Welcome to Fantasy Magazine! We’re so pleased to bring your story “Children of Earth” to our readers. Can you tell us how this story came to be?
Thanks! So pleased to share this weird little tale with all of you!
“Children of Earth” came out of a workshop prompt, which is very rare for me.
The full backstory starts with Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s weekly blog and short stories at kriswrites.com, which were (and continue to be) a formative influence. She’s married to another fantastic author, Dean Wesley Smith, and they co-own WMG Publishing.
Back in 2021, I backed one of their (frequent and stunningly successful) Kickstarters. It was in support of Pulphouse Fiction Magazine, and the backing reward I chose was a workshop called “How to Write a Pulphouse Story.” The short answer to the question posed by that workshop, for those who haven’t read the magazine, is to lean into the bizarre and don’t hit the brakes. It’s an (invitation only) place for stories that don’t colour between the lines.
Something I always love about doing workshops with Dean is the way he brings together eye-opening, challenging, and inspiring insights. You don’t often get told to do less editing and rewriting and more wildly chaotic and unplanned “writing into the dark.” Terrifying. Thrilling. Fun, as Dean likes to emphasize.
So, I was looking at the workshop as a chance to maybe get a few more short stories written, maybe learn a few things, maybe even have some fun (not something I’m good at, but I digress). I’m stubborn, so I kind-of ignored the initial prompts and just went ahead with drafting the openings to a couple of concepts I’d been kicking around for a while. Neither really panned out . . . and in addition to being stubborn, weird, and bad at fun, I’m terribly competitive, so for the last assignment, I buckled down and actually tried to write something that would get a reaction.
Something bizarre. Something that wouldn’t quite colour between the lines. Genre-blending. Uncomfortable. Hmmm . . .
The result was an odd blend of body-horror, humour, and eco-anxiety with a side of romance thrown in as a challenge to myself to raise the bar and make it even weirder and more uncomfortable. So, uh, enjoy?
What was the most difficult part of writing this story, and what came easiest?
I was really conscious of trying not to censor, self-edit, revise, plan ahead, or even slow down and think too much while I was drafting. This was almost a freewriting exercise. Dean really emphasized pushing boundaries, “writing into the dark,” and being true to the story in the workshop/not editing the life out of it, so I was trying to put those learnings into practice without letting myself filter or fear the outcome too much.
The most difficult part was not getting scared and not trying to plan ahead. I’d get these ideas about where the story could go next as I was typing, and I’d sort-of have to shove them aside so they wouldn’t take on gravity and pull the arc of the story away from the characters and the moment. I got to the end, saved the file, and emailed the attachment out to Dean. I type “clean” as a general rule, but it absolutely went out with some typos and one or two hilarious mistakes. With apologies to Arley, some of those mistakes stuck around even into subsequent submissions!
Oh, and the whole romance angle was hard for me, too. I remember putting that in deliberately, as practice. I have this intention to write more romance/get better at writing romance, but it always seems faintly absurd. I don’t know if that comes through in the stories or not, but since part of the challenge with this assignment was to write without self-censoring or giving into taboos, fears, etc., I leaned into it. Maybe it says something that, when I do write a rom-com, it’s about a basement-dwelling gremlin-girl, body-horror, and toenail cryptids.
All that makes it sound like drafting this story was like peeling my own skin, but it was actually pretty easy. I think it was done in a single sitting, maybe a couple of hours long, and other than having to make a conscious effort not to distract myself by trying too hard, it all just kind of flowed. As may be obvious, I had a lot of thoughts about eco-anxiety and aspirational Millennial lifestyle envy to spill (lol).
I feel like a lot of my evolution as a writer has been (/continues to be) about realizing/accepting creative work can be play and doesn’t have to be painful to have value and meaning. I absorbed waaaay too much Protestant work ethic at an impressionable age and am still deprogramming. I wish all my writer kin less sweating blood (unless they’re enjoying it) and more grace and joy in their creative process.
What authors or stories have most influenced your work? Are there themes that you find yourself returning to in your writing?
This is another question where I could just go on endlessly. I inhaled Lewis, Tolkien, L’Engle at a young age. Adored Redwall; spent an embarrassing amount of time rampaging across playgrounds roaring the battle cries of small, bloodthirsty woodland creatures. Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising Sequence also made a strong impression.
I’ve always been a little too interested in the intersection of fantasy and horror, the places where the nightmares break through. But, like L’Engle and Diana Wynne Jones, I can’t help mixing genres, writing science fantasy that sometimes leans more sci-fi and sometimes more dark fantasy.
Holly Black’s The Modern Faerie Tales were a revelation. I adore everything Brenna Yovanoff touches. Laini Taylor and Christelle Dabos are both inspirations. Kelley Armstrong’s The Darkest Powers series helped form my sense of what was possible in YA (in terms of walking the edge of horror in fantasy) for my first series, and her Cainsville series was a major influence for what will be my next series. I was reading the brilliant The Market of Monster series by another Canadian author, Rebecca Schaeffer, just before I wrote “Children of Earth,” so my main character’s name is in homage (or just outright stolen from her book, depending on your perspective). Outside of speculative fiction, I love Louise Penny, Laurie R. King, Sandhya Menon.
I also see a lot of anime/manga influence in my work, probably due to mainlining an inadvisable amount at a formative age. And, weirdly, a splash of Disney. I wouldn’t be shocked to find musicals somewhere in the mix. Influences are fascinating (and terrifying). I can see traces of so many different stories, including some that I wouldn’t have thought made a strong impression. At the same time, I don’t think I actually write or tell stories like any of the authors I admire. If anything, there are books like Dhonielle Clayton’s genius The Belles that I wish had made more of an obvious influence.
In terms of themes, I keep circling back to eco-everything and (mostly) girls/women who don’t fit in or struggle with the expectations of their society—and aren’t terribly interested in correcting that. Also monsters. So many monsters, often with a liminal element.
My first series was set in an alternate future where the climate apocalypse comes with a side of monsters. It follows a haunted girl who has to figure out how to take back even the ability to want or choose or own her own desires from a world that’s taken the very ability to feel and question from her, before she can rise up and fight monsters, and so on. So, uh, not the most veiled commentary, lol. But most of what I’ve written since then has been more a shift in tone (lighter, funnier, grosser, less angsty), rather than in content (still trying to solve the dystopian capitalist hellscape . . .)
Is there anything else you’d like our readers to know about this story?
There’s definitely some poking fun at eco-friendly lifestyles going on in this piece. But I’m all about holding corporations and governments accountable, not pointing the finger at Millennials doing their best to buy local. While elitism, overconsumption, and greenwashing are legitimate problems, let she who has never drooled over an eye-wateringly expensive Merino top cast the first stone.
What are you working on now, and what can our readers look forward to seeing from you in the future?
I’m getting ready to launch a new series loosely inspired by Tam Lin, Thomas the Rhymer, and The Fiddlers of Tomnahurich for fans of Supernatural, Kelley Armstrong’s Cainsville, Seanan McGuire’s Toby Daye, Lilith Saintcrow’s Gallow & Ragged, and Holly Black’s The Modern Faerie Tales. An aspiring musician ends up babysitting a washed-up rockstar on a road trip from hell when she gets him blamed for a string of strange murders in the area. If that’s not bad enough, she’s in debt to the fae—and if she doesn’t perform, they’ll show up to collect. Twisty, unexpected, and dripping with angsty vibes. Fun fact: switching to the male POV really upped the romance quotient! Readers can actually find an early, gloriously voice-y (though mildly spoiler-y) version of this story from the female POV in “A Song of Dark Things” in Unknown Realms: A Fiction-Atlas Anthology.
I also have a ghost story for kids (upper middle grade/teen) waiting for some love, inspired by an actual place I visited as a teen with a basement that was just open to the side of the mountain. Like, it just didn’t end. I . . . was not brave enough to explore. Anyway, it’s about this boy who has to escape the haunted cave off of his basement by learning to really listen to the trapped souls in it, including, at the end, his own grandfather. He ends up confronting this intergenerational legacy of toxic masculinity, racism, etc. while also confronting some of the true history of the area . . . It’s pretty cool, probably the most action-packed thing I’ve ever written, but there’s this weird gap in publishing where no one is actually putting out books for younger teens, and I need to either age it down or up, or make up my mind to release it independently and try to get it into the hands of kids on my own. Maybe a Kickstarter or something when I have time (lol).
Finally, I always have more short fiction on the go. I’m really excited about my first audio production, an upcoming Twilight Zone-esque piece inspired by my (brief and unproductive) time in Hollywood North. It’s my most “straight horror” story so far. Usually, I go in for more gothic weirdness or humour. Unfortunately, I’m not allowed to say which horror podcast has picked it up, but I’ll have a link to it at kawiggins.com as soon as the news goes public.