DAMIEN WALTERS GRINTALIS, Author - Interview

I first became familiar with author Damien Walters Grintalis through Twitter, and shortly thereafter through backing the Kickstarter for the second issue of Fireside magazine (for which backing, Damien “tuckerized” me into her wonderful short story “Scarred”), and when we finally met in person at last year’s Readercon, we hit it off famously. Damien is an active member of both the Horror Writers Association and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA). She’s a staff writer at BooklifeNow and an associate editor at Electric Velocipede. In addition to her short stories (which include recent  appearances in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Electric Velocipede, Penumbra and Arcane magazines), her first novel, INK,  has been out since early December. INK is about a recently divorced man who meets a really sketchy tattoo artist in a bar … which sounds like the set-up for a joke, but things take a much darker turn when the new tattoo takes on a life of its own.

ANTHONY: INK has been out for a few months now. How has the reaction been?

DAMIEN: So far, the reception has been overwhelmingly positive and readers seem to like it. I’d assumed release day would come and go without a peep and that if anyone read it, they would hate. A normal debut author mindset, I’d like to think.

ANTHONY: Why are tattoos such a staple of genre fiction, and specifically of horror fiction?

DAMIEN: I know tattoos are a recurring staple in Urban Fantasy but when it comes to horror, I was only aware of Bradbury’s “The Illustrated Man” and thought a living tattoo was an unexplored facet of the genre. I’ve since heard about another book and an episode from the Tales from the Crypt TV show so it’s obviously been explored before, but I’d like to think it hasn’t been done to death yet.

ANTHONY: If you encountered Sailor, unaware of who he was was, what would your tattoo be?

DAMIEN: I have a penchant for text tattoos, so it would be the line “Something wicked this way comes”. Given Sailor’s ink game, I wonder if the letters would emerge and wrap themselves around my neck or force their way down my throat? Shakespeare was brilliant, but I’d rather read his words than choke on them.

ANTHONY: In INK, Jason’s ex-wife is particularly snobbish about horror fiction. Most bookstore chains don’t even have a “horror” section any more.  Of all the genres, why does horror seem to have more of a stigma attached to writing/reading it? 

DAMIEN: I suspect it has to do with the glut of horror fiction published in the 80s. There were a lot of great books published, but there was also a great amount of dreck and, unfortunately, the genre was left with the reputation of the latter. I do think horror is shaking the last traces of that stigma, though.

ANTHONY: What was your writing process like for INK?  And how has it changed as you’ve worked on other novels? 

DAMIEN: I wrote INK mostly at night, cranking out 2,000 words or more in each session. I write during the day now and my progress is a bit slower, although I attribute that to taking more care with my words than the schedule change.

ANTHONY: You also write a lot of short stories (including what is for obvious reasons my personal favorite, “Scarred”). Does your writing process differ from novels to short stories?

DAMIEN: Slightly, yes. With novels, I usually see a character in my head doing or saying something (In INK’s case, I saw Sailor walking.), and sometimes I know right away the why and how and what; sometimes they linger for a bit until they reveal their story. With short fiction, I often have a handful of lines pop out that define the basic concept and spin the story from there. Sometimes the concept remains the same throughout; sometimes it spins off in a different direction.

ANTHONY: I was lucky enough to be “tuckerized” into “Scarred” by you as part of a Kickstarter perk for Fireside Issue 2, long before we finally met in person.  What sort of pressure is involved in tuckerizing someone as a lead character into a story when they know they’re being tuckerized (as opposed to doing it as a surprise for the person)?  And did that affect the writing and editing of the story at all?

DAMIEN: After the first draft was complete, the only real pressure was “Will Anthony like this story?” But when I was writing that first draft, I didn’t think about it. The story grew from the first line and your character simply slipped into place.

ANTHONY: Back to INK. There was a Mercedes Benz commercial during the Super Bowl after which you tweeted, and I paraphrase, “He’s perfect for Sailor.” (Awesome commercial, by the way!) With Willem DaFoe as Sailor, who else would you cast in a film version of INK?

DAMIEN: I never thought of anyone specific as Sailor before I saw that commercial and, in truth, my image of Sailor isn’t quite Willem Dafoe, but he does come close. I see all the characters very clearly in my head and they look like regular, non-celebrity people to me, so it’s hard to say who I’d cast. Maybe Jake Gyllenhaal and Kate Hudson for Jason and Mitch, but they’re both far more glamorous and attractive than the Jason and Mitch I envision.

ANTHONY: You’re very effective at stringing out the tension in INK — the reader is aware of what’s going on long before Jason is, but even so we don’t get to see one of the “monsters” of the piece in “full light” until near the end. Why is this such a staple of horror fiction and film, and why is it so hard to do effectively?

DAMIEN: What we can’t see is so much more effective, more powerful, than what we can. Think of the movie Alien. You see bits and pieces of the creature throughout, but it’s not until the end that you see it in its entirety. If Ridley Scott had chosen to reveal it early on, the movie would definitely have lost some of the nail-biting tension.

Is it hard to do? I’m not sure. As you mentioned, in INK, the reader knows what’s going on before the character does and I worried that technique would spoil the story for some readers. But given who Sailor is, I couldn’t find a way to effectively hide that fact without it coming across as trite. Instead, I put his card on the table up front and chose to keep the griffin under wraps for as long as I could, hoping that knowing it was there but not seeing it would keep a reader engaged.

ANTHONY: Well, it worked for me! What else do you have coming up, and where can people find it?

DAMIEN: I have short fiction forthcoming in Interzone, Lightspeed, Apex Magazine, Shock Totem, and Daily Science Fiction, and my agent and I are working on the final edits to my next novel.

ANTHONY: And my usual closing question:  What is your favorite book, and what would you say to someone who hasn’t read it to convince them that they should?

DAMIEN: I have quite a few favorites, but I think I’ll spotlight one that many people (in my experience from talking about books with friends) haven’t heard of: I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman. It’s a brilliant, dark dystopian book. If you’re the type of reader who wants everything explained and everything tied up with a neat bow, it will frustrate you and quite possibly piss you off, but it’s haunting in a very, very good way.

You can follow Damien on Twitter @DWGrintalis, check out her website for the latest publication news, check out INK (and Damien) on Goodreads, and purchase INK as an ebook or in print.

SABRINA VOURVOULIAS, AUTHOR - Interview

I met Sabrina Vourvoulias through the weekly Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Chat (#sffwrtcht) on Twitter a bit more than a year ago. We clicked right away, sharing a sense of humor and a near-fatal dislike of outlining (which eventually led, with several other folks, to the formation of The League of Extraordinary Pantsers). We finally met in person at last year’s Readercon, just about the time the uncorrected proofs of her novel INK were available. We’ll be meeting up at Readercon again this July, and from the conversation below, it looks like there will be reading, writing, and … dancing??

INK is a novel set in the near future, in an America where immigrants (South/Central American in particular), whether they are legal citizens or not, are being “inked” as a method of population control and tracking. The novel follows a diverse set of characters as their lives are undone and remade, politically, socially, scientifically and magically, by these events.

ANTHONY:  Sabrina, thanks for taking some time to chat. INK has been out for several months now. How has the reaction been?

SABRINA: It has been so positive. The vast majority of readers who’ve left comments on Amazon, Goodreads and Librarything have had lovely things to say, and I’ve been absolutely blown away by some of the attention it has garnered. That a review of it would appear in the Los Angeles Review of Books, for example, when I’m a first time novelist from a small press … I’m very, very gratified.

ANTHONY: What was the initial impetus for INK?

SABRINA: I had been interviewing and hearing stories from undocumented immigrants for a number of years when I ran across a small newspaper article tucked into the back pages of a Spanish-language newspaper. It was about an undocumented immigrant who worked with a landscaping company in the suburbs of New York who had been “given a ride” by a couple of guys on the way home from work one day. Except instead of taking him home they took him over the border with Connecticut and dumped him there without money, cell phone or any identification and warned him to stay out of their state. According to the article he wasn’t the first undocumented immigrant to experience this kind of “border dumping.” It was horrifying and fascinating enough to kick my imagination into overtime.

What if it was over an international border? I thought. And how bad would the tensions that already exist between immigrant and non-immigrant have to become to make it likely, or viable?

The other manifestations of the dystopia came about the same way — I looked at what has already has been happening, or has happened in the past, and nudged it over the edge.

ANTHONY: INK is set in the near-future, which makes it frightenginly real despite the magical elements that appear. How realistic, or perhaps I should ask how possible/probable, do think the socio-political events of the novel are?

SABRINA: Possible, but I hope not probable. On the other hand, some of what I describe is only one or two steps removed from what has been (or is being) proposed in some omnibus immigration bills in some states. And other things — the forcible sterilizations, for example, were part of U.S. programs in Puerto Rico and Peru as recently as the 1970s.

ANTHONY: Although INK is essentially near-future dystopian fiction, it’s also very much in the realm of magical realism. What’s your definition of magical realism, and how does it differ from, say, “urban fantasy?”

SABRINA: One of the foundational Latin American writers of magical realism called the genre lo real maravilloso,  the marvelous reality, and so it is. For me it is about creating a world that reads true to our own and imbuing it with a type of magic that isn’t a learned system but something much more organic. Some manifestations of the magic in INK are culturally grounded, others are elemental, and still others are devotional or vocational.

Magic realism similar to urban fantasy, though without quite so many tropes. I always think of UF as requiring the setting to be as much a protagonist as the characters. Because I needed my characters to move — by choice or by force — to different locations, and because the feeling of being uprooted had to be a big part of things, I couldn’t afford to make either Hastings or Smithville as important as they would have had to be if INK were urban fantasy.

ANTHONY: The magic in INK works on a very personal/character-centric level. I wanted to ask about that choice. How did you decide which characters would have/recognize their personal magic, and why doesn’t magic seem to be more wide-spread in this world?

Character is what interests me most. I start and end everything with character.

Magic is tied intrinsically to “noticing” in my book. So Del’s magic is all about noticing what others wouldn’t in his woods. That “seeing what others don’t” becomes a dialogue and a knowing. All of the magicks in the book follow this same pattern, even Mari’s. So I created situations in which it is clear that while some people see, others don’t. Maybe they don’t want to. Or they see but deny.

Obviously, this applies as much to justice as it does to magic. In fact, the two have been tied together often in fiction, though more frequently in the sense of retribution being exacted magically (an aspect which doesn’t interest me in the least).

Meche, Mari, Del, Abbie, Chato, Chema and Remi all have magic of some kind in INK, and I have to say I’m glad it’s not more characters than that!

ANTHONY: There is a lot of Guatamalan folklore woven into the book. What, if any, liberties did you take in incorporating that folklore into the world of the novel?

SABRINA: The nahuales are a living belief — though probably not as widespread as it was at one time. The stories about them I remember are more like anecdotes. There was this girl named Margarita who was maybe four or five years older than me who told me that one of her relatives, whose nahual was a raccoon, woke up one morning with the injuries his nahual had incurred the night before. This always impressed me. I hate magic that is all-powerful and unassailable because it’s fundamentally boring. The really intriguing stuff always lives in the flaws.

I took liberties: imagining what it might be like to have a nahual, and what it might be like to be one, and then playing with the symbiosis.

ANTHONY: Thinking about the book months after reading it, it occurs to me that what I remember the most is the relationships. I feel like you took the macro (societal upheaval) and worked it at the micro (character) level, which made it all the more effective. The relationships also seem to be largely triangular: Del/Cassie/Meche, Abie/John/Tono … even the Finn/Mari relationship is essentially a triangle, with the third point alternately being the newspaper, the government and eventually the baby.  Was this geometric pattern a conscious decision and if so how did it affect the plot development?

SABRINA: Well, yes. Everything I write is really focused on our interactions and connection to each other individually or as groups and communities. Everything else is secondary.

Hah! I hadn’t even noticed the triangles. But it is interesting… I like threes. You put three elements in an arrangement on your mantel, or in the composition of a painting, and suddenly it becomes more aesthetically pleasing and more dynamic. It creates a lovely sort of tension, but at the same time there is a stability to it. It doesn’t teeter.

Look, romantic triangles are the stuff of a million books and even more lives. But none of the ones in my book are “Oh, the spark is gone, I’m bored of you” or “I just can’t decide between the werewolf and the vampire” type of triangles. The Del/Meche/Cassie one is on some level a triangle formed by the tensions between belief and disbelief. Or, on a more mundane level, lives sealed off from the cares of the world and those busted open by them.

Abbie/Toño/John are a triangle formed by socio-economic class and racial/ethnic expectations. But it’s funny, because that triangle could also be Abbie/Toño/Neto, in which case it is a triangle fraught with the tension of remembered versus actual.

In the last instance, I think you’ve got the triangulator (!) of Mari’s and Finn’s relationship wrong. It isn’t Finn’s job or their son that forms that third angle, but something much stranger: home. Mari’s really is the immigrant’s story over and over: have a home, leave a home, make a new home. Step and repeat.

So, what do you sacrifice when you stake a claim, put down roots, say no to yet another border crossing? For Mari the choice to not cross finally into Canada exacts a huge cost. And yet, when you see her with her son and the other character’s children later, you know she’s ultimately found a literal home (and a figurative one in her stories).

ANTHONY: You’ve said the main characters of INK are not based on real people, but your personal experiences growing up in Guatemala influenced the tone of the book and some of the choices the characters make, right?

SABRINA: Indeed. Growing up under a repressive government makes you wary and suspicious. It took me a long time to learn to trust — and I’m still painfully aware of those moments when our government takes away civil liberties, or tries to institute policy that controls the flow of information in the name of curbing piracy on the web, for example. All of that feeling — paranoia, wariness, mistrust — underpins the dystopic society I’ve created in INK.

The state of emergency, the civil patrols, the guns on the street and the siege-mentality and routine in the novel — all of that comes from my experiences living in a country at war with itself.

But there is much that is positive in this book that is informed by my life in Guatemala and my life here, as well. My understanding of community and the ways groups of people stand up to much greater powers, for one. The way networks of support are built for another.

But it is not only my experience that informs INK. It is the lives of the undocumented immigrants I know. And the people I know who live in towns like Smithville. And practically every young reporter at the small newsrooms I’ve worked in.

What informs a novel — or a life — is a menjurje, as we say in Central America. A mess of ingredients all macerated together until they cohere into something else: bitter medicine, enlivening draught, a soup that sustains.

ANTHONY: Since we’re both members of the League of Extraordinary Pantsers, I have to ask what the process for writing INK was like, and how (if at all) it differed from your other fiction.

SABRINA: I write a lot on a weekly basis — newspaper op-eds, columns, blogs — and yet I am such a slow fiction writer. I was more obsessive about my novel than I usually am with my short stories, but that’s really the only qualitative difference in how I write. In both forms I start with characters and perhaps only an inkling of what I’ll be putting them through. But as the characters reveal themselves (sometimes in quite astonishing ways) their trajectory through the novel or story changes too. So I don’t write to hit markers. Truthfully, I’m a slow writer because I enjoy the process of writing too much to want to zip through it. And the regimentation of X number of hours a day or Y number of words per week makes me want to run howling into the night.

You know I dance when I write, don’t you? I’m an utter writing hedonist — has somebody claimed that term yet? — if not, it’s mine. 

ANTHONY: I love that about you. Haha. “Now is the time in writing when we dance!” We should have a “Dance-While-You-Write-A-Thon” at the next Readercon! Your other fiction is largely short stories. Are they the same sort of science fiction / magical realism mix, or do you veer into other genres?

SABRINA:  I write everything. No genre is safe. And given my temperament, nothing is sacrosanct.

ANTHONY: What do you have coming up in the near (or not-so) future?

SABRINA: My story “Ember” appears in the Crossed Genres anthology Menial: Skilled Labor in Science Fiction which was just released in January. One of my short stories, “Collateral Memory” will be appearing in Strange Horizons in either June or July (don’t know yet), and my story “Paper Trail” will be appearing in a long-delayed issue of Greatest Uncommon Denominator magazine. A poem will be appearing in an upcoming issue of Bull Spec magazine, and a couple of short stories have been requested for anticipated anthologies.

But mostly I’m working on a collection of interconnected stories about monsters that cross the borders with us when we immigrate to a new country. It might turn into a novel … or not. Undoubtedly it’ll have lots of voices because I get bored with just one point of view. Typical Gemini.

ANTHONY: I’m looking forward to that set of stories. Now my usual closing question: What is your favorite book, and what would you say to someone who hasn’t read it to convince them that they should?

SABRINA: That’s a cruel question, I have to say. One favorite? One? Well, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude is one of my all time favorites. It’s a generational saga rife with magic, history, social commentary and incredibly vivid imagery.

And it has a fantastic first line: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” Tell me, how can anyone resist a book that opens like that?

You can follow Sabrina on Twitter as @followthelede. INK has its’ own website. And of course you can find updates on Sabrina’s writing and other great stuff on her blog.