First, I'd like to thank you for taking the time to sit and talk about writing, horror, and Sparks and Shadows , your debut collection out from Horror World Press.

Certainly! It's a pleasure to talk with you.

1. How long have you been writing and what drew you to speculative fiction?

My interest in speculative fiction goes way back. My mom used to read fairy tales to me at bedtime. When I was three years old, one of her friends asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, and my mom said I very earnestly replied, "A dragon." Even at three, I had come to realize that flying, breathing fire, and devouring knights was way cooler than being a princess in a tower.

I didn't read horror stories much when I was young; my brain would amplify scary images and I'd get terrible nightmares. When I was nine or ten, I was usually sitting in the back of class with a science fiction or fantasy paperback under my desk so the teacher couldn't see me reading. If it was a really good book, I would get completely engrossed in it, my skin goosebumped because what I was reading was blowing my mind. I remember thinking that if I could write something that damn cool, something that would make other people feel the way I was feeling, well, that would be the best job in the world.

I wrote my first novel at age 12, in longhand in a series of spiral-bound notebooks. It did not survive the Adolescent Angst Purge of 1986, so I can't refer back to it and tell you how very, very bad it probably was. But I recall it was set in outer space, with dragons and zombies and possibly also pirates.

I was pretty shy as a child -- still am -- and for the longest time I found talking to people face-to-face difficult. I'd want to say something like, "Hello, Benjamin, I really liked the frog skeleton you brought for show-and-tell," but I'd only manage to blurt out "Froggie!" and then run away red-faced. Writing appealed to me because I found I could put my thoughts down on paper and say exactly what I wanted to say.

2. Have you always wanted to be a published author?

Definitely. I grew up surrounded by books, and once I had it in my head I wanted to write stories, the obvious goal was to someday have a book with my name on the cover. The notion of writing just for myself -- journal-writing and the like -- didn't occur to me until I was older. I always saw writing and storytelling forms of communication first and foremost.

3. How did friends and family react when they learned you wanted to write these kinds of speculative, offbeat stories?

Remember the nightmares I talked about earlier? Yeah. I never outgrew those, and I'd wake up in the mornings with my head humming with frightening images, and I found myself wanting to exorcise them on paper. As a teen, I wanted to write the type of fantasy and science fiction I loved to read, but most things I wrote ended up much darker and bloodier than people expected from a girl.

I took my first creative writing workshop when I was 19; the professor set up the class so that we didn't know who had written the story we were critiquing that day. After the class had finished discussing it, the author could reveal him or herself, or stay anonymous. I submitted a very early version of my story "Soul Searching", which is in Sparks and Shadows. The class finished with the story, and I raised my hand to identify myself. I remember there was an older lady taking the class, and she sort of blinked and stared at me and exclaimed " You wrote that?" Nobody was expecting the quiet, nerdy girl to write the freaky demonic sex story. Silly classmates! It's always the quiet ones.

I remember showing one of my stories to a boyfriend, and his only reply was "Why can't you write anything nice ?" Needless to say, he did not remain my boyfriend. I finally quit fighting the horror urge soon after that, and consequently started reading in the genre.

My parents were always supportive of my desire to be a writer. I think the content of some of my stories worried my mom, but she grew up reading westerns and space operas and so she was fine with speculative fiction. My dad always figured I'd outgrow wanting to write about monsters and that surely I'd turn to literary fiction. Oops, I haven't. So I tell him when I've had poems published -- he thinks poetry's a good and worthy art form -- and sort of gloss over the rest.

4. Who were some of your influences in and out of the genre?

Aside from fairy tales, Madeline L'Engle's books really caught my imagination when I was young. When I was a bit older, I started reading authors like CS Lewis, Tolkien, Douglas Adams, Ursula K. Le Guin and Ray Bradbury. Later, I found myself really impressed by Tim Powers, Clive Barker, Neil Gaiman, Philip K. Dick ... there are really too many authors to list, particularly once we get outside genre.

5. How'd you get started? What were some of your early publishing successes?

I got started the same as most people: I pored over the local library's copy of Writer's Market. In college, I finally had a story I felt confident about showing to a real editor, so I sent it off to a magazine called Midnight Zoo. And they bought it. Selling your first story to the first place you send it is a sterling example of beginner's luck, and that luck did not hold. It wasn't until after I'd attended the Clarion workshop while I was in graduate school that I got sufficiently clued in on the finer points of plot development and consequently I started selling more stories.

Until Clarion, I'd never taken a class that addressed plot in any helpful manner. In academia you'll run into people who'll try to convince you that having an actual story with a beginning, middle, and end is a bad thing. These people are full of shit. Listening to Joe Haldeman explain the mechanics of plotting was a real eye-opener. 6. And now you have Sparks and Shadows out from Horror World Press. Can you tell us a little about the stories and where you found inspiration for your favorites?

There are 17 stories in Sparks and Shadows, and they're a mix of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. The fantasy is generally set in the present day, so if you pick this up hoping it's got elves and sword-wielding barbarians and whatnot, sorry, it's not your sort of book. However, the book does have aliens, seductive demons, ancient gods, and various undead (none run Linux).

In a lot of ways "Soul Searching" is my favorite, but not for the reasons you might think. A friend of mine has a cat she found abandoned in a shoebox in the parking lot outside her office. He was less than a day old. She fed this tiny kitten formula through a dropper every couple of hours, wiped his butt with a damp cotton ball, and carried him around in her shirt pocket until he was old enough to walk. He's not her smartest or prettiest cat, but he's her favorite because she worked with him and he survived.

That's how I feel about "Soul Searching". I wrote the first version when I was 16; it started out as a largely plotless chunk of prose I'd written in response to a dream I'd had. But I kept at it, and it turned into something.

That one, of course, is the oldest story in the book. I wrote most of the others more recently, and their inspirations vary widely. I once got a job at a nature center purely because I wasn't afraid to handle snakes, and that inspired "Darwin's Children". A visit to an old cemetery in South Carolina inspired "So Lonely As The Grave". But I often use dreams as material. The night after I first read Gary A. Braunbeck's story "Drowning With Others" I had a vivid nightmare, and my story "The Dolls' Hearts" was the result.

7. You write in several different genres as well as blending genres and inventing a few of your own. Is there any one or two you love to write in more than the others?

When I have an idea for a story, I'm not usually concerned with genre. I don't usually think, "Today, I shall write a dark fantasy story, and yea, it shall have satire!" I'll think, "Damn. That sure was a strange dream about my dead mother and the cats coming out of the TV screen. I wonder what could have led to a scene like that?" I just try to let a story do what it needs to do, and when the smoke settles, I'll be concerned with genre labels only when I'm looking at places to send it.

But, within genre parameters, much of my work could be classified as dark fantasy. And no, I don't think that dark fantasy is "code" for horror. I think the two genres are distinct, but I'm not hugely interested in debates over speculative fiction taxonomy because I don't think it should matter that much. The moment I hear somebody say, "Well you can't do that in a science fiction story!" I'll want to go do it. Just because.

8. You also have another collection coming out: Installing Linux on a Dead Badger. Tell us a bit about that collection. Who's publishing, how's it different than Sparks and Shadows, and how come two so close together?

Installing Linux on a Dead Badger just came out from CGP, and it's very different from Sparks and Shadows. Several reviewers have remarked on the humor in Sparks; Badger is made up entirely of my short humor stories. One reviewer referred to them as "cyberzombie humor" and I guess that's as good a label as any.

Badger came about as the result of the title story, "Installing Linux on a Dead Badger: User's Notes". I wrote it as a spoof of the really awful technical documentation I'd been reading at work. The articles department at Strange Horizons published it, and someone at the Slashdot site noticed it. As a result of the piece being Slashdotted, a huge number of people saw the story, including some humor-impaired folks who thought the piece was intended as actual technical instruction.

Most of the rest of the stories emerged from my thinking about the ramifications of having technology that one could use to create remote-controlled zombies. Eight are written as fake magazine articles, and I had specific stories I wanted to tell in order to properly illustrate the fictional world in the reader's mind. The three at the end are written in a more "traditional" style, and one, "Wake Up Naked Monkey You're Going To Die", has nothing to do with technology or zombies.

The Badger collection has a dozen very short stories total, and is illustrated by DE Christman and Malcolm McClinton. The book's intended to look like a computer technical manual, but it is not solely aimed at the geek crowd. I think most anyone who enjoys comedic horror will find something appealing in the book.

The two collections came out within 6 months of each other purely by accident. I had talked with Pete Allen, the publisher at CGP, about putting out a book of short humor several years ago, but I didn't finish all the stories for it until recently. While I was working on the content for the humor collection, I had a series of conversations with Nanci Kalanta that led to her offering to publish a book of my short fiction. I put Badger on the back burner, and Sparks and Shadows came out almost exactly a year after I signed my contract with HW Press. Once my work was done on the first collection, I went back to the humor collection. I got the last stories finished, the artists turned in their illustrations, and Pete put it on his schedule.

I didn't get all the humor stories written that I'd hoped to, but if the book does well there may be Installing Linux on a Dead Badger v. 2.0 in the future.

9. What else are you working on these days?

I'm tweaking the ending of a dark urban fantasy novel entitled Spellbent. It's set in the present day, and is about a magician's apprentice named Jessie whose lover gets sucked away to a hellish dimension when a fairly innocuous spell goes wrong. The book is about Jessie's search for her lover and her discovering the extent and nature of her own powers. Because I don't envision hell as fluffy bunnies and unicorns pooping marshmallows, several key chapters are out-and-out horror. That may color the rest of the book in the eyes of some publishers, but up until then it is inarguably a fantasy novel.

10. What's your writing schedule like?

What is this "schedule" thing you speak of?

No, seriously, I'd love to have a schedule, but I have a full-time job and am usually taking classes, too, so writing gets done whenever the opportunity arises and I have the energy to squeeze words out of my brain.

11. What words of wisdom do you have for people who want to write and publish?

My main bit of advice is to write a lot and read even more. Always look for ways to improve your craft. Read and write outside your genre. Don't be afraid to try new things. If you find yourself saying, "Well, I'd write that, but there's no market for it," write it anyhow! If I'd limited myself to writing things I thought I could sell, my second collection wouldn't exist. Cross-training works for writers just as well as it does for athletes.

12. What are you reading these days? Anyone you recommend?

I recently read Michael Marshall Smith's The Servants, and that's one heck of a good novel. It's marketed as horror, but to my eye it's a very quiet dark fantasy. If you enjoyed Neil Gaiman's Coraline or the movie The Others, I bet you'll enjoy The Servants. I'm also really looking forward to Fran Friel's collection when it comes out.

13. What's next for you?

I've sold all the short stories I've finished and felt were publishable, so the logical thing is to finish more, right? But first I want to make sure Spellbent is in the best possible shape. I'm also planning to take some time to focus on poetry, and when I've built up my stock of short work, I'm going to get cracking on another novel. I do find that novels, short stories and poems all require a different kind of mental focus for me, so I do best if I'm concentrating on just one kind of writing in a session. I think of writing a poem as being a bit like doing a backflip or a somersault, but writing a novel is like running a marathon.

Thank you, Lucy, for taking time for this interview and good luck with Sparks and Shadows as well as Installing Linux on a Dead Badger.

If you want to learn more about Lucy and her writing, stop by her journal at http://las.livejournal.com or her website.