Sebastian A. Jones - Interview by SE

Intro: It is not intuitive to seek beauty in art deemed grotesque/weird, but most authors who produce horror/fantasy actually are usually (a) serious about their craft, and (b) driven my strange muses. This interview series engages contemporary authors & artists on the theme of “Art & Beauty in Weird/Fantasy Fiction.” Previously we cornered weird fantasy authors like John Fultz, Janeen Webb, Aliya Whiteley, and Richard Lee Byers. Recently we heard from the legendary author and editor of weird fiction, Darrell Schweitzer!

Note:  This interview will be simulcast on Black Gate.com Sunday Oct 21st!

This round we corner Sebastian A. Jones: Author, actor, and teacher, Sebastian A. Jones grew up in England and moved to America at the age of eighteen where he founded MVP Records releasing albums that included James Brown, John Coltrane, and Billie Holiday. In 2008 he founded Stranger Comics and Stranger Kids. Sebastian has written children's books including Pinata and co-created the I Am Book Series with Garcelle Beauvais including titles I Am Mixed and I Am Living in 2 Homes. Under Stranger's dark fantasy line Asunda, he has received critical praise for his written work on The Untamed: A Sinner's Prayer,  Dusu: Path of the Ancient, and Niobe: She is Life, which was coauthored by Amandla Stenberg.

Note that the Asunda, the world of Niobe, is being realized with Pathfinder for RPG lovers. Check out the recent Paizo interview for more. 

 Is Niobe “Life” or is she “Death”?

Niobe returns to reclaim her throne in 3 tales. Get the Erathune Hardcover, She is Death #1 & #2, and the vampire epic, Essessa #1! Another Kickstarter brings omnibus versions of Niobe to life. Fill us in on the status and long term vision of Niobe and Asunda.

SAJ: The status is we are in the midst of another kickstarter campaign where folks can get all of the new stuff in Niobe’s world of Asunda (and the old stuff too). We first planted Niobe in the original story THE UNTAMED: A Sinner’s Prayer, where we followed a man, the Stranger, who had returned from purgatory to exact vengeance on the seven souls that murdered him and his family. He meets Niobe, the only light in the sinner’s Town of Oasis. She offers him a chance at salvation. But when he discovers she is the seventh soul, and the devil had planned the whole thing, the Stranger has a choice to make: Does he kill her and free his family, or let her live and save the world, as Niobe is destined to bind nations against the devil.

After The Untamed we saw Niobe in other tales including her own title NIOBE: She is Life and now She is Death. She also appears in ERATHUNE with other heroes, the Macgrom (Dwarf) Buxton Stonebeard, and Morkai (Silver Elf) assassin Skarlok Two Hearts. She also guest stars in ESSESSA: The Fallen, a dark vampire tale of Niobe’s nemesis a thousand years before the main and current timeline. My vision for Niobe is for us to follow her throughout the world of Asunda and discover new lands and tales with her, as she grows into the Joan of Arc meets Luke Skywalker badass savior she is destined to be. In the future we will have NIOBE: She is Spirit and eventually She is God.

Beyond the comics, I am hopeful Niobe will transcend all media and appear in games and on the screen. Viola Davis honored us with this quote from her foreword in the hardcover, “We all have a Niobe inside ourselves, and it’s time to hear her roar.”

SE: In the “Spilling Guts” Appendix of the Untamed: Sinner’s Prayer compilation, your interview reveals that Asunda was primarily your creation but it evolved over twenty years and has involved many artists.  As author, did you ever draw/sketch (i.e., not write) anything for this world?  If so, can we share an image? Please share your insights working with graphic artists as they depict “your” world.

SAJ: I have done loads of sketches and none of them good! I also created the designs for the magic and spirit runes that readers can check out on the items wielded or worn by our characters in the comics. All good fun for gamers and campaign builders.

The artist who has been a catalyst in the world of Asunda is Darrell May. I consider him a cocreator as he not only translates effortlessly what is in my brain, he improves upon the vision. Over several years now he has created many of the most important landscapes, characters, and monsters that we sometimes build stories around. In fact, the title Erathune was born from a game we played in where Darrell was the dungeon master.

Generally, what we do is: I write the script > My brilliant Editor in Chief polishes it > Darrell does all of the concept art and all of the layouts >  the artist draws and paints based on the aforementioned > Joshua letters it > multiple screaming matches and revisions > off to the printer.

Here are some layouts by Darrell and the final results by Peter Bergting for The Untamed and Ashley A. Woods for Niobe: She is Life.

Beautiful Weird Art, Balancing Disparate Content:

SE: The Niobe and Untamed series balance “coming of age” YA appropriate stories with vivid, adult-worthy content. They also exhibit a splendid variety of beautiful empresses and heroines (i.e., the 2018 Calendar for Asunda is portfolio mainly of beautiful women). Any tips for other artists for designing art that is beautiful yet intense?

SAJ: Embrace the uncomfortable. Artists should step out of their comfort zones and explore all areas of art and other mediums. Artists should write, writers should draw, and everyone should listen to music that has grit, beauty, and gravitas. Photographers and filmmakers are also a great resource, where master storytellers capture moments that stay with us. When I wrote THE UNTAMED I listened to Aaron Copland and Gorecki and watched a lot of Spaghetti Westerns and Samurai films.

Niobe’s Beauty?

SE: One could argue that Niobe is a nontraditional heroine for the dark fantasy genre. She is introduced in Sinner’s Prayer as a young girl but has her own line of comics for her coming of age.  Can you comment on Niobe’s own beauty? How did she evolve from idea to character over the years?

SAJ: Niobe has been with me for a long time, since I was a teenager. She was a character that was born out of my own hopes and ambitions for a better world. Seems a bit naïve perhaps, but I poured all of my vulnerabilities and desires into this character who started to roam the fantasy world I was creating. 

The more I grew, she grew with me, and soon she reflected my own light and darkness, which would come to represent the duality I was struggling with. She is mixed (like me) but she is also half angel, half demon, which was to represent the inner conflict everyone can relate to. By the time Stranger Comics was formed, I thought I had a fairly clear image of Niobe. By the time I wrote her own story with Amandla Stenberg, her character arc had blossomed into something powerful. We will witness the rise of a young woman, struggling with the weight of the world on her winged shoulders, but will conquer the battle of obligation vs. adventure and be a beacon for us all.

Now she is a movement. And in her – young people and old alike – can be the hero in their own story. All they have to do is pick up the sword.

SE: Your Amazon Author Page features eclectic works.  Your Asunda series alone may represent you as an author fascinated with dark myths, albeit ones presented with beauty.  But that is not only the case. Via Stranger Comics, you are also making/marketing children faerie tales (i.e., “I am Mixed”). Indeed in 2008 you founded Stranger Comics and Stranger Kids, which would appear to have divergent markets/audiences & muses. Are there similar motivations driving Stranger Comics & Kids?

SAJ: I am motivated by a great many things, all of which trickle into what we create both at Stranger Comics and Kids. Good story with resonance that connects on an emotional level is everything. Each tale must be autentic to what it is trying to achieve. We cannot do things because things are a current hashtag trending just to make a quick buck. This is soulless, transient, and transparent. And the audience always sees through it.

I like to plant seeds within our comics and children’s books, for readers to stumble or search for hidden messages that can both relate to the story and at times reflect issues we face in our own world.

I believe that representation matters. On all levels, as we swim the murky waters of today’s social and political landscape. Hence our kid’s book I AM LIVING IN 2 HOMES was dedicated to kiddos who navigate the complexities of separation and divorce.

And despite all the serious stuff, I am still a kid at heart who like to have fun, a gamer, a dreamer, who wants to escape into fantasy worlds – which is probably why we partnered with Paizo to create Pathfinder roleplaying games for NIOBE: She is Life and created a Piñata making supplement in the back of the same titled children’s book.

Niobe (or Sebastian) in Film?

SE: Andrew Cosby’s introduction and BleedingCool.com indicate a feature film for Untamed is in the works. Do tell more! Seems like it may be (or be inspired by) previous screenplays written by you, and that it will depict Niobe (to be played by Amandla Stenberg who is known for playing Rue in Hunger Games). You have film credits for working in a psychological horror game called Hektor. If Asunda comes to a screen, will you be in it?

SAJ: I cannot say too much about the movie and TV stuff at the moment, as it is a delicate dance, but I am confident it will all happen in the way it is meant to. I would love to be in it, but it is not necessary. Above all, any film or show must reflect the work and the vision we have spent years nurturing.  The fans deserve it.

Musical Muses:

SE: If not acting, you hinted at creating the score for the movie. Having founded MVP records, music certainly inspires you. In Sinner’s Prayer, there is an undercurrent of music that begs for explanation: the prologue has a few stanzas and there is the music played during a climatic confrontation. Can you clarify how music inspires you? Any connections between creating song and prose?

SAJ: Music feeds me perhaps more than anything else. It is a marriage of movement and the still moments in between. For music to inspire, it must have a spirit to make me want to fight, f**k, or fall in love. Anything else is like a formulaic snapchat fliter that deadens the soul… and puts us on automatic robot mode. I can’t mess with that.

Beauty in dark art:

SE: Do you see Beauty in your dark work? Any tips on how to interpret or create art that is “dark” yet “attractive”?

SAJ: I find the darkness a beautiful comfort, but I am not sure I see beauty in my own work. I am honored that readers seem to enjoy the stories and of course, the incredible art.

My tips are: Do not compromise and dare to be vulnerable. You get your feelings hurt now and again by those who will judge, and people will rip you off… But as long as you are true to your vision and your own truth, your soul will be fed.

Darrell Schweitzer - Interview by SE

SE Lindberg Intro: It is not intuitive to seek beauty in art deemed grotesque/weird, but most authors who produce horror/fantasy actually are usually (a) serious about their craft, and (b) driven my strange muses.  This interview series engages contemporary authors & artists on the theme of "Art & Beauty in Weird/Fantasy Fiction."  Recently we cornered weird fantasy authors like John R. Fultz, Janeen Webb, Aliya Whiteley, and Richard Lee Byers. Today we hear from the legendary author and editor of weird fiction, Darrell Schweitzer!

Note, this is being simultaneously broadcast via Black Gate.com (thanks to John O'Neill). 

Darrell Schweitzer is an American writer, editor, and essayist in the field of speculative fiction. Much of his focus has been on dark fantasy and horror, although he does also work in science fiction and fantasy. Schweitzer is also a prolific writer of literary criticism and editor of collections of essays on various writers within his preferred genres. Together with his editorial colleagues Schweitzer won the 1992 World Fantasy Award special award in the professional category for Weird Tales. His poem Remembering the Future won the 2006 Asimov's Science Fiction's Readers' Award for best poem. His novels include The White Isle, The Shattered Goddess, The Mask of the Sorcerer, and The Dragon House. His most recent story collection is the explicitly Lovecraftian Awaiting Strange Gods published by Fedogan & Bremer. He has also been known to lead the choir at Cthulhu Prayer Breakfasts, where his The Innsmouth Tabernacle Choir is used. He has published books about H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Lord Dunsany.

SEL: What Beauty is there in horror and sadness? Edgar Allen Poe subscribed to evoking melancholy to stimulate 'Beauty'.  In his 1846 “Philosophy of Composition”, Poe revealed his views on experiential beauty by detailing the deliberate construction of his poem The Raven: “Regarding then, Beauty as my province, my next question referred to the tone of its highest manifestation-and all experience has shown that this tone is one of sadness. Beauty of whatever kind in its supreme development invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears.  Melancholy is thus the most legitimate of all the poetical tones. In “Windows of the Imagination” you interview Poe, through dubious means. So we must turn the tables. Paraphrasing from you, “Which do you prefer writing [poems for Beauty, or tales for Terror]?” More broadly, how do you define Beauty in art/fiction that appears to be repulsive (weird/horror/melancholy)?

DS: If I am to make a guess in the case of Poe (who, being dead, was not as entirely revealing as you might want in my interview with him), the beauty of horror does indeed have to do with sadness and loss. It is a reflection on the inevitable passing away of all things. Poe was the guy who said that the most poetical subject in the world is the death of a beautiful woman, and I don’t think he was into necrophilia. You can see this in his life. He knew his wife was dying. Various other beloved figures in his life kept dying on him. He knew that his own stay on this mortal coil was always tenuous.

SEL:   Do you find beauty in your weird fiction? Dissect an example. 

DS: This seems a little pretentious. It is a “look how great I am” question. The time-loops & their links to innocence and youth in “The Sorcerer Evoragdu”? The dancing resurrected goddess at the end of The Shattered Goddess? The strange redemption at the end of “On the Last Night of the Festival of the Dead”?

SEL: What scares you? Is it beautiful?

DS: I think we are all scared of death and the loss of identity or mental acuity. In real life, it is NOT beautiful. There is no “City of the Singing Flame” in the mundane world.

SEL: Art vs. the Artist: Is there a character that you most empathize with or reflects you (i.e., Julian the Apostate or Sekenre the Sorcerer)?

DS: I am neither of these persons. Julian the Apostate (the knight, not the emperor) is a lost soul precisely because he still has his faith. If you do not believe in God and the Devil, you do not fear them. Sekenre the sorcerer is the kid that never grows up, and always feels left out of normal society. There are some advantages to this, such as long life, but I think his existence involves much loneliness and suffering. I think of him as a cross between Joseph Curwen and Peter Pan. His agenda, however, is not, unlike Curwen’s, evil. He has expressed an intention to survive until the end of time and demand of the gods the reason for the world’s pain.

Have I ever written myself into a story? Not really. I can see how, if I had not somehow managed to face the world, I could have ended up like the character in “Jason, Come Home,” but he is a very sad and unfulfilled fellow, is he not? There is a little of me in the comic artist in “Pennies from Hell,” but this is caricature. Also, that other guy draws better than I do. I do pick up pennies off the street, but not for purposes of occult divination. After a certain age you do it because you STILL CAN. Also, I am superstitious. I believe it is bad luck to leave money lying around when I could have it.

SEL: Regarding other, Dark Arts: Clark Ashton Smith, whose soul or muses seem to have corrupted your own, was a poet, illustrator, and sculptor. Do you practice other arts? If so can we share them (i.e., images of fine or graphic art) or mp3s/videos (of music). Likewise, can you discuss how art can from one medium can inform/inspire another? 

DS: I have been known to draw cartoons. I suppose with some art training I could be mediocre. There is some talent there, but I think that as a cartoonist I am a pretty good gag writer. See attached. 

Art by Darrell Schweitzer [Sidebar: Wilbur Whateley is a character in Lovecraft’s 1923 The Dunwich Horror]

SEL: Cadence in fiction. In a 1930 letter to Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith described his strategy of using aesthetics to heighten the reading experience of his weird works: “My own conscious ideal has been to delude the reader into accepting an impossibility, or series of impossibilities, by means of a sort of verbal black magic, in the achievement of which I make use of prose-rhythm, metaphor, simile, tone-color, counter-point, and other stylistic resources, like a sort of incantation. You attain a black magic, perhaps unconsciously, in your pursuit of corroborative detail and verisimilitude. But I fear that I don't always attain verisimilitude in my pursuit of magic! However, I sometimes suspect that the wholly unconscious elements in writing (or other art) are by far the most important.” What tips or tricks can you reveal about delivering the right cadence to affect beauty or horror? 

DS: I have a theory that some of the best and most “poetic” prose writers – Lovecraft or Dunsany for instance – have the impulse to write poetry but not quite enough talent. So it is sublimated into their prose. Lovecraft held that the rhythm or cadence was the most important aspect of prose. Indeed, prose is for the ear, to be read aloud. The ultimate example may be the last few lines of Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death,” which is both hideous and exquisite at the same time. Poe of course had the full poetic talent, but also could do it in prose.

SEL: Unpublished Conan and Inspiration: What Makes A Genuine Muse (inspired by your essay “My Career As A Hack Writer” in the collection Windows of the Imagination)? Many do not know that you wrote Conan the Deliverer (not a midwife, but perhaps a milkman you jest in your essay) which was never published. It was to be the “definitive Stygian novel.” I’m not sure of the chronology, but you certainly wrote some beautiful-weird-adventure with Egyptian (a.k.a. Stygian) influences (Mask of the Sorcerer and Sekenre) and proved yourself capable of damn good heroic tales (We Are All Legends). On the surface, having you script Conan the Deliverer sounds awesome. But you reveal that the script was perfect, and it was because of the artistic inspiration (or lack thereof). Please explain more. What makes a quality muse?

DS: A quality muse is one that inspires you to create works of genius all the time. One can only wish to have one … The Mask of the Sorcerer was indeed written on the rebound from the failed Conan novel. I simply let go of all the restrictions of trying to write a Conan novel, the first of which was to dispense with the character of Conan or anyone like him. My Conan novel did indeed deal with a descent into the Stygian afterworld, but the details are very different. I have to admit that this many years later, I do not remember Conan the Deliverer very clearly. That may be a sign that it was not, ultimately, very successful. Tor Books still owns it. They paid for it. They could publish it if they like. It used to be that about every five or ten years I would mention this to someone from Tor and they would say, “Oh, I never knew this existed,” and I would send a copy to them, and then they would lose it again and a few years later the subject would come up again. The last time this happened, I photocopied it for them and they did not bother to reply.

SEL: You have a B.S. in geography and an M.A. in English; has the geography ever served your writing? If not your degree, then perhaps the geography of your person [I was honored to listen to you read “Girl in the attic” the World Fantasy Convention 2016, a story that was published in Black Wings VI S. T. Joshi.  I recall the imagery of the Pocono ridge lines pretty well.]  Was this inspired by time spent in PA? Actually, this line of interrogation reminds me of my favorite CAS tale, “Genius Loci”. How does “place” affect one’s art?

DS: It does make me a little more aware of other places, but then so does collecting stamps. I am not one of those Americans who has only heard of a country when we have gone to war with it. I know where Kazakhstan is. Otherwise my getting a degree in Geography was a naïve attempt to do something practical so I could make a living while writing. But as with all the sciences, I could not proceed very far because I couldn’t do the math.

The Pocono ridge lines in the stories are inspired by long drives to Niagara Falls. I used to be a regular at Eeriecon, and I drove up that way alone many times after my wife stopped doing. You do notice on such trips how the familiar and safe world is only along the roadway, and eldritch rites or hideous murders could be taking place a half a mile away into the forest and no one might ever know. That whole landscape has inspired the Chorazin series of stories, of which “The Girl in the Attic,” and also my YA novel The Dragon House. Chorazin is located in the “flyover” part of north, central Pennsylvania, which is pretty blank on the map. Go to the Poconos, turn left, and go beyond any of the towns or resorts, and there is … what? Any large state in America holds such mystery. It is quite different from Europe, particularly Britain, where if there is a clump of more than two or three trees, it probably has a name, a hereditary forester, and a record in the Domesday Book. We have a lot of empty land.

The landscape of Arizona and the area around the Grand Canyon inspired my “Howling in the Dark.” So, yes, I do respond to landscapes. In the southwest there is vastness of both landscape and sky, and the realization that everything around you is also mutable. An Arizona landscape may be dry, but it is shaped almost entirely by water. You can also look out over the Grand Canyon and realize that among those hundreds of spires you can see are places where, very likely, no human being has ever been, so if Lovecraft’s Great Race of Yith is still hiding on one of them, as long as they don’t shoot off fireworks or play their boom boxes too loudly, we might never know.

SEL: Any current or future endeavor we can pitch?

DS: Latest novel is The Dragon House (Wildside). Latest collection is Awaiting Strange Gods (Fedogan & Bremer). PS Publishing will publish a Best of DS in two volumes next year. I am also working on two anthologies for them, The Mountains of Madness Revealed and Shadows Out of Time. My most recent anthology (for PS) was Tales from the Miskatonic University Library co-edited with John Ashmead.

SEL: Any new callings from the Church of Dagon?

DS: Funny you should ask. The spirit moved me to testify at the last Cthulhu Prayer Breakfast at Necronomicon 2017. I spoke briefly on the fact that the Esoteric Order of Dagon is the only nihilistic doomsday cult with a positive message. The text of my remarks was published in Audient Void magazine recently (No. 5), and will be used as a kind of preface for the second volume of The Innsmouth Tabernacle Choir Hymnal. I write a new hymn for every prayer breakfast. Last time it was “Great Old Ones” to the tune of “Kumbaya.” There are now four uncollected hymns. I need to write three or four more, and I can have another booklet. I don’t just want to do a revised, expanded version, because that would render the old one obsolete and I want to go on selling it too. It is good cultist relations too. No one wants to be told that what I sold you last year is now out of date, so you have to buy a new one. I want your money, but I’d rather let you keep the value of your previous investment while I empty your wallet with the new one. So, I hope to have Volume II available at Necronomicon 2019. Come and sing along!

Partly squamously, partly rugosely, Darrell Schweitzer (a.k.a. “Brother Darrell” in the Esoteric Order of Dagon).

Richard Lee Byers - Interview by SE

It is not intuitive to seek beauty in art deemed grotesque/weird, but most authors who produce horror/fantasy actually are usually (a) serious about their craft, and (b) driven my strange muses.  These interviews engage contemporary authors & artists on the theme of  "Art &Beauty in Weird/Fantasy Fiction".

Today we host author Richard Lee Byers, known for his Forgotten Realm contributions. He holds a Master's degree in Psychology and worked in an emergency psychiatric facility for over a decade, then left the mental health field to write. He is the author of more than fifteen books, including the lead book Dissolution (first book in the War of the Spider Queen series). Follow him on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/rleebyers) and on Twitter (https://twitter.com/rleebyers).

Richard Lee Byers has recently participated in interviews with (a) GdM Grimdark Magazine #12 and (b) one focused on his recent Sword & Sorcery release: This Sword For Hire. Other recent releases include The Shadow Guide, which is another and rather darker heroic fantasy book, and TheHep Cats of Ulthar and Other Lovecraftian Tales. You can findthose and all his work on Amazon. Here we’ll focus on his approach to making horror pleasing, reveal his muses for creating beautiful dark fiction.

RICHARD LEE BYERS

1) SEL: Geographical Muses: One of my favorite Clark Ashton Smith tales is Genius Loci (1933) in which an artist, Amberville, turns mad when he paints a landscape that happens to embody the effigy of the land's deceased owner. Ghosts, and muses, can be geographic in nature. Noting that you were born in Columbus OH, which many Sword & Sorcery authors have roots (i.e., Swordsmen and Sorcerers' Guild ofAmerica members Andre Norton, John jakes, Roger Zelazny…), is there any evidence you have to support the crazy notion that Ohio localizes S&S muses? [sidebar: SEL has lived in OH since the 1980's and wishes for such a genius loci]. Perhaps you have memories of Ohio has haunted or inspired you? If not Ohio, another geography?

RLB: Alas, no. To the best of my recollection, there was nothing notably swashbuckling, barbaric, or eldritch about Ohio when I was growing up there. But I was fortunate enough to find a circle of friends who shared my enthusiasm for fantasy, SF, and horror. I imagine that played a role in my ending up as a genre writer.

2)  SEL: Early weird fiction masters like Edgar Allen Poe, Clark Ashton Smith, and Howard Phillips Lovecraft wrote letters and essays on “Beauty,” and they all generally espouse that beauty is not necessarily within art (i.e., a book or poem), but it is the conveyance of a feeling. Is there beauty in horror/weird fiction? Is there beauty in the repulsive?

RLB: Sometimes the repulsive is simply that. Realistic images of slaughter, torture, etc. sicken me as is, I imagine, the creator’s intention. But I think that when a horror story is based in the supernatural or some SF premise, there can be beauty even when something monstrous in being depicted. That’s because our curiosity, fascination, and sense of wonder are being engaged at the same time as our sense of dread.

3)  SEL: Do you have any “dark muses,” i.e., things that terrify/repulse you but you feel compelled to write about them.

RLB: I don’t know. Maybe not. I’m not fond of heights, and some of my more popular characters frequently fly the skies on griffon-back, but that experience isn’t portrayed in a way intended to scare. I am quite conscious of the dark side of human nature, our capacity for cruelty, selfishness, bigotry, fanaticism, etc., and many of my stories try to comment on that on one level or another, but my concern there is so general that I don’t know that it indicates I have a “dark muse.”

4)  SEL: You have a degree in psychology and worked in the mental health sector; how has this informed your writing (psychology of characters...and or readers expectations)?

RLB: I’ve been out of the mental health racket for a long time now, and today I seldom consciously think of personality theory and such when writing if, indeed, I ever did. But back in the day, I did interact with psychotic and sociopathic people on a daily basis, and I’m sure that getting a sense of who they were and how they viewed the world provided insights I still draw on when creating characters.

5)   SEL: Rorschach Test: What do you see? Ok, bear with me since this is question a game/gimmick of sorts. I wanted to reinforce your mental health background in a fun way. As a scientist who performs image analysis on data, I apply math on photos to quantify microstructure of materials. I took the liberty of processing two images you should be familiar with the content. Figured it would be interesting if you commented or interpreted this abstract version, and described what you see. There is no intention for any real psychological test, but figured this exercise may also reinforce your feelings on different perspectives.

RLB:

Image 1: Guys hanging around the brothel parlor waiting for their turns.

Image 2: The faces of somewhat thuggish-looking twin brothers.

[See bottom for the image reveal! Very funny]

6)  SEL: Do you practice other arts beyond writing? If so can we share them (i.e., images of fine or graphic art) or mp3s (of music). Guess you could mention martial arts too.

RLB: I don’t paint, play music, etc. I did put in 25 years as a fencer (epee, mainly, although I fenced foil and sabre, too) and still think of myself as a fencer even though I haven’t been inside a salle in a while. I miss it, but my right knee is showing the wear and tear of catching my weight and momentum through 25 years of lunging. So, sadly, the more prudent course may be for me to just keep going to the gym three days a week.

7a) SEL: Forgotten Realms (a):  Writing dark fantasy that is acceptable for the young adult crowd requires balance; how does you go about presenting scary settings/events in fun ways?

RLB: Honestly, no editor ever said to me that Realms fiction was targeted at the YA market, and I didn’t think of it that way. I did have an understanding that the publisher didn’t want writers to go all XXX-rated or splatterpunk, so I didn’t. When it came to generating a sense of dread, I don’t think it cramped my style all that much.

If you look at the masters of classic horror, they depicted terrifying and even grisly events, but they rarely if ever went on for pages with detailed descriptions of torture, dismemberment, and what have you. Appeals to the reader’s sense of the uncanny and the depiction of the viewpoint character’s emotional response to the strange and threatening saw them through. I guess I tried to achieve similar results via similar methods.

7b) SEL: Forgotten Realms (b): If you were a Zulkir (master magician) what discipline would you practice (Evocation, Transmutation, Abjuration, Enchantment Illusion, Conjuration Necromacy, Divination)? Perhaps you have an RPG character for this.

Now that I’m not doing Forgotten Realms fiction anymore, I haven’t looked at my reference material in a while. Is Evocation the one where you throw fireballs and lightning bolts? Whichever one that is, that’s my pick. I don’t see how you can go wrong throwing fireballs and lightning bolts.

I’ve run some magic users in RPGs over the years. I don’t think I ever had one who specialized in one particular school of magic. But you can bet they all threw fireballs and lightning bolts.

7c) SEL: Forgotten Realms (c): Can you comment on Szass Tam's artistic flare (the necromancer character in the Haunted Lands Trilogy) and/or comment on the muses you drew upon for him?

RLB: I don’t recall thinking of Szass Tam as an artist per se, but in the trilogy, his goal is to destroy the universe and replace it with something better. I guess that would be the ultimate act of artistic creation if you want to look at it that way.

As far as how I portrayed him, well, he was a preexisting character in Forgotten Realms lore, which indicated he was a wily skull-faced undead master of the dark arts. To that, I added the idea that his ultimate goal was the destroying and rebuilding the universe thing.

If you look at all that, a skeletal undead villain out to kill everybody, you realize the potential for cliché, one-dimensional characterization, and portraying a guy who comes across as a virtual parody of the evil mastermind archetype. I tried to avoid that by resolving that Szass would never feel what a standard arch-villain would feel or do what a standard arch-villian would do unless the plot required it. So in the story, he doesn’t gloat or fly into rages and isn’t needlessly cruel. Rather, he forms friendships and shows mercy. He’s someone you might enjoy hanging out with if you didn’t know he was planning to obliterate you and everyone and everything you cared about.

7d)  SEL: Forgotten Realms (d): Please comment on the creative process when writing for shared worlds (Forgotten Realms) vs your individual work (i.e., featuring your character Selden in This Sword For Hire or Billy Fox in Blind God's Bluff).

RLB: To my mind, there are two main differences:

The first is expressed in the adage (if I knew who originally said it, I’d give credit, but I don’t)  “Don’t blow up the moon.” That means people other than you are working in the shared world and the owner of the IP intends it to generate product and revenue for a long time to come, so you can’t tell a story that would mess things up for everybody else.

Such a story doesn’t have to involve blowing up the moon, sinking a continent, etc. The issue can be subtler than that. Many shared worlds are built around fundamental conflicts and mysteries. If you’re already a fan of the shared world, resolving one of those conflicts or solving one of those mysteries may be the first story that occurs to you and one you’d be thrilled to tell. But it’s one you probably can’t tell because doing so would close out a part of the franchise that people like and would otherwise generate future products.

Now, occasionally, you can tell a story like that if the IP owner has decided it’s time for the franchise to move on to a new phase in its history. I’ve done those world-changing epics a couple times in the Forgotten Realms. In my experience, if the publisher wants a story like that, they’ll ask a trusted writer with experience in the shared world to write it. You won’t get such a gig if you’re a newcomer.

Now if you’re writing in your own universe, you can do anything you want anytime you want. Although if you’re writing a series, you too may want to be careful about writing something that’s apt to make future stories less interesting or maybe even superfluous altogether.

The second difference is that to do shared-world work, you need to be flexible. You could go to your editor with a great idea and be told, “Sorry, we already have an elf-centric book for this year” or “So-and-so is already going something set in the Red Kingdom.” If that turns out to be true, it won’t do you any good to argue or sulk. You just have to come up with a different idea.

Obviously, if you created the universe of the story and are the only one working there, you won’t have such a problem. I think, though, that it still behooves you to be open to feedback. You don’t want your editor to decide you’re a pain in the ass to work with.

Rorschach Image Sources:

Image (1) RLB’s “brothel line” is actually a tribute to his “Ape of the Day”, a long occurring tradition of RLB on Facebook. Follow him (or on twitter) and you’ll enjoy the flippant posting of “apes” in various media. Image is in public domain.

Image (2) RLB’s “thuggish brothers” is just an abstracted mirror-image of himself

Aliya Whiteley - Weird Beauty Interview by SE

"They were found in the graveyard, springing from the decaying bodies of the women deep in the ground, and they were found in the woods, spreading themselves like a rug over the wet earth. The Beauty were small at first but they grew and took the best qualities of the dead. They sucked up through the soil all the softness, serenity, hope, and happiness of womankind. They made themselves into a new form, a new north, shaped from the clay of the world and designed only to bring pleasure to man.

But the Beauty knew form the many experiences of the women that had gone before, that men did not always love what was good for them. Men could attack, hurt, main and murder the things that came too fast, too suddenly, like love..."  -- excerpt from ‘The Beauty’  

It is not intuitive to seek beauty in art deemed grotesque/weird, but most authors who produce horror/fantasy actually are usually (a) serious about their craft, and (b) driven my strange muses.  These interviews engage contemporary authors & artists on the theme of "Art & Beauty in Weird/Fantasy Fiction."  

Aliya Whiteley has written over thirty novellas and short stories in a range of genres. Her excellent novella The Beauty offers a compact dose of weird fiction in which humanity is evolving into mushrooms. It is entirely unique, but could be described as a mashup of Kafka’s body horror (The Metamorphosis), Golding's social dynamics (Lord of the Flies), and James' infertile dystopia (The Children of Men). “The Beauty” is an action-packed tale saturated with philosophy on "what is beautiful?" and "what is humanity?", a true must-read for those who enjoy intellectual meat (shrooms?) with their adventure fiction. Let’s learn more about Aliya Whiteley and her muses.

• SEL: You were born in and raised in southern England. Are there fungal horrors in the sea-side town of Ilfracombe that haunt you? Perhaps, you have a different muse from the area.

AW: I don’t remember finding many mushrooms in Ilfracombe, but certainly I grew up feeling that it was filled with strange events, from a ghost in a decaying hotel to the tall, triffid-like plants that grew in an old explorer’s garden. These things have appeared many times in my fiction, and I’m still writing about it now.

The Beauty is set in the Valley of the Rocks, which is a real place close to Ilfracombe with an almost volcanic landscape; it’s a few miles from where I grew up, and I remember visiting it and feeling that its bare, rocky ground was more suited to a horror story than any romantic tale (the most famous novel set in that area is RD Blackmore’s Lorna Doone: A Romance of Exmoor, first published in 1869). Spooky things always seemed to happen in Devon – but perhaps that’s down to my teenage imagination, which liked to find monsters and darkness in every situation.

• SEL: Early weird fiction masters like Edgar Allen Poe, Clark Ashton Smith, and Howard Phillips Lovecraft wrote letters and essays on “Beauty,” and they all generally espouse that beauty is not necessarily within art (i.e., a book or poem), but it is the conveyance of a feeling. Is there beauty in horror/weird fiction? Is there beauty in the repulsive?

AW: These are the kind of questions I think about a lot, and haven’t found any answers for! I suspect that beauty is one of the really big concepts in human existence that deserves a lot of interrogation. What is it? When and how does it come into existence? Does something have to be universally considered beautiful to deserve the description? If one person finds it hideous, does it forfeit that idea? Perhaps everyone has different thoughts about this area, as well as having different definitions of beauty.

There’s a moment in The Beauty where the narrator, Nate, comes across a glossy women’s magazine from a time before the death of all women. He doesn’t recognize the pouting figure on the front cover as beautiful because that stylized version of beauty has now disappeared from the world. Nathan then goes on to find things that we would consider grotesque, even horrifying, to be beautiful. It’s all connected to his perception of what life is about. He finds beauty in growth and change. I wonder if uncovering our own personal ideals of beauty rests somewhere in better understanding the concepts that underpin it. So, on those terms: yes! There can be beauty and horror in many things, simultaneously, including weird fiction.

• SEL: Do you find “The Beauty” repulsive, beautiful, or both?

AW: Do you mean the fungal creatures that erupt in the book? I find them to be both. And also upsetting, and horrible, and challenging, and reassuring. They mean that life goes on, whether we want it to or not. I’m interested in the idea that nature will find a way, but possibly that way doesn’t have to fit any human morality, or concept of beauty. There’s a tension between humanity and nature in the book. So often nature is described by humanity in terms of its beauty to our eyes. I found myself wondering, while writing this book, how much of that is another method of survival. Are we less destructive to those things we find aesthetically pleasing? (Yet more questions I don’t have an answer to! But I think I write to explore these questions, not to answer them.)   

• SEL: Do you eat mushrooms?

AW: I eat lots of mushrooms, and I’m a bit perturbed when people tell me that I’ve put them off mushrooms! I love them. I make a brilliant mushroom stew with cheese and walnut dumplings. Although I have occasionally found non-edible mushrooms when walking my dog in the nearby forest and felt a bit disturbed by them, if I’m honest. Particularly if they’re yellow and strangely solid, or growing in large clumps to take on monstrous shapes. They are fascinating, aren’t they? I remember reading an article about the mass extinctions of life that have taken place on Earth, and how fungus thrives afterwards, with so much decaying matter to feast upon. I think that must have been lurking in the back of my mind when I started writing the book.

"When [William] told me of his journey, that was how he finished it--he fitted there. I find this to the strangest of expressions--how does one fit in with other people, all edges erased, making a seamless life from the sharp corners of discontent? I don't find anything that fits in such a way.  Certainly not in nature. Nothing real is meant to tessellate like a triangle, top-bottom bottom-top. The sheep will never munch the grass in straight lines."  -- character Nathan speaks in 'The Beauty' 

•  SEL: Your body of work is eclectic, so you seem to defy the limitations of a single genre. What are our muses then? Where do you “fit”?

AW: I don’t think about fitting anywhere, really. I’m very interested in exploring genre, so many of my books have horror, science fiction, crime or fantasy elements mixed in with commercial or literary approaches to prose. Another way of putting it might be to say that I like to write whatever I want to write, and let other people worry about the definitions when they’re trying to sell it or explain it. That suits me fine.

• SEL: Voronoi / Rorschach test: What do you see? Ok, bear with me since this is question a game/gimmick of sorts, but it may be fun. I wanted to reinforce your “fitting-in” tessellation-metaphor in a fun way. As a scientist who performs image analysis on data, I apply tessellations on photos to quantify things like particle size, or effective densities of microstructures. I took the liberty of using some Voronoi methods (typically applied on images of dispersed points) on an image you should be familiar with (I grabbed it online).  Figured it would be interesting if you commented or interpreted this abstract version, and described what you see. There is no intention for any real psychological test, but this exercise may also reinforce your feelings on different perspectives.

 

AW: My first thought was that I was looking at a map of some strange outcropping of land, surrounded by psychedelic seas. It looks like my kind of place! I bet they tell good stories there… My brain also wants to turn it into a sideways view of a face, perhaps a child’s face, with an upturned nose and a chin resting on one finger. Lost in thought. Can an image be a map and a person? And a mushroom, of course.  

**** SIDEBAR: See follow up and image reveal at end. ****

“My name is Nathan, just twenty-three and given to the curation of stories. I listen, retain, then polish and release them over the fire at night, when the others hush and lean forward in their desire to hear of the past. They crave romance, particularly when autumn sets in and cold nights await them, and so I speak of Alice, and Bethany, and Sarah, and Val, and other dead women who all once had lustrous hair and never a bad word on their plump limps...Language is changing, like the earth, like the sea. We live in a lonely, fateful flux, outnumbered and outgrown." -- From 'The Beauty'

•  SEL:   Love of Language: “The Beauty” and “Peace, Pipe” (provided as a pair in the 2018 edition) both had protagonists with storytelling/journalistic roles which affected greater society. Given your degrees in Theatre, Film and Television Studies. any other media Other Arts, you clearly like the subject matter. Your prose is rhythmic and begs to be read aloud like poetry. Explicitly having your characters take on your persona seems telling. What about language and storytelling compels you so?

AW: You’re right that I was influenced by theatre first, and started out by writing stage plays before deciding to switch to novels. It was all about the concept of voice. A lot of my writing is in first person for that reason. I love being able to capture and sustain a person’s voice, and I haven’t found any form that allows me to do that so completely as the novel/novella/short story. It can be an immersion into somebody else’s head, for the writer and the reader, and I find that so powerful. 

Also, the subjectivity of it is so involving. The Beauty was so much fun to write because nobody viewed these mushroom creatures in the same way, and therefore refused to accept them into their own narrative in the way that the storyteller figure wanted to present them. There’s such great tension in that. Which story do we choose to accept about our own pasts and futures? We’re all telling stories and perfecting our own voices all the time by subtly rewriting our own experiences and feelings. That was brilliant territory to explore.

• SEL:  Beauty and attraction need not be about gender roles, but sexual attraction certainly involves beauty.  There are no women in The Beauty, so you literally switched gender-perspective to write on behalf of your characters.  You could have reversed the situation and had all the men die instead. Please discuss the creative process while switching gender voices, and the role of beauty in relationships.

AW: I don’t plan in advance. I sit down with my notebook and pen and start putting words down on paper. I’d just finished writing a novel with a female protagonist that had a repressed, strict tone to it and so I picked up a fresh notebook and started writing and the first paragraphs of The Beauty, in Nate’s voice, came out. I loved his voice straight away, and I kept going, really enjoying the freedom to let the words flow. 

As I started to get a sense of what the story was about I was nervous about the subject matter and getting the voice right but early on in the process the thought came to me that Nate could barely remember a world without women, so he wasn’t going to hold a lot of set viewpoints about gender. That helped me to let go of the idea that I had to write a man. I wrote a person trying to make sense of new things, changing things, and finding beauty by embracing those changes.

I think it’s really interesting to consider how the book may have been different if I’d imagined all the men dying and the women being left behind. What decisions would they make differently, as individuals, as a group? But Nate’s voice cropped up first, and that’s the voice, and the story, I told. Maybe I’ll try it the other way around some time.

• SEL: Can you recommend past and/or future works of yours that would appeal to the weird-fiction crowd?

AW: For US readers, my novella The Arrival of Missives will be published by Titan in November 2018. That’s another story which uses the natural world in surprising ways and doesn’t belong to one genre. It’s set in England in 1920, and begins as a coming of age story about a girl who adores her teacher, and becomes – I don’t know, maybe science fiction? The Arrival of Missives is already available in the UK from Unsung Stories.

For UK readers, my new novel The Loosening Skin will be published in October 2018 by Unsung Stories, and that contains similar elements of body horror, but intermingled with a detective story and an examination of love in much the same way as The Beauty examines our concepts of beauty.  

Thanks for the opportunity to give these novels a mention, and to chat about The Beauty! I enjoyed it.

• SEL: Thank you for writing intellectual fantasy and sharing your creative process! Readers can learn more about her Wordpress.

THE IMAGE REVEAL (click to enlarge):

SEL: After the interview, I provided the below Image Analysis workflow that transformed her portrait into the abstract tile. What did she see in herself?

AW: Look at that! I felt certain you'd used the image of a mushroom as your starting point. I must have mushrooms on the brain...

Aliya Whitely Bio (on Wordpress):

Aliya Whiteley was born in Barnstaple, North Devon, in 1974 and grew up in the seaside town of Ilfracombe which formed the inspiration for many of her stories and novels. She was educated at Ilfracombe College and gained a 2:1 BA (Hons) degree in Theatre, Film and Television Studies from the University of Wales, Aberystwyth in 1995. In 2011 she was awarded an MSc in Library and Information Management by the University of Northumbria; her dissertation involved conducting a case study into the research techniques of modern novelists. She currently lives in West Sussex.