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Interview with Fantasy Author Anna Tizard

Published by Tabby on December 2, 2022

I have another fellow author and contributor to the short story anthology, Midwinter Magic & Mayhem! Anna Tizard is a truly unique author that you will love getting to know. Be sure to check out Midwinter Magic & Mayhem for only 99¢ and enjoy some comfy reading for a chilly night. Be sure to also check out Anna’s books and podcast, which are linked throughout the interview.

    Please welcome Anna Tizard, fellow fantasy author and contributor to our short story compilation, Midwinter Magic & Mayhem! Thanks for giving me the opportunity to interview you today. Can you introduce yourself and what you write to my readers?

    Hi Tabitha, and thank you for having me!

    I write weird, highly imaginative speculative fiction and dreampunk. For me, the whole point of stories is to take readers on a journey they’ve never been on before. Writing a story is magical – you’re literally creating and imparting to someone an experience they wouldn’t otherwise have. But to make these experiences resonate, they must explore situations which, even if they’re completely impossible, are in some way psychologically true.

    A lot of my writing is inspired by the theories of the twentieth-century psychologist, Carl Jung, although I never set out intending to draw on these ideas; they tend to emerge of their own accord, taking on new, fantastical forms.

    Stories are a way to tap into our unconscious minds, both when writing and reading. I think this is how we find and create experiences that really affect us and stay with us: they reach something deeper inside us.

    You have a very unique method for writing new stories. Tell us about it!

    Yes – “unique” is the word! I use the surrealist word game of Exquisite Corpse to come up with story ideas. The game randomizes word entries from different people to generate bizarre sentences that follow this structure: “The described noun did something with/to/ for the described noun”.

    In fact, I play the game “live” on my podcast, Brainstoryum, brainstorming story ideas by scrambling words my listeners have sent to me through www.annatizard.com/play! It’s hilarious – I laugh quite a lot on the show – but once you start digging beyond your initial impression of these weird word combinations, you find how suggestive they are of situations and characters. Often they can be quite haunting.

    Where did you come up with that idea, and how did it lead to your books?

    I discovered the game when I was working in a call centre, bored but glad to be working with a great mix of people. At first we played Consequences (where you co-create a short story, with each player writing a different segment on a piece of paper and folding it so the next person can’t see what’s come before). Through a French-Spanish colleague (and an internet search) I learned that the French surrealists in the 1920s transformed Consequences into an even weirder game where you co-create a single sentence.

    It was actually years after that initial discovery that I started experimenting with stories from the game results in earnest, and I got hooked!

    “The empty danger” was a weird word combination that felt like a puzzle: what could be both dangerous and empty, or intangible? Along came the pandemic and I had my answer: fear itself. The novella explores the question of what happens when (pretty much) the whole world is feeling the same thing at once – but based on entirely fantastical interpretation of what fear might look like (evil goblin-like creatures beyond the clouds. Oh, and they also stink!).

    My next book was inspired by an entire Exquisite Corpse result: “The lofty portrait of my grandmother rapidly salivated at the estranged stairwell” (and yes, you will probably have to read that sentence twice!). This sparked a story about an artist whose dying grandmother’s portrait comes alive after her death – so is she really dead? The plot has some really weird twists, again based on the idea that our minds are all connected. “I For Immortality” won the Imadjinn Award for Best Literary Fiction Novel in 2022.

    So far I’ve written at least twenty short stories based on different Exquisite Corpses (Overcast in Midwinter Magic & Mayhem being one example). While many of these are yet to be published, one story, The Midnight Ship, became such a collaborative project since I invited my podcast listeners to give me feedback on the first draft, that I decided to publish this as a stand-alone, perma-free e-book. (Download here: https://BookHip.com/BLRGGCX.)

    What is the silliest or funniest word combination you’ve had to work with?

    Oh my goodness, there are so many… Two that spring to mind are: “The humungous vampire angrily washed the engorged cheese” and “The crispy pumpkin vaingloriously ached for the attentions of the narcotic slipper”. Another, more recent example is: “The loving horizon passed through the TSA Checkpoint with the galloping pickle.” I mean, come on! Talk about a writing challenge.

    But it’s so fascinating to get feedback from my listeners because they can come up with whole new ways of looking at these things. For example, one author (Frasier Armitage) suggested that “The Loving Horizon” might be a valuable painting which someone is trying to smuggle through customs by hiding it under the less well-regarded piece, “The Galloping Pickle”! Incredible. Hats off to my listeners!

    In Midwinter Magic & Mayhem, your story, “Overcast”, deals with some unnatural cold in the summertime. It also involves a clever word play with the title. Can you tell us about how your followers’ submissions inspired the story?

    It’s funny you should ask about my followers’ submissions: When I first received the invitation to write for this anthology, I hunted around for an Exquisite Corpse that would fit the wintry theme. When I couldn’t find anything, I asked my listeners and readers to send me wintry words for the game, hoping that these would combine into the perfect Exquisite Corpse to inspire a story! But inspiration doesn’t work like that. As the original surrealists knew, the spark of an idea comes from the unconscious mind and one way to “get at” this is through randomness, and by not trying to control things.

    So after going round in circles on this (and experimentally trying to break my own “rules” for finding inspiration!) I settled on a sentence that had some resonance for me, though not with an obvious winter theme:

    “The long-tailed mystic learned the secrets of the overcast gargoyle.”

    The word “overcast” was my way in to a weather-based kind of magic, and gradually the rest of the story took shape. The concept of winter actually being inside the protagonist came to me quite late in the drafting process. (I’m a discovery writer, and often I don’t know how everything’s going to fit together until quite far in to the first draft.)

    The word play that occurs with the title (I don’t want to give this away to anyone who hasn’t read the story yet!) literally sprang into my mind at random while I was quite far into the second draft – there’s no way I could have worked that out consciously or in advance. This is what I love about being a discovery writer. Not only do my stories tap into the deeper parts of the mind, but the process itself is a way of delving into these unknown spaces inside me – and I get to turn them into entertainment!

    Many readers come to my site to read my series on conlanging. Though you aren’t making up a new language, you are playing with words we know and use everyday. How has this opened up your creativity, if it has done so?

    Trying to create stories from Exquisite Corpse game results is really challenging, but it’s become a vital regular exercise for my imagination (as well as extremely fun!). Since I began the podcast, I’m finding it quicker and easier to come up with new ideas. The imagination is like a muscle: you never know what you can achieve until you push yourself that bit further.

    Brainstorming story ideas on the spot for the podcast also enables me to share this process with so many other authors (or aspiring authors) who, like me, have no clue where this is going to take their creativity.

    Some people might find it a weird and scary prospect: allowing complete randomness to guide what I write next. It is scary, every time I sit down to play the game! But it’s given me confidence in what my imagination can do. It’s also given me the most unique, unexpected ideas I would never have otherwise dreamed of.

    Do you have any upcoming releases or works-in-progress you’d like to tell us about?

    I have several works in progress at the moment, either in early drafts or busy percolating. I like to switch between projects so some stories can “rest” while I work on others, and come back to them afresh. It’s a messy process but it works for me!

    I’m looking forward to the spring or summer 2023 release of a new dreampunk anthology I’ve contributed to, entitled Somniscope (Fractured Mirror Publishing, edited by Cliff Jones Jr,). Broadly speaking, dreampunk is a fantasy and scifi subgenre which explores the mind and different states of consciousness – right up my street! My story is called The Secret Undoing and it’s about an auditor for the government who comes across some dodgy figures in the accounts. Having notified his manager, he is then forced to “forget” this incriminating piece of information. A dream clinician guides him through a meditation into the deeper layers of his unconscious mind so he can literally “bury” the unwanted memory. It’s as weird as it sounds!

    Any parting thoughts you’d like to share?

    I’ve always felt that stories are full of unlikely yet resonant connections. This is what the original surrealists were exploring by randomizing words and juxtaposing ill-fitting images: they wanted to go beyond the conscious order and the automatic assumptions we make, and to reach for something deeper than the obvious or surface reality. By placing situations and characters together that don’t fit perfectly, or are deliberately misaligned, we find the basis for a striking, original idea.

    Everyone knows that stories are about conflict. But not everyone realises how much you can discover by digging into mismatched, conflicting ideas or themes, and using them to uproot new ways of exploring universal themes. This is really at the heart of what I do.

    This is also why I’m always encouraging Brainstoryum listeners to join in, and to write in if they’ve been inspired to write a story. The possibilities are literally limitless.

    Like Einstein said, “Creativity is intelligence having fun”.

    Thank you so much, Anna! It was a pleasure to interview you. You can find out more about Anna at her website, www.annatizard.com. You can also subscribe to her email list and get TWO free stories!

    Interview with Fantasy Author Ash Fitzsimmons

    Published by Tabby on November 4, 2022

    To celebrate the release of Midwinter Magic & Mayhem, a short story compilation with contributions from many fantasy authors, I’m excited to share my interview with the wonderful Ash Fitzsimmons. Author of almost twenty books, it is an honor to have her with us! Be sure to check out Midwinter Magic & Mayhem for only 99¢ and enjoy some comfy reading for a chilly night. Be sure to also check out Ash’s books , which are linked throughout the interview.

    Please welcome Ash Fitzsimmons, a fellow fantasy author and contributor to our short story compilation, Midwinter Magic & Mayhem! Thanks for giving me the opportunity to interview you today. Can you introduce yourself and your books to my readers?

    Thanks so much for inviting me, Tabitha!

    I’m Ash Fitzsimmons, and I write contemporary fantasy, stories with magical elements set in the present moment. (I wouldn’t call it urban fantasy—mine tends to skew more suburban, let’s say, with long romps through the countryside.) To date, I’ve published one complete series, Stranger Magics, and I have a new one, Hall of Thorns, in progress.

    You’ve written almost twenty books at this point—no small feat whatsoever! When did you start writing and publishing, and can you tell us a little bit about your process? How have you accomplished getting this many books out?

    Oh, goodness…well, I wrote my first novel in 2003, during the summer after freshman year of college and a few months into the fall. I’d never written anything longer than a twenty-thousand-word novella, but I had a story I wanted to tell, and I was an English major, so I gave it a shot. The result was a little north of two hundred thousand words. My mentor, bless him, liked it well enough to pass it to his agent, who said that a doorstop like that from an unknown was unpublishable. That book now resides comfortably in the back of a dark, locked drawer.

    I started writing in earnest a few years later, when I did a one-year Master’s degree in creative writing. While this hasn’t proven to be the most marketable of my degrees, what it did was give me time and space to just write—and coming directly out of the chaos of undergrad, this was an incredible gift. I’d say I treated my writing like a job in those days but for the fact that I had a poor grasp of work-life balance, and I may have been slightly obsessive: my personal rule was that I had to produce at least six thousand words per day. Before the end of the program, I’d written the first drafts of eight books, none of which have yet been published (though I do have plans for some of them…).

    All good things come to an end, however, and I graduated and needed to find employment. A couple years later, I decided my career plans weren’t panning out, bit the bullet, and went to law school. While I was still writing during this time, my output shrank dramatically—I wrote three novels in five years, including one during a manic three-month sprint to finish before graduation and the bar exam.

    It was the thirteenth book I wrote, the one I’d intended as a palate cleanser a few months after the bar, that turned into Stranger Magics. That was published in 2017.

    My process now is a reflection of the demands on my schedule. I try to hit at least one thousand words per day. Sometimes, I can do this before work. Other days, my brain refuses to focus at dawn, and so I write until bedtime. Because I don’t have the luxury to just sit and churn for hours, I’ve become much more of a plotter, which greatly helps when the sun’s not up and I’m wondering what’s supposed to happen next.

    My Siberian husky has been most accommodating, though she can’t seem to understand why I enjoy staring at the screen and muttering.

    Your first series, Stranger Magics, has fifteen books. Wow! What has it been like writing a series that long? What have you learned along the way?

    You know, Stranger Magics was intended to be a one-off. The previous seven books I’d worked on were a series that had taken me about six years to write, and I wanted to try something new. I had ideas for a story, it coalesced, and so I cranked that out, put a bow on it, and said, “The End”…

    …but then I started getting ideas for a sequel. I’d left some loose threads in the first book, and I liked the sandbox I was playing in, so I started working on the next book, aiming toward a particular resolution that absolutely refused to happen. It wasn’t true to the characters.

    Okay, I thought, one or two more books, just to tidy this up.

    But by that point, the story had taken on a life of its own and was sprawling toward characters and places and events I’d never imagined when I wrote the first one. Long story short, I published the final volume of the series in February, almost nine years after I sat down to write that innocuous little one-off book.

    My biggest takeaway from the experience is the importance of keeping notes. The first book was largely “pantsed,” if you will. The second had a five-thousand-word synopsis, plus several pages of character descriptions, a brief timeline, and notes about the subsequent books and the arc of the series. In 2020 or so, I discovered TiddlyWiki, which works well for me—it let me write a series wiki, which was such a great tool as the series grew and I needed refreshing. (What color are his eyes? When was she born? How are these characters related?)

    I’ve taken those lessons into Hall of Thorns, which also has its own wiki and plenty of plot notes!

    In Midwinter Magic & Mayhem, your story, “Daisy”, deals with magical creatures and a magical time of year—winter! What inspired your contribution to the book?

    “Daisy” was so much fun to write because it’s a freestanding short story unconnected to either series. I wanted something for the anthology that could be enjoyed without knowing the first thing about my books, so starting from scratch with the characters and their world was a treat.

    The story opens with a young woman who buys a house and hangs a birdfeeder on the deck. One day, she discovers that the feeder has been tossed and opened…and it’s not the squirrels at fault. Like my narrator, I bought a birdfeeder a couple years ago and hung it to see what I could get. (The answer to that is far too many birdfeeder pictures and the Merlin app, but I digress…) I came home a couple times to find that the feeder had been lifted off its nail and apparently dropped to the deck to open it. The wind wasn’t strong enough to do that, so something had to have pulled it loose and flung it. Personally, I’m chalking it up to the local squirrels, but as they left me with a story idea, I don’t begrudge them the sunflower seeds they stole.

    Many readers of this blog are aspiring writers or creators of a fantasy world (such as conlangers and Dungeons and Dragons enthusiasts). What advice do you have for those who are starting out with their ideas?

    Two pieces of advice:

    Keep good notes. Whatever works for you—Google Docs, Scriblr, index cards, strange sigils drawn on the wall in lipstick, whatever it takes to build a record of what you know about the worlds, characters, and languages you create.

    The good news is that you usually don’t have to have produced a fully formed world by the time you write “Chapter One.” You need to have an idea of who your main characters are and how they operate in the scenario into which you’ve dropped them, but you don’t need to know, say, every detail of that nasty little civil war six hundred years ago in the country next door. But might that war become a plot point? Make notes about it. That way, two years from now, when that war has somehow become relevant to your story, you have a record on hand of what you know about it. Maybe those notes will refresh your memory about some important details you’ve forgotten, or maybe they’ll show you the places where you need to fill in the background gaps. Either way, it’s far easier than reading through all your work to that point, trying to figure out what you might have said on the subject.

    Know when to put it aside. Sometimes, the story flows of its own accord. Sometimes, you end up scrolling Twitter for half an hour because you managed to write “the,” and that’s as far as your muse is willing to go. We all have bad writing days. If you can’t power through it, put the manuscript away and let your subconscious figure out where you want to go. You don’t win Writer Bonus Points by typing words you don’t like just for the sake of writing something.

    When you’re stuck, what helps you get out of a writing/creativity rut?

    Frankly, if I don’t know where the story goes next, I’ll step away—maybe take a walk, maybe sleep on it. The mind is a remarkable thing, and if you let it ruminate in the background, it’ll work out problems for you. The trick is not forcing it.

    Do you have any upcoming releases or works-in-progress you’d like to tell us about?

    Sure! I released the third Hall of Thorns book, Silent Siren, on October 4. The series is available on Kindle Unlimited, or you can find it in eBook or paperback on Amazon.

    Any parting thoughts you’d like to share?

    Let me close by saying that I’m thrilled to be in Midwinter Magic & Mayhem with you! This project has been such fun, and I’m excited to get the anthology out there.

    Thank you so much, Ash! It was a pleasure to interview you. You can find out more about Ash at her website, www.ashfitzsimmons.com. You can also find her on various social media through her LinkTree.