shakes” appears in The Best of All Flesh.

Jim C. Hines:  Zombies are all about the loss of control.  Any individual zombie can usually be destroyed pretty easily, but the zombie horde never stops.  It’s inevitability embodied in shambling, brain-munching corpse form.  Even when the living win, it’s often a temporary battle only. But watching how we deal with the inevitable, that’s where you get great stories.

Jesse Bullington is the author of The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart.  Bullington’s short story “Charlie’s Hole” appears in The Best of All Flesh.

Jesse Bullington:  To quote Dennis Hopper in the best part of Romero’s Land of the Dead, “Zombies, man, they creep me out!” It’s of dubious note that Dennis is picking his nose when he voices this sentiment. Perhaps because we too often do have such a static notion of what a zombie is (stupid, slow, scared of fire, hungry), what I enjoy most about zombies in fiction is seeing how authors can make the stale concept fresh again.  Horror so often lies in the unknown and unknowable, and I love being reminded that even the commonplace can be made interesting and creepy in the hands of an accomplished writer.

Myke Cole is the author of Latent.  His story “Shouting Down the Moon” appears in The Best of All Flesh.

Myke Cole:  I was never interested in zombies for zombie’s sake. Sure, the walking dead have a certain cool factor to them, but so do superheroes, giant dinosaurs, transforming robots, ninjas, or just about any of the other speculative fiction mainstays us geeks love to get our nerd on. I came to zombies like most folk do, through George Romero flicks, and always thought of them as a motion picture phenomenon. They were fun, but not so fun that I wanted to spend a whole lot of time with them.

You can blame Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead [series] for turning that around.  (I know comics are visual, but I still consider them a literary medium). Kirkman’s work doesn’t dwell on the zombies themselves at all but rather on how the zombie apocalypse affects those who are left alive and uninfected.

Michael Jasper:  Zombies represent the one thing people understand the least and probably fear the most — death.  They take our concept of a peaceful afterlife and flip it on its lid. And every author does zombies differently, so the most fun for me as a reader is seeing how the author fiddles with the formula to come up with something fresh and original.

Claude Lalumière is the author of Objects of Worship and the co-creator of Lost Myths.  Lalumière’s story “The Ethical Treatment of Meat” appears in The Best of All Flesh.
Claude Lalumière:  I’m drawn to monsters in general, as I am to most things with a pulpy feel. I appreciate that, unlike vampires and werewolves, zombies have not been romanticized and eroticized. I mean, anyone who’s read my stuff knows that I don’t shy away from sex, but the notion of murderous monsters as romantic objects of desire doesn’t jibe with me.

Myke Cole:  The question the best zombie writers ask is, “What do people do when the world goes away?” Any holocaust can set up that petri dish, but zombies have a unique horror, hunger, survivability and eerie resemblance to a sentient enemy who could potentially be negotiated with.

Michael Laimo is the author of Atmosphere and Deep in the Darkness.  Laimo’s story “Last Resort” appears in The Best of All Flesh.

Michael Laimo:  There’s a sense of true realism in the zombie, and this in and of itself appeals to me on many levels. When we lose a loved one, we deeply wish for that loved one to be with us again. If our wish were granted, literally, then we’d find ourselves buried in terror. Then, the simple idea of something dead coming back to life intrigues us, scares us, and then as we discover that the once dead human, now alive, possesses a triggered instinct to feast on warm flesh, it terrifies us.

Michael Jasper:   The real horror is that these undead beasts used to be normal folks who’d never do such terrible things while they were alive…

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Christopher L. Dinkins is a freelance writer and editor living in Spartanburg, SC.  His non-fiction has appeared in and Kobold Quarterly.  His debut short story will be appearing in the cyberpunk anthology, Foreshadows.  He is an instructor at Shared Worlds, a creative writing and world-building camp for teenagers at Wofford College.

Jeremy L. C. Jones is a freelance writer, editor, and part-time professor.  Jones is a frequent contributor to Clarkesworld Magazine and Kobold Quarterly.  He is also the director of Shared Worlds.

Reasoner has published more than 200 novels.  He writes under his own name and nearly three dozen pen and house names, such as Dana Fuller Ross, Brett Halliday, Tabor Evans, Jon Sharpe, Jake Logan, and Gabriel Hunt.  He’s been writing stories since the late 70s and novels since 1980.  Over the years, he’s written Westerns, detective stories, action-adventure, military, fantasy and just about any other type of novel and story.

“The author of the cult classic P.I. novel Texas Wind under his own name, James Reasoner has nevertheless made his living writing books he received no credit for,” said Robert J. Randisi author of The Ham Reporter and, as J. R. Roberts, the Gunsmith series. “But I give him credit. The best thing I can say about him is this:  he’s a helluva Professional.”

Reasoner moves among the genres seemingly with great ease.  Though I suspect a lot of hard work goes into making it look so easy.  From book to book, series to series, Reasoner’s stories seem to follow one pattern – good character, good story, and good fun. 

Below, Reasoner and I talk about entertaining himself first and writing the West. 

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What do you enjoy about writing the West?

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James Reasoner:  Traditionally, Westerns have both strong characters and strong plots, and I enjoy combining those two elements.  Plus, I grew up reading Western novels and watching Western TV series during the Fifties and Sixties, and it’s just great fun being able to follow in the footsteps of creators whose work gave me so much pleasure and entertainment over the years.

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And what is the biggest challenge in writing the West?
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James Reasoner:  Getting all the historical details correct.  Readers will let you know if you get something wrong.  I try to be as accurate as I can in my writing, but mistakes still slip through from time to time. 
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What sort of Westerns do you write, and what are they key elements?
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James Reasoner:  I write traditional Westerns that are not that much different than the ones published in decades past, although I think the characterization in today’s Westerns (not just mine) is usually deeper and better developed than it was during the pulp era.  Of course, there are exceptions to that, since some of the pulp writers were very good at characterization.  I’ve also written quite a few books for several of the so-called Adult Western series, as well as big historical sagas that are more concerned with actual events and characters in Western history. 
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How have your novels and/or your approach to writing them changed over the years?
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James Reasoner:  My style has evolved over the thirty-plus years I’ve been writing, but it’s been a gradual process that’s still going on.  I’m constantly learning new things about how to make my writing more effective.  My approach is still the same, though:  I try to do the best I can on each project and write books that would entertain me as a reader.  If I’m not having fun, the readers won’t, either. 
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You write both under your own name and under pseudonyms and house names.  Do you approach writing “as someone else” differently?  What does it allow you to do that writing “as yourself” doesn’t?
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James Reasoner:  I touched on that in the previous answer.  If I’m writing for a particular series, I’ll definitely try to make my book fit in with the others in that series.  Each series has its own way of doing things.  But as far as my general approach to the work goes, there’s really no difference.  When I sit down in front of the computer to produce my day’s pages, that my book I’m working on.  I have to like it and enjoy it.  When it’s turned in, of course, I’m professional enough to accept that sometimes it’s not mine anymore.  But in my heart, it still kind of is.  That’s why I can look at a book in the store that doesn’t have my name anywhere on it, but if I wrote it, I’m still proud of it.
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You wrote the first novel in the Gabriel Hunt series.  How much freedom did you have in shaping the character and the direction of the series?
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James Reasoner:  Charles Ardai, the creator and editor of the series, wrote a fantastic bible for it, one of the best series bibles I’ve ever seen.  So he had developed the character of Gabriel Hunt pretty extensively before I wrote my book.  However, I was able to add some touches of my own that Charles adopted for the rest of the series.  Writing that book was a very enjoyable experience.
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What are you working on now, and what’s next?

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James Reasoner:  I’m writing a traditional Western novel that will be out under my name next year, plus developing an outline for a house-name book also scheduled for next year.  The next manuscript in the schedule after the current one will be a house-name Western.  I have quite a bit of work lined up, and that’s the way I like it.

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What can a writer who doesn’t usually read Westerns learn from reading within the genre? 

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 James Reasoner:  How to balance plotting and characterization, and how to get the details right.  Plus a lot of Western authors are just really good storytellers and know how to pace a book so that the reader wants to keep turning the pages. 
 

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Jeremy L. C. Jones is a freelance writer, editor, and part-time professor.  Jones is a frequent contributor to Clarkesworld Magazine.  He is also the director of Shared Worlds, a creative writing and world-building camp for teenagers that he and Jeff VanderMeer designed in 2006.