OMG Julia!

This episode about how writers and editors collaborate was originally published for paid subscribers only in 2019. Now I'm releasing it to everyone! For full show notes and a transcript, visit https://www.juliarios.com/omg/

This is part two of my discussion with Maya MacGregor about their process in writing The Many Half-Lived Lives of Sam Sylvester. This book is a delightful YA mystery/ghost story with an autistic and non-binary main character, and it's on Pride Month sale for $1.99 in ebook format through the month of June! I was fully engrossed in the mystery aspect of it, and also loved to see the main character finding a supportive community.Content note for this book: it does mention trauma and hate crimes. That said, it's overall very much about surviving and thriving and not about sensationalized suffering.You can listen and/or read the transcript of our conversation below. JuliaWelcome to the OMG Julia Podcast, where we talk about creative lives and processes. This is part 2 of my covnersation with Maya MacGregor, author of The Many Half-Lived Lives of Sam Sylvester. We ended part one with Maya saying how glad they were to see lots of queer representation in media lately, and how they hoped to see more of it.[transition music]JuliaAnd I'm really glad to see that this autistic character is also presented as someone capable of forming meaningful emotional attachments because I feel like that's one of the most persistent myths that I see when people put autistic characters into media is the idea that like basically they're robots who don't have feelings. Maya Absolutely.JuliaThey're incapable of empathy. They're incapable of making connections with other people. MayaYeah.JuliaAnd therefore there to be pitied. And in fact, when you dig into all of the actual experiences of autistic people, that's not an accurate representation of the experiences that real people have at all.MayaYeah, it's really, really different. I'm reminded of this study. My first disastrous attempt at an autism diagnosis, the person who assessed me was so behind on actual peer reviewed research in her field that she literally said to me that because I had attempted to have friends I couldn't possibly be autistic.JuliaWhat?MayaThere was a study that UCLA did in like 2016, I think, and they were studying the gender differences in presentation of autism in children. I think they tracked about 40 kids, and research is so far behind so it was very binary, very like girls here, boys here. But what they showed was that the boys behave sort of stereotypically, as one might quote unquote "expect" from an autistic kid. They were frequently alone, off doing things themselves rather than engaging with the other students. But the autistic girls would go from group of girls to group of girls, and would bid for attention and bid for inclusion, attempt to play, or attempt to do something with their peers, but they were rebuffed every time. But what the researchers noticed was that, to a teacher's eye, it would look like those kids were actually engaging and that they were behaving quote unquote "normally", but when you looked closer you realized that the the autistic girls were being rejected at every turn. But they were trying really hard. That was my experience my entire life, was trying so so hard. I felt like I was always missing the key to to open up some sort of social acceptance, and that study is just such a perfect picture of how easily we are missed. And as an non-binary person who was assigned female, that was so much my experience of of life and growing up. And so the idea that even clinicians these days will tell us that if we desire to have relationships or friendships, that we can't possibly be autistic… That is just so unbelievable to me, because even solitary autistic boys who present quote unquote "typically" when it comes to autism still want and have bonds with other human beings, and value those bonds. With Sam, I think in revisions I got even more militant about these things when I was just like, "We do have feelings, and we do have empathy!" Most of the autistic people I know actually fall on the hyper empathic scale of things, where we feel too much and can't turn it off.JuliaSince I've since I've learned a lot more about autism as an adult —and I really only started learning about the real different ways that autism actually presents probably three or four years ago —it's been fairly recent, and it took me a while to really internalize that, oh, this matches my experience of the world in so many ways. This is simultaneously a very powerful realization, because it makes me able to reframe and forgive myself for things that I've done that have just not worked out for me. But also make me realize things that I already had started doing to compensate.I realized several years ago, and this is before I'd learned anything about how autism presents, that I react very differently to sensory input than some people. And I had not realized that this was a difference about me until one day… it was a winter day, and I went to a friend's solstice party, and it was very dark because it was the afternoon. Where I live, it gets in very dark at like 4pm in the midwinter time, and so it was it was very dark and very cold outside, and I got to this person's house and I rang the doorbell. And inside, the house was all brightly lit and the heaters were on and it was a party full of people and I went from outside, cold, dark, with only my headphones and music that I was listening to on my own, to sudden, inside a very brightly lit, warm place full of people. And my friend let me in and was like, "Hi. Welcome. How are you?"I looked at her and I said, "I'm sorry, just give me a minute to accustom myself to the temperature change and stuff." And she was like, "What?" And I thought that this is just a normal thing that most people did. It's like you just need minute to recalibrate. I'm not in a dark, cold, outside place. Now I'm in a warm, bright, inside place.MayaAnd there's people here.JuliaYeah, and I've got to readjust before I can actually talk to you. Like, I cannot answer your question about how I'm doing. That's not possible at the moment.Maya Yeah.JuliaI thought that was just something everybody experienced, but it turned out no. In fact, the vast majority of people don't think twice about it. They just would go into that house and immediately be engaging in whatever the rules of the social situation would say that you should do.MayaYeah, and there's so much active processing that happens in those social situations as well. We call it camouflaging or masking. Over painstaking, long periods of trial and error, most autistic people learn (to a degree) social scripting. And that's a constant thing. Even in our conversation, my brain is reminding me to make a sound of agreement at certain intervals to cue that I am paying attention.But that's an active part of me, because of like I've learned by being yelled at if I'm sitting listening to someone and not making eye contact contact, and looking at something else. They assume I'm not listening, and that I don't care.JuliaYeah, and I've always struggled with that. I remember getting in trouble with my teacher in first grade for not looking at her. MayaYeah.JuliaThis is also sort of complicated for me because I've also always had vision problems, and my eyes don't track together, so one eye is always going off in a different direction. So even if I am theoretically trying to look at a person, they might see my other eye wandering and assume I'm not looking at them.And I remember just getting in trouble. I was at a catholic school and this was a very scary nun.MayaOh god.JuliaShe was like, "You're not paying attention to me. You don't look at me when I speak. You're very disrespectful." When I'm listening really hard, a lot of the time the way that I listen is by turning away.MayaYep! JuliaAnd like maybe even closing my eyes because I'm focusing so hard on hearing.MayaYeah, that's 100 % how I am as well and it happens all the time, to the point where it's sort of comical, where I'll be out somewhere with people and there'll be other background noise and so I have to look away from the person speaking if I'm going to actually hear them. It never fails where they will track where I'm looking and I'll have to be like, "No, there's nothing over there. I'm just looking at a completely innocuous patch of grass because I need to hear you better."That's something that doesn't make sense to a lot of people, but that's something that's really normal for me. I really have to focus, especially because I have auditory processing delays, which hit really hard if there's any sort of competing noise. I can do like one masking script at a time. It's either make eye contact with a person, or hear what they're saying. JuliaRight.MayaAnd I generally prefer to hear what they're saying to forcing myself to make eye contact that feels really uncomfortable for me.JuliaYeah, and I think that there are lots of things like that. There are lots of little ways that I've sort of arranged my life so I compensate. I have had multiple conversations with people where I'm like, "Oh, you know I listen better if I'm looking down, and I'm not not listening to you." And I've sort of just started saying that to people, which I had started doing several years ago before I'd ever worked out anything about autism. And I usually, if asked, would have explained it as like, I have all these vision problems and focusing my eyes takes extra effort, which it does. But like people I think are more likely to believe that physical reason. MayaYeah.JuliaBut the thing that I was going to say, when you talked about if anything autistic people that you know seem to have hyper empathy. MayaYeah.JuliaYes. I can't count the number of people that I've met who are actually autistic who say things like, "I cannot watch embarrassment humor, like it hurts me physically to watch it."MayaYeah, Always Sunny and Curb Your Enthusiasm, like I could not make it through much of those shows because it's like actively physically painful for me to watch. And I really struggle with some things

It's another writing process conversation! This time, Maya MacGregor joins me to discus their process in writing The Many Half-Lived Lives of Sam Sylvester. This book is a delightful YA mystery/ghost story with an autistic and non-binary main character. I was fully engrossed in the mystery aspect of it, and also loved to see the main character finding a supportive community. Content note for this book: it does mention trauma and hate crimes. That said, it's overall very much about surviving and thriving and not about sensationalized suffering. You can listen to the interview and/or read the full transcript below. Content warning for this interview: We briefly discuss hate crimes, including murder, and homophobic language used on school playgrounds. This discussion starts around 23 minutes into the podcast and lasts for about a minute and a half, so please skip ahead if you don't want to hear it. JuliaWelcome to the OMG Julia podcast, where we talk about creative lives and processes. This time I have author Maya MacGregor with me to talk about their book, The Many Half-Lived Lives of Sam Sylvester. Welcome, Maya.MayaThank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.JuliaIt's very exciting to talk to you. I recently listened to the audio book version of this book, and I loved it. It's a super fun YA mystery book and Sam Sylvester our main character is autistic and non-binary, and I thought this was a wonderful time to have you come in and talk to us about that your process of writing a YA novel, a mystery novel, and autistic and non-binary characters, and the ways that you approached all of those different things. How they intersect, and also just in general your writing process and your road to publication with this particular book. I know you've been published before so it's not the first time for you, but I know that every book has its own journey, so I'd love to get into all of those things. Maya Yeah, absolutely.JuliaBefore we start with all of that, would you please introduce yourself to us and tell us a little bit about you and your career as an author?MayaMy name's Maya MacGregor. I live in Glasgow, Scotland and I was US born, but I've moved around a lot during my life and I'm settled here. I'm a fluent Gaelic speaker. In addition to my writing career I also sing in two Gaelic choirs, including the Alba choir that competed at Eurovision in 2019. I have mostly written adult fiction through most of my career. Sam Sylvester was my seventeenth finished novel, and ended up being my seventeenth published novel as well, I think. For a long time, I was fairly adamant that I was only going to write adult. And then in 2017, this character just sort of popped into my head and wouldn't really let me go, so I sat down and wrote the book quite quickly. It came really naturally, and I had no idea what I was doing when I started writing it. One of my good friends, Sarah Glenn Marsh, who's amazing and a fantastic author herself, read the book chapter by chapter as I wrote it. I was just sending it to her just sort of like, "Can you just at least tell me if this is terrible?" and she was so enthusiastic. She just devoured the chapters the second I sent them to her, so she gave me a lot of confidence with what I was doing.Getting into YA has been fascinating and really different, because I've always read it, but I wasn't sure that I was ever going to write it. So my career has really spanned a lot of adult fantasy from sort of gritty noir superhero novels, to urban fantasy that's sort of Buffy The Vampire Slayer meets Supernatural, to sprawling epic fantasy. And so I've done a lot. It's been really fascinating to do a lot of diverse projects. Sam's just been a really wonderful part of my development with my craft and my career.JuliaSo when you you said this just popped into your head and you wrote it right away, what was the thing that kind of started it? Was it the mystery? Was it the character? Was it something else?MayaI think it was actually the title that popped into my head first. Originally the paranormal aspect of this book was that these lives were actually Sam's past lives, like Sam's reincarnated lives. But we got a revise and resubmit request from a major publisher after we were submitting it and one of the things that they said was they wanted it to be more of just a straight contemporary. So I took that out and ended up folding a lot of a lot of that aspect into Sam's autism, and these half-lived lives as a special interest, which I think worked really well. But when when we sold the book a lot of that sort of migrated, and so like when I look back I feel like a lot of what initially sort of kicked the book off didn't end up staying in it, which is fascinating to me. The soul of the book is exactly what I wanted it to be, so I think it just, through that evolution, sort of found the core story that I was originally trying to tell, even if it doesn't look exactly like I expected it to.JuliaWas Sam always autistic, even in the first draft? MayaYes.JuliaOkay, so you just decided to roll the reincarnation into a special interest, but you already had Sam as an autistic character?MayaSam was already autistic, already non binary. The only things that really got taken out were the the the literal aspects of past lives. So pretty much everything in the final draft is there. The book actually grew by 25,000 words over the course of editing, so less got cut than got added, and so pretty much everything that's on the page was also in the first draft.JuliaOkay, so really quickly pitch us the book, like the premise of the book as it is finished now, so that in case anybody's listening to this who hasn't read it, they know kind of what it's about.MayaThe Many Half-Lived Lives of Sam Sylvester is about an autistic, non-binary teen who flees Montana after a traumatic incident and settles with their father in Astoria, Oregon, in a home where, thirty years before, a young boy died mysteriously. And the house has its own feel to it, and its own presences within it, and through that Sam has to solve this mystery as well as come to terms with their own past.JuliaYeah, okay, great. I feel like the mystery is definitely a central part of the the plot, like everybody in the town is aware of it, and Sam digging into it kind of also stirs up lots of old business with the people in the town.MayaYeah, absolutely. I got asked a question last night about the setting of the book and why I chose to set it where I did in Astoria, Oregon. It's not a huge town. It's quite small. I wanted a place that was big enough that you could feasibly avoid people that you didn't want to see, but that where you're going to see familiar faces when you go out. and the people who have been there a long time know each other, and they're aware of the big happenings and the things that transpire within its boundaries. And that really played a role in the story itself, because you have people who've been in Astoria for 30 or 40 years, and the events of the backstory actually acted on their lives and their experiences and we see that throughout the story as Sam interacts with them as a newcomer.JuliaRight. Had you ever been there before?MayaYeah, so one of the eight states I've lived in is Oregon. With my moms, I lived in Portland, and so we would go to Astoria on the coast for holidays and wee day trips. I spent, not a heap of time there, but I always liked visiting it because there's just a beautiful, really stark coastline and I remember haystack rock being this just enormous stack of rock out in the surf, and it's so imposing. It's just an amazing view from there. And it has a certain feel to it in the Pacific Northwest. It's a lot like Scotland, honestly. Like lots of rainfall. Lots of cloud cover. Wind, and, along the coast particularly, there's a severity to it that is something that suits the sort of ambiance of the story. It has a lot of memories to me as both a place of comfort and a place of that sort of stark beauty.JuliaOkay, so talk to me about your process in writing this character as a non-binary, autistic teen? I asked my patrons if they had questions —that's one of their perks is that they can get the chance to ask questions of anyone that I'm interviewing— and one of the questions that came up was of course what resources did you draw on when writing an autistic and nonbinary character? I'd love to hear what resources you drew on, but also just how you approached it, and what was important to you to include in that portrayal.MayaSo this is a really particularly personal book for me because the main resource I drew on was my own life. I am an autistic, non-binary person and there are a lot of aspects of Sam's experience that are straight out of my own. When I started writing this book, I wanted to write the book that I wish I'd had when I was a young gremlin. It's really fascinating for me to look at now because I wasn't diagnosed at all until I was about 30, and I didn't get my formal diagnosis until I was 36, so I went most of my life just feeling like a freak and not having a clue why I couldn't seem to understand social cues, or that I always seemed to get everything wrong when I did something. And people would get angry at me and call me names for reasons that I couldn't understand, and it didn't make any sense to me. And I wanted to write a story where where Sam actually had the language, and they they had the ability to know what was going on with them from an early age. Sam was misdiagnosed first, but their dad is such a wonderful character and he really pressed to make sure that Sam got the correct diagnosis. So a lot of that came out of my experience. Sam is not just me on the page. Sam is quite different to me in a lot of different ways. But as I was going through the editorial process on this book, it was during 2020 and 2021, and I actually got my formal diagnosis as I was going through the editorial process. And at the same t

This is part two of my interview with C. S. E. Cooney about her publishing journey for Saint Death’s Daughter, featuring questions from my patrons. You can listen, or read the transcript below, and in case you missed it, part 1 of this interview is here! If you have not already devoured Saint Death’s Daughter in one day, like I did, I encourage you to check it out! It’s available as a printed book, an ebook, and an audiobook, and Claire does her own narration for the audio version!JuliaWelcome to the OMG Julia Podcast, where we talk about creative lives and processes. This is part 2 of my interview with C. S. E. Cooney about her journey to publication with Saint Death’s Daughter. We’re picking up this conversation after Claire told us about how she loves to read her first drafts aloud. JuliaI love that about you! I love working with you, because I've done work at the same time and place as you, and even if I'm not super productive during those times, I always love hearing what you've come up with. Because I feel like I've gotten a lot out of just talking through plots with you, even if I haven't been writing. ClaireI Do. I Love that part. Yeah.JuliaBecause I think that writing is a lot of different things, and some of that is getting the words actually down on the page, but some of it is actually just being in a place where you can think through story structure, and what is actually happening. And one thing that I've learned about myself over years and years and years of basically feeling like I must be broken because I don't write x words every day… Which, there is so much advice out there that's like, “You're not a writer if you don't write every single day.” And I don't. I don't write every single day. ClaireYeah, it's so harmful. Oh my gosh.JuliaI have to have a long period of time usually before any project where I just kind of like think about it. And now that I've learned that this is how I work, it really has made a huge difference for me. Because I know that if someone has asked me to write a story for an anthology or something, I can tell myself very clearly, “You know we have to write a story for this anthology. So, let's start thinking about that.” And then I go about my business doing other things, but I'll be working through the problem in the back of my mind. And I will do research and I'll do other things, but the whole time, what I'm really doing is the hard brain work of invisibly creating something inside my head that I don't even necessarily really fully understand until I actually start writing. And I won't be ready to start writing until it's ready.ClaireI feel like I do that process, but I do it in drafts rather than in my brain first. But I draft a lot, like 4 to 8 drafts sometimes, so it's like I write before I even know what I want to write, before sometimes I have an idea. And that makes a whole draft before my draft starts, but sometimes it's just like this vague, you know, itch. Or a character, or even like a feeling between two characters. Like, what is that? How do you make that? Like, I wanted to write a theater story and I knew what the theater troupe did. And I kind of knew the world they did it in but I didn't have characters you know like the troupe was almost like an entity but somebody still has to tell the story. There has to actually be a plot. And these elements of this theater troupe that does this thing in a world that does this thing… those were like the tensions grinding against each other. So I had the 2 major tensions, but what are the pieces at play within those tensions? And I didn't know that until I started, you know, wrote the first line, which came out of nowhere.JuliaRight? yeah.ClaireAnd then I figured my way through from there. But it's funny how much you can do with 2 grinding tensions. JuliaI mean, yes, as the actress said to the bishop. You can count on me for that 12-year-old humor. ClaireLOL. Anytime, Julia Rios.JuliaNo, but I find that for me, I used to be the kind of person who writes a zero draft that's not a first draft. It's the draft where I try to tell myself what I'm even writing, and it's a giant mess and completely often unsalvageable. So I have many, many old stories languishing on hard drives that are just like a complete mess. It doesn't do anything for me, and many of them are such a mess that I've never come back to them. It's like, it's not worth it. Now that I know that I kind of have to do this percolating thing, my drafts come out a lot cleaner. Which isn't to say that I don't end up having to change them and edit them. I do! It's just that my rate of unsalvageable muck is lower.ClaireThat's cool. You can actually work on it because you're not shuddering away from it.JuliaAnd because there's something to work on. I literally, because I tried to do NaNoWriMo many years, and I had so many attempts at it that just came out as just a mess. Not a mess that you're like, “Oh, this could turn into a good story!” Just like, what is even happening here? No one knows.ClaireHave you over have you ever tried to do a NaNoWriMo where you've spent all year thinking and prepping for it the way you do for a short story for an anthology?JuliaI think, yes, I have, and that's probably the one that came the closest to actually being decent. This was many years ago, though, and I say close to being decent, by which I mean, like, had a full story arc. And I don't think I finished the word count during NaNoWriMo. I definitely didn't finish the novel during NaNoWriMo, but I had been thinking about it a lot before I started it, and I did do a big chunk of it during NaNoWriMo. I don't remember if I did 50,000 words or if those 50,000 words ended up staying. I think I still have that saved somewhere, possibly in a Google drive. But it's the kind of thing that also it was so long ago. I haven't attempted NaNoWriMo in many years because I finally figured out that like, hey, you know what? Trying to push myself in that particular way isn't actually productive for me. ClaireYeah, that's what Ellen Kushner once called the cult of word count, which, I have to say, I mean, all these years later: Saint Death's Daughter! But it is not really the story I wrote in NaNoWriMo, though there are many elements… Like, you could see the origins there. JuliaI don't think it's a cult of word count. I think that it's a really useful tool for some people. I think it depends a lot on what kind of writer you are. ClaireYeah, I always wanted to do it again.JuliaI know people for whom they have a great time and they come out of it with something that they enjoy. And I know several self publishers who, like, a lot of the people who really are successful in self publishing can just crank out stuff and they are very prolific. They have an idea of what they want to do and they just sit down and do it, and they do that over and over again. And if you're really fast, doing something with a bunch of other people and knowing that everybody's doing it at the same time can be a very powerful tool.ClaireI've always wanted to do it again, and I never have, and I wonder why. It was like that 1 year in Chicago, and, I mean, I was commuting an hour both ways to the bookstore that I worked at. I'd come home and I remember that I would read a chapter of Jane Eyre (which I've read an umpteenth billion times) right before writing, because I couldn't get started without having read something, but I couldn't read something that I would get into too much, because I didn't want to lose all my time to reading something that I found super fascinating, but it had to be really good. Because it had to feed the writing itself. So Jane Eyre was the book of choice, and I would set a timer. I'd read for a half hour, and then I would try to do 2,000 words, and it was really interesting, and it created a lot of cool things. And I feel like I was like, “This is cool. This works.” If I did that every month, oh boy. What a writer I would be! And it made it feel possible to to be that kind of writer, and yet I've never been able to duplicate it.JuliaWell, the other thing I wonder is, for you, if that isn't the kind of thing that you can sometimes do in a sprint, but can't do in a marathon setting. And often when you're writing as a career, you're doing a writing marathon. You're not doing a writing sprint.ClaireYeah. Yeah, maybe I'll do it this year, though who knows? It would be cool. You know, it'd be cool if I wrote the next two drafts of Miscellaneous Stones —sorry, of Saint Death's Daughter. I still do call it by its old title, or just by her name, really— if I did both drafts as NaNoWriMo to start with, to give myself, like, starting time motivation. You know, like, here's the seed… and maybe if I start out with 50,000 words and I don't give myself 12 years, it won't turn into almost. 200,000 words. Maybe I could just kind of keep it in… But, you know, usually a second draft doubles. So like 100,000 words is not bad for a novel, you know. We could maybe keep it at that that.JuliaSo you mentioned NaNoWriMo, and you said that this is what came out of it. Was this actually your NaNoWriMo novel?ClaireIt was, but it wasn't the beginning. The beginning is further back than that, though I often count the first draft of Saint Death's Daughter as the NaNoWriMo. I think it was 2006. But, before that, was a short story in Phyllis Eisenstein's science fiction class at Columbia College, where there was the idea of a girl raised in a family of assassins. But it was a sci-fi story, and the butler was not a housekeeper, and it was not undead. It was a robot, a robot butler named Graves. So, before that, though… Several years before that, either I was just in college or just before college, my friend Kiri took me out shooting in the Arizona desert. We were both raised in Arizona. She said, “You're going to be a writer. At some point you probably will have to write about guns, so you should definitely shoot a gun sometime during your life, and I want to be the one to take you to shoot a gun.” So we went out to the desert to shoot guns, and we had noise canceling headphones and everything, but either mine weren't working or my ears are very sensitive or bullets are just that loud, but it was so loud that after the first shot I was getting heart palpitations and my hands were sweaty because I didn't want to hear that sound again. I was like, “Oh gosh, if this had a silencer on it I'd be a badass assassin, but it doesn't and I'm afraid of the sound. Wouldn't it be interesting if there was a character who was supposed to be an assassin, but was allergic to violence?”That was the idea, and I remember when it happened, and it didn't show up in a short story for several years, and it didn't turn into a NaNoWrio novel. But the idea has always been appealing, especially throughout all the media and books I've read, and still am reading, where violence is such a problem solving tool on a micro and macro scale. There are so many TV shows where, if you don't agree with someone, you punch them in the face, which is not how my life works at all. And then like on an epic fantasy scale, if you don't agree with someone, you invade their country and you kill all of their orcs or whatever, you know? And I just thought like what if she doesn't have that option? What else can we do if you don't have that option? How many workarounds does somebody have to figure out in their life? In a world like ours that's full of violence, but you're incapable of it? Not that you don't want to sometimes, but that even wanting punishes you?I mean, I still think it's an interesting idea. Thank goodness, because it's still enough of an idea to create two more books out of, I think. And then trying to turn it and look at it from a different point of view. What does violence mean? What does history mean? What is, like, not only the violence of a physical violence, but the violence of your own history? The lies and the biases and the prejudices you've been told? The violence of your own education? How seeing the world and growing a little older and thinking about things differently, and learning another language changes your mind, you know? So, I mean, I still think that's interesting. JuliaYeah, I mean I think it's very interesting. I think that you really do dive into a lot of those questions, and it's very cool to see Miscellaneous Stones exploring them.Yeah, I think this leads into… This is a good place to dig into a question from Francesca Forrest.ClaireOh, I Love her!JuliaThat's because she's delightful! So, she says, “I know Claire's journey with this novel is very long. I'd love to hear what the most important differences are between the novel now and the novel she started so long ago, and which things have remained the same or very similar over all the years.”ClaireThe first novel, that was 50,000 words almost exactly, was very cheeky. It's very lighthearted, and the violence is cartoonish, and the consequences are surface. It's as funny as I could have made it at the time, which isn't very. But what has happened since then? Well, many things. Many drafts, many years, and also Carlos. And one of the wonderful things about Carlos—so he caught me at about draft four, so he's been with it for more than half the book, more than half of the drafts. It was about eight full drafts till it hit the agent and went on submission, and then a couple more drafts from the editor. So, Carlos did many, many things for me, but the three things that stand out are:The child, DatuThe father, Mac The Scratches, the Scratch family So, in the original, the child, Datu, is like one of those anime 6-year-old genius serial killers. Do you know what I mean? Like, cold stone killer, acrobatics, dance on the edge of a leaf. Really funny and witty, but also six years old. And he was like, “She's a child. She's six years old. She may have been trained. You know, like, you see children gymnasts who are capable of amazing things, or children Broadway performers, or child actors who've won the Academy Award, and they are amazing. They're still children, and that level of savant genius has a toll, generally.” He kept being dissatisfied. He's like, “We've seen cartoon death child already. Like, what else have you got?” So, I think Datu’s really different.Mac, the father, really different. Because he's one of the only nurturing, moral male characters in the in the novel. And I think Carlos was just like, You know, give me more than brooding male / potential love interest.” Earlier drafts, he definitely was Lanie's love interest, and I've moved far away from that. Because it is more interesting. Satisfying romantically is one thing, and what I kind of like to read and am inclined to write. But what is more intellectually and emotionally interesting now is different. And he's like, “I don't think if one's sister has enslaved a man, got her child upon him, abused him in many ways, that it's very likely that that man will end up falling in love with you, unless it's super traumatic and ugly, you know?” Like, he was just so repulsed by it in a way that was so different from every romance novel ever that takes a damaged man and puts it with your protagonist and by the end he's not as damaged because love has saved him, or whatever. Like all of those tropes that I grew up with. So he kept saying that. He kept being dissatisfied. And, you know, his best friend Maggie once told me, “You have too high of an opinion of his high opinion.” But the truth is I do want his high opinion so badly, and it tells me something when I can make him cry or laugh. Like, it's working. That's what I want. And when I make him make a certain face like, this just isn't right! This doesn't feel good. “Give me something. Mac has to be better than that. You have to make him better.”So he really turned into, in many ways, a moral center. He's wrong sometimes. But he thinks about it, comes back, and says, “I was wrong about that.” You know, he's actually capable of growth. He has such an interesting internal life. And he and Lanie become like brother and sister, true brother and sister almost in spite of everything that happened to them. Consciously, to make this decision to be family, that’s something that is a huge difference from brooding man who turns into a falcon, totally damaged, awesome, scarred, so hot, ends up being the love interest that lightheartedly, coyly flirts with you at the end sort of thing. I still have that Mac inside of me, but he doesn't fit anywhere in the future of Lanie Stones. What does fit in is an increasingly interesting intimate. Not sibling the way she and her sister are siblings, but like, will be there for you if you need me. Always, and in both physical and spiritual ways. And then, the Scratches… There's like the huge major villain, which is the Blackbird Bride, which, I actually am a little in love with her, and I feel deep pity for her. But she's also, like, she just needs to be shaken some sense into, and she's not capable of being shaken sense into. She was not born that way. But the Scratches are the villains on the ground, or at least the antagonists. They are definitely working against the Stoneses, for reasons that are both apparent and mysterious. There's the front reason, like, you owe us money. And then there's the deep-seated, like, your family versus my family a hundred years ago, feudal reasons.But the nature of the scratches… They were very much like cartoon villains, and in the first draft, by the end, Lanie had turned them into like neon colored bunny rabbits. That was what her magic did. They ended up being a bunch of neon bunny rabbits that she sold to a circus or something like that. That was that story. It is not that story anymore. There's no magic that turns anybody into neon colored bunny rabbits, and there are severe consequences to the Scratches doing things the way they do. Which is, you know, sometimes with violence, and sometimes with arrogance, or with coldness, or with an uncompromising vision. And not everybody survives that.And the Scratches, once they have enough power to do so, change their name back to their true name, and they start to live by their own standards. They'd been sort of subsuming themselves for so many years, but like the nature of of culture and language again like they kind of represent a lot of that and they are very reasonable and and yet have been part of a people who have been very oppressed and downtrodden for. Hundred years so like there's a there's like they occupy a whole different space. So I would say those are the 3 and I blame Carlos for all of them but also just like living in the world a little longer than 27 years Ah also helped.JuliaYeah, I mean, I'll say one thing that I noticed a lot, reading the final version versus the the draft that I read so many years ago… because I think it was probably ten years ago that I read a draft of this. ClaireYeah.JuliaFor me, some of the things that stood out were just how much more real a lot of the world felt. And I don't mean like I could imagine being there, because I feel like you always have drawn worlds that I could imagine being in. They're very vivid. And your writing voice tends to draw people in that way. So it's normal to think, “Oh, I'm reading something by C. S. E. Cooney and I feel like I could just walk into this world.”But the realness was more of this sort of like… The sense that all of this frivolity was happening in the harmony and contrast with oppression and suffering and what those things specifically meant and how they tied into each other and fed each other on multiple axes. And I don't know if part of that is just your deepening life experience or part of that is having feedback from different people. But I think, like, you were talking about the character of Mac, and how he changed from being just like a hot scarred hawk guy and into someone who has become in a lot of ways a moral center, and I think that I noticed that with Goody Graves as well. ClaireYeah.JuliaIn the draft that I remember first reading, Goody Graves was just sort of like a loyal retainer who was always there and liked Lanie. And that's great and cool, and it's also you know, unexpected that your loyal retainer is going to be an undead, stone, statue person. But in this draft you you learn a lot more about who she is and her backstory and what she is capable of doing or not doing, and it makes it feel that much more real and rich because you have a lot more — there's a lot more to chew on, I guess.ClaireYeah, Amal said when she read it —this will always stay with me, “It’s like I can see your stretch marks.” You know like she's read so much, like you, I feel like she can see all the layers. I don't think she ever read an earlier draft. And I'm very aware of the draft you read, because you were the one who gave me the language of the many gendered god of fire, and I remember changing that because of how you were very gently like, “I don't think we use those words anymore.” And then I started thinking about gender in a different way, because, at some point in our lives, we have to start. You know like if you don't know something, there's a point where you learn it, and that was the point where I learned like, oh, a fire god, a many-gendered god of fire makes it much more interesting and open and like less like, “Oh, I don't want to touch that…” You know, like, you gave me my god of fire, Julia.JuliaOh, that's so nice! I love the way that worked out, by the way. And I really love that the inn that she sort of ends up working at has a history of having been a brothel at one point, and it's still actually there and informs the present of it today. And I love the character that's clearly Patty Templeton.ClaireDread! Yes, I want to write the novella that's mentioned in the footnote about Havoc Dreadnought. Havoc: the life and times of Havoc Dreadnoought, and how she… like there's a huge footnote about it, and yeah, I want that to be the title of a novella someday. JuliaI guarantee you you will have a built-in readership for that.ClaireYeah, I love the school. So there's an inn, and on top of the inn is a bakery, and on top of the bakery is a school, and the the school part had been a brothel, but they leave a lot of the brothel trappings to sort of, the footnote says, to lure people into higher education. To lure the unsuspecting into higher education. I feel like some of the cheekiness of the first draft, when I really just wanted to be Terry Pratchett and failed constantly. I'd lost a lot of the humor in many of the drafts to come, and then I just missed it so much that, very late in the drafting process… There was so much world-building and backstory that I wanted that didn't fit into the narrative flow, and so many jokes that I wanted to make that delighted me, so that's when the footnotes happened.I was like, I have to cut all this, ooh, but I could put it in a footnote and then make it even funnier! So that's what I did and I feel like Jasper Fforde, Terry Pratchett Susannah Clarke, you know, I think they sort of give you permission to do footnotes.And when I was younger, if a story had footnotes in it, I would actually not read them. It just didn't occur to me to do so. And I feel like if a younger person, or somebody who hates footnotes, read Saint Death’s Daughter through, they'd still get it without having to read the footnotes, but the footnotes are the parts that made me laugh out loud. And I don't easily respond to my own writing like that. But some of the footnotes still make me laugh.And I have to say that's what Carlos says. When he's writing, if he can make himself laugh out loud, he knows it's working, because it's like tickling yourself. It's a lot harder to do.JuliaYeah, I 100% agree with that. Okay, so last Patron question is, “I would love to find out what it was like finding an agent and how your agent helps you in your career.”ClaireOkay, yeah, it's so hard. I thought when I was first setting out to find an agent, I'm like, “I'm going to submit to an agent a day. No, five agents a day!” It's a numbers game —everybody says it's a numbers game— if you can get to a hundred submissions, your chances are so much higher than if you do ten submissions, but so is dating, they say. I don't know how similar or dissimilar they are, but what I found when I was submitting….First of all, it's sort of like the cover letter and the synopsis takes a lot of eyes and brains. You definitely want to get some friends on it, especially friends who've already gone through the process. For doing the synopsis, if you have three friends who've read your book, basically what I ask them is, “Could each of you write your version of a synopsis of my book and send it to me?” My friend Caitlyn is really good at that. So I think Carlos maybe did, and Caitlyn did, and I had my synopsis. And Caitlyn's really good at making my book sound like something somebody would want to read. I wrote a very stilted like, “And then, she very formally did this thing in an elucidating sort of way, and you know there was a villain…” or whatever. It just was very stiff, and she'd be like, “Kapow! Kablam! Exclamation point!” I mean it all felt like an exclamation point. It felt like an actual back of a book, and by reading her synopsis, I saw what was important or what stood out, or like, “Oh that's what it feels like to write a compelling synopsis. I think she left a few important things out which I will slip in and try to do it more in her style…” And then again if you have a third view, it's even better because then you can have a pretty hefty, true to the story synopsis in a way that you, as a writer, may be too close to write initially. So I say cover letter, synopsis… And cover letter is much like a cover letter for a submission for a short story, where you give your credits. So you have to make yourself look like you're worth reading the first chapter of, I guess. Which doesn't necessarily mean that you have to have a bunch of credits to your name, but you just have to, I guess, be confident, or know who you are, or at least be polite and professional. So anyway. All of that to say that I set out with this very what Caitlyn calls Big Book Energy. You know, I'm going to do all of this because it's a numbers game! And I found that like after submitting one, I had this terrible headache. My stomach was a mess. I had to go lay down, and the whole day was shot, and I was like damn it this is not how you win a numbers game! But I couldn't, emotionally, make myself do more than one a day, very rarely more than one a week, so it was a very, for me, slow process. I Still don't know, if I have to do it again, how would I do it. Because it would just… I'd hope I'd be tougher now. And I'd hope I'd make better lists and do things better, but actually I think it will always be hard, and it's what mood people are in how overwhelmed they are, how much they might like the thing that you're writing. And, boy, like books are so personal and so intimate. So I would say that I sent it out to a lot of people. I got very few responses. Some of the responses I got quick were just, “This is not for me. Didn't catch my interest.” And you try to think, “Ah, I didn't catch their interest. I am boring. Nobody loves me.” Eventually, I got a great response from one of the submission editors at New Leaf, I think they're called. I loved every single agent bio that I read, I loved their mission statement, I was like, “Oh, these people! I want these people to read my book and love me!” And it got to the submissions editor or agent, the one who reads things before they send it up to the main agent, like kind of to get you past the slush pile, and she just wrote back with such enthusiasm! And she's like, “I'm going to set it up to my boss right away!”Even just that stage, even to get any kind of feedback of that tone of voice that I'd been waiting for… I want the people who represent me to have that tone of voice! And it did get passed up to her agent, and I think she even was reading it, but I think she had a baby and a lot of things.And in that interim, when she was reading it and having a baby and life was happening, Markus Hoffmann at Regal Hoffmann & Associates also read it. And he was a suggestion of a writing friend, who said, “This is my agent. I really like him. just tell him I sent you.” So that was a kind of a Who You Know moment. It was Audrey Niffenegger, who I had met once at Columbia College Chicago. We were on a panel together. She had been a teacher there and I had been a student. She wrote The Time Traveler's Wife. So we were Facebook friends, but we had had literally no interaction since that one panel we were on, where we were on a panel but didn't really talk to each other, we just talked with each other. And she saw on Facebook when I was like, “Oh, this agent quest, it's such a slog.” You know, how one does when one's on an agent quest. She private messaged me and she said, “Try Regal Hoffman. I didn't know you didn't have an agent.” You know, like, tell him I sent you… So Marcus got back to me and he wrote an email. He said, “I quite like the first 50 pages. May I see the rest?” And then he wrote an email saying, “I would love to talk to you to tell you about this agency.” When I talked to him, I just loved him immediately. He said all the right things, and in such a tone of voice, very European. He's German, and just gentle and warm and really incisive, and had great questions, and… It's like that kind of person you want on your team, that he'll be the editor before your editor gets to you. He'll be the editor who makes the draft that makes the the publication happen. So just on all of those levels, I really clicked. So I wrote to the people at New Leaf, who still had my manuscript. I was like, “I'm sorry, I'm going with another agency.” And that agent had just read it and said, “Oh, I just finished it! I was about to write to you.” So I feel this very warm radiant feeling toward New Leaf, and I think I feel like if I had gone a little further in the process, maybe would have not been so emotionally wrecked by it, I would have gotten better at it. I would have gotten a tighter and tighter synopsis and cover letter. You know, it might have taken 50 or 100 more, but I think eventually it would have happened. That it happened this fast, I think, was due to the shortcuts of going to conventions, being on panels, that whole networking web that happens that you think will never happen that it's really hard to make happen on purpose. But Gene Wolfe once told me, “You know, all networking means is making friends.” And you don't really make friends with this cold eye of calculation of what your friends will do for you someday, you just sort of make friends who all love the things you love writing and reading, you know, and then sometimes somebody knows somebody who knows somebody, and that's one way to do it. But I think the other way also works. It just takes longer and has a toll. So I would say, working with my agent is amazing. I sometimes like think of him as like a ninja elven prince. Yeah, that's the space in my brain he occupies. He's sly, he likes things like talking up my book, and making deals, and like, going to parties. Things that I don't really know how to do, and don't really want to know how to do. he has people who do the contracts like, “Markus, can you look at this contract because it's scary?” And then he'll look at it, and he does things that I can't. I don't have the tool set, and I'm so, so grateful. And as Carlos and I have done some collaborative projects, It's been really fun, because Carlos's agent is DongWon Song and mine is Markus Hoffmann, but they used to almost work together at one point. They knew each other! And they met at a house party at our house, and they're like, “What are you doing here?” So they get to work together sometimes on mutual contracts and it's really nice that they already had a kind of warm, friendly relationship.JuliaOh, that is nice. So how long would you say it took from the time you started sending queries out until the time you ended up with an agent?ClaireIt's it's really hard to say because, like at one point I had sent it to an agent and he suggested these edits, so that took me six months to make the edits and turn it back in. He suggested more edits, and at that point, I thought, “Ooh. I liked the first round of edits a lot, but the second set of edits sounds like the book he wants is not the book I want to write.” And so I gently backed away very amicably and then started submitting again.And then there maybe comes a time where it's like, “Oh, I can't believe I ever thought that draft was worth submitting. I think I need to just sit down and rework it.” You know? So it was a lot of stops and starts, and it was years. I think I started submitting it at the fourth draft and it wasn't until like draft eight that it got an agent. That's at least a draft a year, so I would say maybe four years for that one. Some people don't ever start submitting until they are totally sure they're done. Me, I'm like totally sure I'm done after my first draft, and then two weeks later I'm like, “What was I thinking?” And you know then twelve years later it's ready…JuliaOkay, well thank you so much for talking to me about this. We didn't talk about your career as an Audiobook narrator at all, which is a sort of a separate thing from your writing career. Except for when you narrate your own books. ClaireYes, thank goodness.JuliaAnd so I want to close this out by asking how was the experience of narrating this novel as a narrator who is also the writer of the book? Did you always know it was going to be you? Did you really want it to be you? And what was the whole experience like?ClaireThat's a great question, and it has a complicated answer, so forgive me beforehand. So, if I could have gotten a world class, phenomenal, powerful narrator like one of the ones I listen to all the time, like Kate Reading, for example. Or who's the really famous one? Simon Vance. You know, somebody of that caliber. Then I would totally have wanted somebody else to narrate my audiobook. But most narrators are like me, where we're pretty good. We make a living, or we would make a living if we lived in a small town and had two roommates. But since I'm married to Carlos, you know, I make a living as far as I'm concerned, but not like a New York City living. Anyway, so if somebody is just going to be very good, and I know I'm pretty good, and I know how to pronounce all my made up words. So that part of my narrating writing brain is like, “I should probably do it unless they get somebody extraordinary.” Which sounds… I don't know how it sounds, but that's how my brain works. Now, Carlos, and my mother, and a couple people who love me very much have agitated strongly from the beginning that no matter if they got Kate Reading or Simon Vance, I should still be the one to narrate it, which I fight against because there's a part of me that is not arrogant enough to think that that my text couldn't be improved upon by somebody else. I would be eager to listen to a different interpretation. It's easier to listen to somebody else's voice than my own, even though I like my voice just fine. All of that to say, when we made this deal, Rebellion seemed very excited. They like having authors narrate their own work and that had been kind of a handshake agreement. And earlier this year, as we're getting closer to publication, it ran into some snags. Like, it's pretty expensive to hire a US narrator. They have people in-house. They have deals going on. So it was almost that I couldn't narrate it and they had some pretty good narrators lined up, and I was like, “Okay, well just make sure that they call me so I can give them the pronunciations of the words I made up.”But I was unhappy, I think, in that moment because I had been looking forward to it. for two years I'd sort of had it in my head I was going to do it. I'd been prepping for it, and so that felt like a little like, “Oh it's not going to happen. Okay.” And I had to readjust my thinking.But over the pandemic, instead of commuting to Connecticut to do my studio recording for Tantor Audio, they have a working relationship with a small studio that's just three miles from me, which I can walk to. Three miles is a big difference from a three hour commute to Connecticut and staying overnight for three or four days, which is what I'd been doing for the two or three years since I'd moved here before the pandemic. So I told my agent and Rebellion. I was like, “Well, there's this little studio I work with. They do all this amazing professional production work for all of these different companies. Here are their rates. Here's their email. Maybe we could work something out.”And the next thing I knew, they're like, “Okay, you're recording next week.”So whatever they worked out, whatever my agent did, and whatever all of the powers that be… Because of the pandemic, and because of this relationship, and maybe because I wrote the right email at the right time, all of this worked out so that I could I could actually record my audiobook. So it was a bit of a roller coaster right at the end, and it was right up at the edge of time of when we could record it to have it out concurrently with the book. All of which to say that I didn't have as much prep time as I had wanted, and yet I have been prepping for twelve years at this point.I wanted to make every day in the studio more than usually special. I really wanted to say this is the end of a very long journey of many drafts and many despairs and a lot of leveling up. And yet it felt like another day. If I didn't pay super close attention, it would just be another grinding week at the studio, and I didn't want that. So every day I dressed up to match the section of the book that I was going to be recording. I wore like a different little perfume that had a note of citrus in it because citrus is the smell of necromancy in my book, and I wore a piece of jewelry that usually a friend or a loved one had given me that had to do with the book. I really tried to make it not just a recording, but a celebration of a decade and a half of work. And it was a blessing, in that sense, to record my work, and to look at it in its final form, and to say, “Ah, well, this was a thing, and this is what that thing looks like, and now it's in my mouth, and it's for you in your ears for all of posterity.” And that's something, because you know we still listen to W. B. Yeats at the beginning of the twentieth century reading his work in his own voice. There are probably better actors to read his work, but it is something to have his poems and his own voice. And so now we have this work in my voice, and I feel that in this human pageant, it's something that is super special. Very pleased.JuliaI think it's great. I loved it, and I think you're a wonderful narrator. I think you're not giving yourself enough credit.ClaireOh, but not British, Julia!JuliaWell, no, you're not British, but you are someone with a huge background in theater, and training, and also a large amount of experience at this point in narration, and you know your stories better than anyone, because you did spend all of your twelve years refining this particular book.ClaireThat's what Carlos says, so you and Carlos… if you and Carlos say it, I know that you're both more right than I am because I trust your brains.JuliaI thought it was a wonderful experience listening to you read it, and if you're listening to this podcast and you like listening to things, go ahead and pick up the audiobook of Saint Death's Daughter, because it is really wonderful. If you like to read things on the page, the text is also there for you, and that is also wonderful. But if you like listening to Claire's voice, get that audiobook. Thank you Claire and, thank you so much for taking all of this time to talk to us and answer all of our questions.ClaireThank you so much. Julia.JuliaI hope everybody goes out and reads your wonderful book, which is full of horrifying things, and also great bits of humor, and wonderful humanity. ClaireThank you.JuliaThanks so much for listening. If you want to have the chance to ask your own questions, or request specific kinds of posts from me, consider joining my patreon which is at patreon.com/juliarios, or my substack, which is at omgjulia.substack.com All patrons and subscribers get early access to every piece of creative work I commission from other creators in my Worlds of Possibility project, and your pledges and subscriber fees go directly to help pay for those stories and poems, and for the cost of my equipment and my labor, because recording these interviews, and then editing the transcripts and editing the recordings and making them podcast-ready for you takes a lot of time and effort! I am a little later on this one than I had intended to be because I got COVID again! Oops! So that’s why my voice sounds a little hoarse right now. Luckily, I was able to get antivirals, so that is fine, and I am doing better, but it kind of threw a wrench in things and it really made me realize how much time and effort this kind of thing takes. It takes a lot! So, if you have been enjoying this, please do subscribe. Please, any amount that you feel like contributing will absolutely help keep things going for me. And I’m in the middle of accepting all the pieces I am going to accept for this wave of Worlds of Possibility, and I have some GREAT stories to share with you, so I can’t wait to get into that, too. Thank you for listening, and I’ll catch you next time!Thanks for listening, and I’ll catch you next time. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit omgjulia.substack.com/subscribe

I invited the amazing C. S. E. Cooney to talk with me about her journey to publication (a journey that lasted 12 years!) for Saint Death’s Daughter. We had a long talk, and she answered a lot of questions from my patrons and subscribers, who had the chance to send in their specific questions ahead of time. Here is the first part of the interview, which you may listen to, or read a transcript below!If you have not already devoured Saint Death’s Daughter in one day, like I did, I encourage you to check it out! It’s available as a printed book, an ebook, and an audiobook, and Claire does her own narration for the audio version!JuliaHello and welcome to the OMG Julia Podcast, where we talk about creative lives and processes. I'm your host, Julia Rios, and with me today is special guest C. S. E. Cooney. Welcome!ClaireThank you Julia! It's lovely to be here.JuliaSo C. S. E. Cooney, also known as Claire, is a wonderful writer of fantasy short fiction, long fiction, and, most recently, the novel Saint Death's Daughter. Claire, do you want to introduce yourself a little bit and tell people a little bit about your writing career as a whole?ClaireI feel like I have been writing fantasy since I was pretty young—fifth or sixth grade, I would go around in circles around the playground with the two friends that I had and just tell them stories that I would then fill notebooks full of. The first ones were like, one was called My World and the sequel was Animal World. And then, in high school, I would name all my friends ridiculous, long, elven names made out of all of the words they liked the best. Like, what's your favorite color? What's your favorite jewel? What's your favorite flower? And then I would Smush them all together and then they'd get names like Erazellalzenarayneraniananamavario. And they'd come from a house and they'd have this backstory, and they all thought that one day I would write this epic trilogy called The Elven Story. But what I guess I was doing is what most people were doing: playing D&D with their friends. But I didn't know about D&D, so I was sort of doing the same thing like with my own imprimatur. It was more like out loud oral storytelling, having adventures or like parallel lives to the lives we were leading as high schoolers. But I think when my father introduced me to the person who became my mentor, I was about 18. I'd, you know, been writing and rewriting two or three different novels throughout high school, and one of the gentlemen who was in my father's congregation—my dad is a director of music and liturgy at St. Anne's church—one of his congregation members was Gene Wolfe, who was a renowned science fiction and fantasy writer. But of course me at 17 or 18, I don't know from Gene Wolfe!Actually, that's not true. You know you’ve got the stack of books your friends lend you, and my friend Lydia had let me one, and it was on the top of my book stack, and I was flying out from Phoenix to see my dad in Chicago as I did periodically summers and winters, and I grabbed the first one off my book stack, read it on the plane, and it happened to be Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe! But at that time I never paid attention to authors because they didn't matter. The stories mattered, and the only time I tried to remember an author's name was if I liked the story enough and wanted to get more of that. Then it was sort of more like a tagging system, you know, but I never thought of them as people…So he introduces me to Gene and we go to dinner with Gene and Rosemary and my dad and my stepmom, and Gene made me feel so comfortable that by the end of the evening I was like, “Can I send you my novel?” Just like you do when you're 17 or 18, and I just remember the look on his face so clearly, which was like this minor hesitation, and then this warm, “How about you send me the first three chapters? And I can't promise I'll have anything to say about it.” Just like very gentle, and it had me back pedaling, like, “Oh, no, I could just send you one chapter!” You know? Or, “You don't have to!” And he's like, “Go ahead, send three chapters.”And then I think he only ended up reading one chapter, but he wrote me a five page letter about it. Or three pages. You know, it was a significant letter, and it was typed and it was it was chock full. And that started a correspondence when I went back to Phoenix, and when I moved to Illinois eventually to go to college, our correspondence kept up. We would go to conventions. He took me to my first convention. He taught me how to write short stories. You know, he's like, “You know, novels are great, but in order to build up your byline, you have to write a lot of short fiction. You have to get some credits to your name, and then you can get an agent.” Like, it was the kind of the old fashioned trajectory that he knew that worked for him that he was teaching me.And it took just about as long as you'd imagine—about 20 years of trial and error. But, you know, in 2015, Mythic Delirium published my first short story collection. Four pieces had been previously published, and one hadn't. It was called Bone Swans, and Gene wrote the introduction for that. And that was maybe I think 15 years after I'd met him, so.I would say maybe the publication of Bone Swans and the fact that it got the World Fantasy Award was the beginning of my career as it is now, though it took 15 years of doing a lot of different stuff to get to that point. Doing a lot of short stories, writing a lot of novellas, just going to college and going to school for writing and figuring all that out, reading a lot, failing a lot, you know. And then that small press success seven years ago. It's hardly like, hardly seems it could be seven years, on both ends, you know? Both too short or too long. But I think having having an award and having a collection was what got me, eventually, an agent who could eventually sell the novel I'd been working on for just about as long as I'd been writing anything else, and which is now Saint Death's Daughter. It wasn't then. It's too late now for Gene to read it. He passed away a few years ago, but he always liked the idea, and at one point several years ago he's like, “That's a good idea. Are you still writing it?” And I'd written a lot of things in the interim, but that one, I think partly because I started writing it as I was still teaching myself to write (which is an ongoing process), but there's a very big difference between you know, 26 and 36, or 40, as I am now.And you could write a book perpetually, but at least I think the final version of Saint Death's Daughter as it is—I just narrated it, so I now know beginning to end what it is, that it exists as a single unit and not as 16,000,000 ongoing fluid units—I thought, “Okay. This was the best I could do in all the years that I gave to it, and it constantly got better, and it's out in the world, and it is a good and fine work and I'm proud of it. Now, moving on!” So that's my career in a nutshell.JuliaI asked my patrons if they wanted to ask specific questions, if they were curious about specific things. So one of the reasons we're doing this interview is I allow my patrons to vote on the kind of content that I post and also, if I'm doing something like this, ask questions of their own. And when I asked them recently what would they like to see more of, they all said, “We would really like to see more writing process posts, and we'd love to see like you talking to other authors, or giving us your own stuff.” I had done a process post of my own recently, and they were like, “We'd like more stuff like that, and we'd love to hear you talk to other authors.” Well, I had your book pre-ordered, and I listened to it all in one day, and I was like, all right, this is clearly a good one. I'm going to see if Claire is willing to talk to me about Saint Death’s Daughter. I know that it has a long and complicated process leading up to it and this will be really interesting. So, I knew that, personally, but I was like all right, what do my patrons want to know? So one person, who doesn't know you at all, asked how you came up with the title of the novel. I thought that was fascinating because, of course, when I first read the draft of it that I read years ago that is not the final version at all, It was called Miscellaneous Stones: Necromancer [Note, after the fact: I think actually it was called Miscellaneous Stones: Assassin the first time I read a draft], and I don't know how many titles you've had, and I don't know how you landed on this one, but if you want to share the story of how this book came to have its title, I'd love to hear it.ClaireWell, originally it was called Miscellaneous Stones: Assassin, which was meant to be ironic. And the interesting thing I'm learning about ironic titles is that, well, I was never very good at irony anyway, but. I was like trying to be ironic and sophisticated, but you'd have to read the story first to know that it was ironic, and usually a title is part of what gets you to read the story in the first place. So I think that I was going about it a bit backwards in my desire to be more sophisticated and ironic. So, initially, it's the name of the character, Miscellaneous Stones, and the word assassin because she's from a family of assassins. But it's ironic because she's allergic to violence. So she thinks (this is in the early drafts) that she has to grow up and be like the rest of her family, a slick, awesome, sophisticated assassin, but really, she just projectile vomits anytime like somebody swats a fly near her. You know that was the idea like way back in the first draft the NaNoWriMo draft.In the interest of not being so obfuscating, I was like, well she actually is not an assassin and the way that the drafts turned out, everybody knows she's a necromancer from birth because of her allergy, so there's really no chance she'd ever think she'd grow up to be an assassin. So let's just call her what she is. She's a necromancer, Miscellaneous Stones: Necromancer. Of course later as I was researching the word necromancer, the mancy part of mancer is more about prophecy and oracles. And it's like it's prophesying through the dead, like you know some people scry through birds, and some people scry through cards like cartomancy. You know, there's all the mancies and it's really about like trying to tell the future. So necromancy is really about trying to tell the future through the dead, which I think she can do. It's one of her powers. But really, she's like a death magic. But in this world magic is is part of the religion. It's the more you pay attention to the gods, the more they pay attention back at you, and their attention is what magic is. It's what's called the panthauma, the all-marvel, and panthauma’s what makes good stuff happen. So there's like a give and take, so really, a really good magician is a saint, in that sense that they are devoted to their god and the god is super super devoted back. That god's just pleased somebody's paying attention, because a lot of people (like in our world) in that world, are like yeah, the gods. Whatever. We'll pay attention on the holy days, maybe. Mostly dress up and eat good food, but a true saint is as rare as it ever was, or as nonexistent. At least in this world, they actually exist. That they're devoted. It's like vocation. It's almost fanaticism in some ways. All of which to say, the truth is it went out on submission as Miscellaneous Stones: Necromancer, and I never even call her Miscellaneous! I call her Lanie because it's easier, and that was an edit that happened perhaps from my agent. It may have been either my current agent or an earlier agent who'd been looking at it was like, “These are mouthfuls. Why don't you shorten their name?” So really, Miscellaneous Stones, it's only when she's talking to herself or somebody's like being very stern who knows her very well, they might call her Miscellaneous Stones, but mostly she's talking to herself, and to everybody else in the text, she's Lanie. And I know this is a lot. Okay, but so it went out on submission when it was accepted, everybody was super excited, and the editor at the time at Rebellion. Kate Coe, who was a darling and just like would respond to me in all caps in her emails, which was exactly how I think so I was like, “Ooh all caps. We're best friends!” But one of her suggestions was like, “We're super on board. We like the title, but you really have to know what you're reading in order to understand it. Do you have anything else?” And I think that I probably had been prepared in some way, like, I had a notion for years possibly that this wasn't exactly the right title. But maybe I was too lazy, or you get really attached, so I had the title almost right away. Knowing that Lanie is a devotee of the goddess of death, Doédenna, and her nickname is Saint Death, and their relationship is that of like best friends, or acolyte and divine, or mother and daughter.Lanie has a very complicated relationship with mother figures. So. In this grand scheme of the idea of Lanie and her arc that hopefully will have other books in it. But even if it was just this one book, I wanted to give her in this book: she's a daughter. And when you're the daughter of a celebrity, like a god, for example, who you are is defined by who you come from. So it's like, “You’re Saint Death's daughter.” That's how people think of you. That's why you're important.And I feel like, in that sense, it defines her. It's also something to chafe against, like what else is she besides a necromancer? This is one of the questions. You know, who are you when you're not your vocation? But the the whole arc lends itself to the title. Saint Death's Daughter, Saint Death's Herald, Saint Death's Doorway is a progression of character and duties and power, I think, until you become the doorway through which the dead have passage basically into the god. That's her trajectory in my head, even if she never gets there on the page, which I hope she will. At least I know, and it makes sense, and I proposed that as a series of titles for a proposed trilogy and they leapt on it. And so there might have been even more titles out there, but that was the first thing that I thought, “Oh I think they'll like this.” And they did! And I didn't have to think about it anymore.JuliaOkay, so you said you have already future titles planned. Do you actually have book deals for those, or is it something that you're hoping might happen sometime?ClaireI don't have book deals. I think a few things are just up in the air and I kind of talk to my agent about it a little and he's like let's just see what happens, so it's sort of that. Also, Kate, who was the one who acquired Saint Death's Daughter, has since moved on from Rebellion to do her own thing. I think that I'm just going to see where this book goes. If Rebellion doesn't end up wanting it for whatever reason, and I'm not sure, I haven't written them yet, then I probably will still write them because I want to. And thanks to you, Julia, you have taught me of the wonderful wide world of self-publishing, which I have dabbled in mostly because of you. Also I have some really great connections with small presses that maybe if I made really big eyes at them and came like a small mouse skeleton with, you know, shiny, dead, undead eyes and blinked my bony eyelashes… Maybe they'd be like, “Okay, Claire I could just maybe do this for you.” Or at least or at least help me package it somehow. I'd probably hire a team or do a Kickstarter or something you know, um maybe not Kickstarter. Whatever is the least evil at the time. If it comes to that, I feel like I want to tell the story and so… but until I know I'm just going to wait a few months and then I'll ping my agent again see what he thinks. I'm also working on so many other things so it's sort of like, “But I've made a promise in Saint Death's Daughter. I've tried to do two things. 1) I've tried to give a full complete book that stands alone and that, if it leaves you wanting more, it also leaves you satisfied which is a trick, you know. Like, did I pull it off? Did I not? But I feel like I've told a whole story, and left enough threads that, if I never write them, then hopefully there's a team of like fan fiction writers who could take it and run with it. You know? But if I do write it, I've given myself a lot of threads into the future, which, in my head, I have followed out to many different conclusions.JuliaYeah, I mean, I think I definitely felt like the ending did tie everything up that really needed to be tied up, in that there weren't so many burning questions that I had at the end that I was like, “Oh no, and now I'm at the end of the book and there's nothing I can do!” Which I feel like happens when you have books that are a series that end in Cliff hangers a lot of the time. ClaireYeah I don't like cliffhangers because you know many of our beloved fantasy writers have had these long book deals and then life got in the way and people get bitterly bitterly angry. But there's nothing —you can't force somebody to write, and this one took, you know, twelve years. I don't think the other two will take twelve years, but how many more sets of twelve years do I even have, you know? And at what point will this story not be pertinent anymore? You know, as far as the one I need to be telling as a writer.JuliaGreat questions. So, you mentioned that you're working on a lot of other things, and I know that you're always working on a lot of things. Ah, but this is interesting. I don't know how you're going to answer this one. It's another Patron question. They ask, “What do you do when you're low on ideas?” and I was like I don't know that I've ever known Claire to be low on ideas… But do you get low on ideas? And if so, what do you do?ClaireI can answer that because up until 2019, I would say, maybe 2015 to 2019, I don't know if I was low on ideas, but it felt… it was that burnt out, like charcoal in the back of the mouth feeling that writing feels like sharpening your teeth on cement, you know? Like that terrible feeling of, “I don't want to, but if I don't, then all of my life to this point has been wasted.” That’s just a terrible place to write in. You know like the burnt out thing. Um, but once Saint Death's Daughter, which was not Saint Death's Daughter at the time, had been drafted to the fullness of its ability and turned into my agent... So, after eight drafts I sent it to an agent who finally liked it enough to say sure, asked me for two more drafts, took me another year and a half to do… So, that was turned in. And it was also at the end of 2019 when my novella, Desdemona and the Deep, came out. It always ends up that no matter how you try to space them, all your deadlines end up in the same week for projects you've been working on for a decade and a half, or five years, the last three years. It's like it doesn't matter. They just all end up due that same week.And so Desdemona had gone through its rewrites and its copy edits and it was coming out that July, and for a little bit, there was nothing impending on my plate that needed to be done that anybody wanted and that I had been working on for years already. So I was like, “I am not going to write again until I can do it in joy.” And I was seriously, like it had been so long since I'd felt joy or had been allowed to work on a new thing. “Allowed” you know in quotes, right? Because you have to finish what you started or else, again, you've —well this is for me; this is my voice in my head— you've wasted the last twenty years of your life and all of the money you spent on college. But it was a firm like, “I'm not going to sit down every day and try to be disciplined and try to write for the sake of writing. You know? just I don't want to do it. I don't. I don't want to waste my life in that way anymore.” And so I just kind of like didn't for a few weeks. You know, I can't remember how long, but I stared out a lot of windows, and I read romance novels and mysteries. And, you know, I alarmed a lot of my family who are like, “You can't stop writing! What will you do?”And I'm like, “Well, something that makes me happy, hopefully!” And then on the way to an event for Carlos —Carlos is my husband, and it was that was the year Sal and Gabi Break the Universe came out, I think. Either Break or Fix. I think it was Break came out in 2019 and Fix came out in 2020 because it was a pandemic book— it was a Disney event, and it was in the Bronx, it was the Bronx is Reading Book Festival, and I was staring out the window in this car that had been called up for him, very fancy-like, and we were passing rows and rows of houses and the thought came to me. It was a random thought. It was just like, “What if houses were people?” Like just very random, very gentle. And it was that what if moment that I hadn't felt it in so long. I was so surprised by it. I was so delighted. My brain, it was in that feeling of it was so hard to concentrate on anything else with the story that was building almost like a dam behind my eyelids.I went to bed, wide-eyed in the dark that night, fell asleep, woke up. We were getting coffee and tea in the kitchen, and I was like, “And then this happens in the buh buh buh buh…” But I told Carlos the whole story that had just occurred to me in the last twelve hours or so, and he asked me a lot of questions, and then I sat down and I started writing it longhand, which I hadn't done again for years. And took the time I wanted to. Stopped when my hand got tired. And in a few months, I had a whole novella drafted.Then I was like, “I'll type that when I feel like it.” And so was like, again, “I'm not going to write anything till I feel like it.” A few weeks later I had a really cool, funny romcom dream where a girl who was a severe introvert had to go to three different weddings in a single day, and she had to like change into a different bridesmaid outfit for each of them and they were all across town from each other, and I was like, “That would be a really fun plot for a novel if I could manage it.”And of course me being me, I write fantasy more than romance, though I often have romance elements. And so I was like, “Oh, I could set it in the world of Desdemona and the Deep and Dark Breakers! Ooh, but what if it wasn't in the gilded age equivalent that those stories are in? What if it was like in their 1980s? So what if there are like boomboxes and like space travel? But she's a goblin!” And then it just went on, and she's a severe introvert, and goblins are sort of —in that world— have a lot of spider-like attributes. So, it's like what if she's like a brown recluse? But like she's super, super introverted. She'll bite you if you come up on her unexpectedly. She's kind of a computer nerd. She grinds lenses. Like you look through the lenses and each lens does different things. So anyway, I just fell in love with her and I wrote this RomCom. Again, just typed it out. It was supposed to be very light and funny, and I did the first draft, and it was done in like two months or so. And that was 2019.So I guess that what I do now, if I'm feeling low energy —well, then the pandemic happened and a whole different thing happened— but I try to do a couple things, like 1) write when it feels joyful, but 2) since I often want to write but have low energy, what has worked for me lately is making writing dates with other writers to do a silent Zoom together, like a cafe. There are whole cafe kind of —like my friends in Chicago have this virtual cafe where people go and they are kind of like hosting for hour sessions and on the the top of the hour everybody chats for about 15 minutes, then they do a timed sprint for 45 minutes that's quiet, and then they'll do that. Maybe that will last 3 hours. And there's another one that some playwriting friends started, but it starts very rigidly 9:00 every morning and very rigidly closes at noon. And when I need more pressure than I give myself, just like constraint and pressure, I set my alarm for 5 minutes before 9:00, check my email for the link (it comes every day regardless of whether I sign in), and get my butt in the chair so that I'm kind of responsible to somebody. And then I sit and write for that time because those constraints, nobody's making me but the constraints in place, or this kind of social aspect, even though there's not a lot of interaction, have really given me the little energetic boost to get my butt in the chair —sitzfleisch— and to do to do some of that work.JuliaOkay, so I feel like all of this was amazing and fascinating. But if I boil it down to bullet points, what I've got is if you are feeling overwhelmed because everything has become too much and you can't find joy in your writing, the best thing to do is to actively take a break and not write. And then your ideas will start flowing again once you've actually allowed yourself to relax. ClaireThat's the hope, sure. JuliaBut that seems to be what happened for you?ClaireYes.JuliaBecause rest is part of the cycle, I think. I mean, that sort of goes along with the theory of fallow fields and crops. You need to not harvest every single season because if you do your field will just run completely out of rich minerals in the soil.ClaireYes, my father called it fertile boredom.JuliaOkay, so there's that, and then the second thing is: it helps you to have community accountability, and so having friends that are also writing at the same time as you is helpful.ClaireYeah, and that's a recent development. That was a pandemic development. I think it started a little bit before, but I didn't notice. It was when Carlos and I both had drafts due at the same time, and we started working together. So, suddenly to have two people and a deadline, it's almost like being in college where right after college it was really hard to write for a little while because there was no expectation of turning anything in, or a certain page number, but before college I wrote all the time! 8 to 10 hours, just for fun, and it was really hard. Like, how do you do that again? How do you want to do that again?And I never have gotten back to that level of desire and losing myself, except for moments, but like once you have the pressure and the deadline and the expectation. It's really hard to do it just for fun for me. But and with Carlos and I both writing together, it was so pleasurable and so much easier. And I recently learned a friend, not a friend, an acquaintance. A friendly acquaintance, who I was doing a podcast with through Rebellion, was telling me that she has ADHD and that when she sits with her partner and he's working and very focused and she's writing, she suddenly can focus a lot easier, and that her therapist called it body doubling. And I realized that's probably what was happening with me and Carlos. We were body doubling. And it seems to be what has been helping me the most now, in that kind of… this scattered, like, what day is it? What even is time? Who am I? I was like, “Oh. Other writers are in the world! Dee dee dee dee dee!” You know?JuliaThat's really interesting I find it's this is sort of the opposite for me, and I bring this up because I know that people listening to this are wondering about different processes, and I'm just here to tell you there are so many different processes! And the correct trick is just finding whatever works for you, and it might be different from time to time, but like don't feel like anything is how it always works and has to work that way and if it doesn't you're wrong. ClaireYeah.JuliaBut for me, I find that when I try to do group writing type things where it's, you know, 45 minutes of writing and fifteen minutes of chat, whether it's in person or in video or whatever, I am usually way less productive. It's hard hard for me to get into a good zone for work, and I kind of have to do stuff being on my own.ClaireThat's historically been true for me too.JuliaBefore the pandemic, I used to go to my local coffee shop, and I was a regular! The entire staff knew me. They all knew what drinks I liked! Like, I could walk in the door and they'd start making me a drink because they already knew what I wanted. That is how much I was in there. And I would just spend all day.ClaireI Love that.JuliaBut I would do it on my own, and I just kind of let the the roar of people chatting and drinking coffee around me be background, but I wouldn't have to pay attention to any of it. If I'm there with other people who are there for the same purpose, all of my focus goes out the window. And I don't know why. That's just always been the way it is. So like the body doubling thing doesn't—it's like a distraction instead of a.ClaireWell, it's so interesting because historically I never could write in a cafe or a library. Carlos is really good at that. But I look at too many people. It's really like I could do it if I put earphones on and made like ocean sounds and almost a shade over my eyes. It's too much and and generally, historically, I've always written alone, so this new development during the pandemic, like something else was happening that was even bigger than my need to isolate and focus, which was always a big need for me. So the other thing that I do, when I don't want people, is make it beautiful. So, like, light a candle, sometimes I do essential oils, or a smell, or like clear off my desk. Right? Handwrite, use a different ink, you know. Or like just something that makes it different. And make it beautiful. To make it ritual, almost, so that it's a different space. So that it's pleasurable, or sensual, to do the thing rather than drudgery.JuliaThat's really interesting. Do you find that the environment that you create for your writing affects what you put on the page?ClaireI don't know, but I would say that it's harder or easier depending on the environment to write at all. I like having a window to look out of. It's harder for me to pay attention if I'm looking at a wall. So, I would say all of the things that make it easier to get my butt in the chair. It's sort of like if it's attractive to be in the chair, then it's easier. But if it's sort of like, ehhh, I have to settle, and I have to be here, and I have to like shade my eyes and hide my ears, and like not pay attention to all the people around me. You know, I can get stuff done, but historically, I would say it's easier to do nonfiction blogging administrative work in that situation. Like, I can do administrative work at a cafe but fiction really really hard to do. I am audience motivated just like I'm food motivated. So if I know like my mom has heard the last chapter and she's like, “What's going to happen next?” That also motivates me to write because I've always read aloud my work. The instant I've written a sentence, I'm like, “Listen to this, guys!” So that's another thing that works for me, but some people would be… like I think for you, the idea of somebody immediately listening to your first draft would be so horrifying that it would stop you from writing, so that's where we're different, too. JuliaI'm a “not sharer” so I did the recent process post about one of the stories that I had written, and that was a really big step for me, because it was, “Okay, well, you want to know about what I was thinking, and I'm going to share with you things that feel very close and personal about like my process and my life.” ClaireYeah. Yeah.JuliaAnd my first drafts feel that way. I'm like, “What, you want to see… you want to like open up my insides and look at them? I don't think that sounds comfortable.”ClaireAnd for me, it's like, “Look at me! It's all sequins in here!”And that is where we’re leaving off for this episode. Next time we’ll get into how many drafts Claire typically writes for a project, what her agent search was like, how the final version of the book changed over time, and what it was like to narrate the audiobook version. Thanks so much for listening. If you want to have the chance to ask your own questions, or request specific kinds of posts from me, consider joining my patreon which is at patreon.com/juliarios, or my substack, which is at omgjulia.substack.com All patrons and subscribers get early access to every piece of creative work I commission from other creators in my Worlds of Possibility project, and your pledges and subscriber fees go directly to help pay for those stories and poems and things. I just wrapped up my first open submission period for that project, and there are SO MANY cool stories in my second round consideration pile. It’s going to be really hard to choose which ones I can actually accept, and I can’t wait to share them with you!Thanks for listening, and I’ll catch you next time. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit omgjulia.substack.com/subscribe

You can listen to this, or read the transcript below, which also has pictures. This is for paid subscribers only until the 15th of April, at which point it will unlock for everyone. Hello, and welcome to the OMG Julia Podcast, the podcast where we talk about creative lives and processes. I am your host, Julia Rios, and today this is a special for my paid subscribers. I'm going to talk about my own process in writing one specific story, and that story is “Xtabay” which appeared in Shadow Atlas: Dark Landscapes of the Americas, which came out from Hex Publishers in the autumn of 2021.This story was specifically commissioned as a story about Yucatán, which is where my father was from. The editors of the anthology had a concept for the book that was going to be an atlas of supernatural things and legends and folklore in different parts of North, Central, and South America. So when they asked me if I wanted to contribute, I said of course I would love to, and I thought that obviously Yucatán would be the best place for me to set my story. They thought this was a great idea, and then immediately I fell into a research hole. I thought, Okay, how am I going to do this? There's so much that I can do! I had spent literally days and days scouring the internet, books, YouTube, any kind of thing that I could find. Paranormal investigation websites, the travels of people who research bats… lots of things! And so then I thought, Okay, I need to narrow it down. So I sat down with a mind map, which actually in this case was just a blank piece of paper. And I'm going to give you a picture of it in the show notes for this podcast. So if you are listening to this, click through to the show notes, and you'll see the full picture of this paper, which I kept out for a long time and also spilled lots of things on. Don't worry. It's not actually blood even though it looks like it has a reddish stain I'm pretty sure that's just tomato sauce, probably. Not blood. This mind map: if you're not familiar with this concept, it's like you take a couple of things and then you try to come up with a web of connections to try to make them connect with each other. So, in this case I started with my father and Yucatán because my father was from Yucatán. So, I thought about things that connected to either of those. For my father, I thought of planes, I thought of exile, I thought of charm, and I thought of mamolas. Planes, because my father was a pilot and he liked to fly small planes. Exile, because he left Yucatán when he was 15 and he never lived there again. He did come back to visit, and he took me there to visit, but he didn't actually ever live there again. Charm, because he was very charming. And mamolas, which, as far as I can tell, are a thing that my father made up. He would tell us the story of the mamolas and the day the mamolas came to town, and their black leathery wings would cover the sky, and they would be looking for your uncovered necks so that they could come and like attack them and probably suck your blood, but actually what happened was his hands would descend from the sky and attack your neck by tickling. I've looked for it over and over again. I've done multiple iterations of the spelling. I've tried different phrases. I can't come up with anything. I did text one of my brothers and I asked him if he remembered it and he said yes, but all he remembered was the tickling, too. So we think that that's something probably our father made up, and I thought about trying to make a fake story about it, but I didn't really want to because I didn't know what he had originally thought of, where he had gotten it from, and I kind of just didn't want to mess with that. So I let that one be. But then I was like, Okay, mamolas: what are they like? They're black. They have leathery wings, black leathery wings. What else has that? Bats. Mosquitoes have wings and they're not leathery, but mosquitoes and bats and mamolas could all be tied to blood sacrifice, and so could an alux, which is a little protective spirit that maybe protects your land if you're a farmer or something like that. They can kind of be running around in the wild, but they can also be directed to protect specific places. And people argue over whether they're real or not, but there is a bridge that they had so much trouble building near the airport in Cancún that they eventually had to build an alux house to appease the alux. And after that there weren't any more accidents.And I thought that was a rich mine. I might go with that, but I was deep into Yucatán at this point so I was like, Okay, what else is in Yucatán?Cenotes, which are caves that you can swim in. Sometimes they're thought of as the door to the underworld. Jaguars, big cats in the jungles. There are jungles. There are caves—caves are where the cenotes are. Jungles also have the ceiba tree, which was a sacred tree to the Maya. There's the wáay chivo (sometimes spelled huay chivo), which is a kind of terrible goat demon who will wreak havoc and eat a lot of livestock and possibly you. Then of course the legend of Xtabay. Xtabay is a beautiful woman's spirit that you will see in the folds of a ceiba tree and then she'll lure men to their doom. Like she'll call them in, they'll have good sex, and then she'll eat them! Or she'll just do all kinds of things to cause trouble. You'll find occasional reports, like there's some guy who disappeared for like three to seven days and he says he doesn't remember anything about where he was, but he remembers seeing a beautiful woman by a ceiba tree, and then that's it. And then somehow he manages to come out of the jungle alive, so that's lucky for him. I thought, Okay, these are all good starts. So where are we going to go with any of these? We've got the alux. That may be a good idea. Got wáay chivo. I already knew there was going to be a poem by someone else with that idea so I was like maybe not that one. And then there is Xtabay. Xtabay is a really interesting story. So coming out of the Xtabay capsule, there's Xkeban. And Utz-Colel, which are the names of the two sisters that are central to this story. And xtabentún and tzacam, which are the two different flowering plants that are central to this story. So I started thinking a lot about each of these and basically from there, I went into thinking a lot about different things like the conversations that we have with folktales and what they mean, and I also thought about my father immigrating to the US, and some of the struggles that he faced with assimilation and the things that he kind of passed down to his children as an immigrant who wanted to assimilate fully. And so then I thought, okay maybe I'll make this story really embrace that struggle of assimilation identity.The struggle both at home where it's like are you in line with the colonial forces or the or the native forces? And then also abroad, are you trying to assimilate to your new place or are you trying to remember your old heritage? And the ways that there are lots of complicated webs of people and relationships.And so I kind of I used a few details from my father's own life like he did actually go to Southern Mississippi University, which I have the character in this story go to, and he did have multiple children with white women in the United States, and he did encourage us to assimilate. So I thought about how this all ties in. And then the interesting thing with Xtabay, in particular with this story, is that the quick rundown of the Xtabay story is that there are these two women a long time ago in a small village in Yucatán. They are sisters, and they're both beautiful. But one of them is kind of promiscuous, and the other one is very virginal and pure. And so everyone in the village thinks that the one is very pure and upstanding, but the other one is actually kindhearted and helps people. The pure and upstanding one is actually very cruel and bigoted. So then one day the impure one dies and they find her with like all these animals guarding her and she's got beautiful flowering vines of a specific kind of morning glory called the xtabentún flower kind of growing all over her and climbing all over the village and giving this beautiful scent. Then not long after that, Utz-Colel, the proper one dies and they find her because she smells real bad and she's only got a cactus on her that’s giving these terrible flowers that smell bad. They're like, but she's so good and pure! They bring fresh flowers and those flowers wither immediately and just die. But the story goes that Utz-Colel is so jealous of her sister, even in death, that she prays to evil spirits to be a beautiful woman and then just sort of takes over her sister's role and becomes a beautiful woman who lures men to their death. And she uses her name, Xtabay, because in the in life, Xkeban is not actually a name. It meant prostitute. So they were calling her a derogatory sex worker name instead of her name, which was Xtabay. But in the afterlife Xtabay is this terrible spirit who’s very beautiful but then will kill you. And I feel like this story is really interesting and has a lot of weird conflict about it. So I kind of twisted it a little bit when I used it and I made it that Xtabay was the actual spirit It wasn't Utz-Colel. It was actually Xkeban, and that she would be looking for a nice man. She was not actually setting out originally to be to be mean. But then when people don't do what she thinks they should, then she gets upset because she's been mistreated for her entire life and now she's also been mistreated for her entire death. And she's sort of like the voice of the old native ways versus the new colonial ways. She's sort of like, “You're not even embracing your heritage.” The more you deny who you are, the worse things will be for you is the curse that she imposes upon the character in the story. I really wanted to explore all of these really conflicting things and one of the ways that I did that was by taking this mythology and kind of twisting it a little bit so we didn’t have this narrative that Utz-Colel is the bad person, because it would make sense for Utz-Colel to be the bad person, but then why is she using Xtabay as her name? Why is the spirit that we see looking like Xtabay and not Utz-Colel? Yeah, so these were all things that I was thinking about. Then, once I worked out that I was going to do this story about this particular myth, I also wanted to try to to weave in modern stuff. And both modern stuff from now, and modern stuff from the early twentieth century, so that we could see kind of different time periods and how they might look. And then I also wanted to make sure that I — If you're going to play with something and kind of like turn it a little bit sideways, it's good to know every version that you can. So I spent just ages scouring every instance I could find of someone telling this myth. I listened to firsthand accounts from people translated from Maya to Spanish, that I would listen to the Spanish version. I would be listening to people reading children's books, because there are children's books. There's a children's book called The Legend of Xtabay and it's so funny because in that one they don't say anything about prostitute and they don't say that she's like basically having sex with everybody. Instead they're like she had a lot of boyfriends, which I thought was funny. Xtabentún, the flower, is now used to make a liqueur so there's also the origin story from that liqueur, which I read, and all kinds of other things. And at that point, after I was soaking in it for so long, then I felt like, okay now I'm going to make my own version and make it a little bit different. And the reason I want to make it different is so that I can ask what makes this beautiful person who was so nice to people in life turn “evil” in death? And is she evil? Who's evil in this? Who is the villain? If you say that you're good because you're following a certain set of rules that someone has prescribed, are you good? Or do your motivations matter a lot, and is being true to yourself more important than being someone who follows specific rules and standards? These are a lot of the questions that I was grappling with.So you can see basically all of the things that I spent ages thinking about. And I really did spend a long time, like I followed research trips of The Batman, who studies bats, and his trips with his grad students into the jungle to to study bats at temples and things like that. I mean, I watched full documentaries, I read articles, I bought academic journals so I could read more accounts of their trips. I really spent a long time digging into the bats, like maybe I was going to write about them, and then I totally threw all of that research right out, and there basically aren't any bats in my story. But that process was part of my process of researching the area and digging myself deep into it. I think I couldn't have written this story if I hadn't spent all that time researching bat stuff because I wouldn't know for sure that I wanted to go in a different direction for this one. Same with the alux, and with all the other things. You have to deeply sink into them to know what you're actually going to do. I say “you” as if this is a prescription, but it's not. It's just what I had to do in this specific instance. Part of me doing that was also trying to sink deeply into the area, and remember the landscape, and remember the people, and have a sense of how it feels to be there. And part of what I was remembering was my own memories of the time that I was there. I have the modern character there as a teenager who is in kind of modern times and I was there as a teenager in more modern times as well. So her experiences are somewhat drawn from my own experiences of hanging out with a big group of kids and going to the street fair, and swimming during the day, and things like that. My group of kids that I hung out with did not have evening storytelling time where we talked about aluxes and Xtabay, sadly, because that would have been awesome and I would have been super into it. But I'm pretty sure if we had done that, they would have all thought that I was a nerd for asking.So that's basically the story of how this story came to be. If you think it sounds interesting, you can read it in Shadow Atlas: Dark Landscapes of the Americas. I hope that it is interesting to you. I hope this artifact is interesting even if it's not a step by step how to write a story. It's just this is one way to kind of jog loose some ideas. I didn't know, when I started writing it, if I was going to write about my father being charming and maybe also secretly a mamola or a bat, or my father having flown planes. I didn't know if that would enter into it, but those didn't. They didn't enter into it at all. Just basically him having been a teenager who left Yucatán and coming to the US was the only thing that I really took from his life specifically. All of the rest of it is just sort of there as backdrop. Even if it doesn't make it onto the page, it's there in my head, and I know that this whole world that I've set this story in is rich and full of these other things as well.If you have questions or comments, or you want to talk about some of the themes that we discussed in the story, I'd love to hear from you, and I'd love to hear all about it. Thank you so much for supporting me and my work! I will talk to you next time. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit omgjulia.substack.com/subscribe

Here is a recap of my 2021. You can either listen, or read the transcript below, which I have also added links to! The TL;DR version is that everything I wrote and many things I edited are awards eligible. In addition to all the individual pieces being eligible for any genre awards you might know of, for the Hugo Awards, Mermaids Monthly is eligible as a magazine in the Semiprozine category, and I am eligible in the Best Editor Short Form category. To the transcript!Welcome to the OMGJulia podcast, where we talk about creative lives and processes. I’m your host, Julia Rios, and this time we're going to be talking about specifically my creative life in 2021, and all the things that I did. So this is just a little recap and review. You can listen to this episode, and if you check the show notes (which should display in your podcast app, but also you can find them at omgjulia.substack.com), they will have links to all the things that I am mentioning. So, you may know that I do many different things, from writing to podcasting to editing to a little bit of translation, and here are the things that came out in 2021 that I did. So first, as a writer, I had two stories come out in 2021. The first was “Alma y Corazón” in Speculative Fiction for Dreamers, a story about twin sisters who are about to have their quinceañera, turning fifteen, and three years ago they helped fight demons. Now it looks like maybe there's more demon trouble… Question Mark? That one came out in SeptemberThe next story that I wrote that came out in 2021 was called “Xtabay”, and that was in Shadow Atlas. That came out from Hex Publishers in November, and it is a gorgeous book. It's so cool! They basically have it all laid out as case files with lots of illustrations. There are poems, there are stories, and there are so many different legends and stories represented from different parts of both North and South America as well as, of course, Central America. My story takes place in the Yucatán Peninsula which is the area of Mexico where my father came from, and it’s about a young man who encounters Xtabay, a legendary creature / woman from there, and it's… um, it doesn't go too well for him… We'll leave it at that for now. Later this month I do plan to do a process post about that story. So, if you're a paid subscriber to my newsletter, then you will get to see how I wrote this story, and I will include some visual aids about my process because I think it's sometimes interesting to see how people actually do work through the creation process, and for me it can be different from time to time, but I do have some very concrete things that I can show you, and I'm excited to do that in a little bit. So those are my two stories, “Xtabay” and “Alma y Corazón”. As you may have noticed, both of them draw on my Mexican heritage, which is something that's very important to me, though not the only aspect of my identity that's important to me. But it does come out in my writing every now and again, and a lot in 2021. I also got to translate one of the poems that was in Shadow Atlas, so that was really wonderful. It's called “Waay Chivo” and it's about a really terrifying sort of goat monster. So yeah, that's super cool. It's by Jimena Jurado, and I hope that you'll also check that out. There's also a poem by my fellow Mexicanx Initiative friend, Gerardo Horacio Porcayo, who is known as the person who brought cyberpunk to Mexico originally, but this poem is not cyberpunk. It's an ominous poem about an ominous ghost pyramid, and it's great. Beyond that, though, there are so many awesome stories in this I can't even tell you. I can't even pick them out because there are too many that I love, basically. I really highly recommend you check it out. It's fully illustrated, and it's beautiful. I have the hardcover version and I love it. Okay, editing wise…I am an editor, and I edited first, most notably, 12 issues of Mermaids Monthly from January to December. That was a wonderful project that I did with Meg Frank and Ashley Deng and Lis Hulin Wheeler, and there are so many things that I want to call attention to specific things, but, at the same time, whenever I try to do that, again, there are too many that I love! I love all of them. They're really wonderful. But I will say that you can find (almost!) every issue for free at this point online and I will link to every single one of them here. If you click on the months, they will take you to the webpage index for that month. I’ve also included the direct links to PDF and ebook versions here in case you want to jump straight to one of those versions. January 2021: PDF, ePub, .mobiFebruary 2021: PDF, ePub, .mobiMarch 2021: PDF, ePub, .mobiApril 2021: PDF, EPUB, MOBI May 2021: PDF, ePub , mobi  June 2021: PDF, ePub, mobi  Bonus June story! “Personal Histories Surrounding La Rive Gauche, Paris: 1995-2015” by Jordan Kurella. Web PDFJuly 2021: PDF, ePub, mobiAugust 2021: PDF, ePub, .mobiSeptember 2021: PDF, ePub, .mobiOctober 2021: PDF, ePub, .mobiNovember 2021:  PDF ePub .mobi December 2021: PDF ePub .mobiThe PDFs are the prettiest because Meg designed the the magazine with those in mind. But also you can read them just on the web or you can download ebook versions, which won't have the same careful design as the PDFs, but will still be totally readable on your ereader of choice.Mermaids Monthly is wonderful. It's got lots of art. It's got comics. It's got poems. It's got essays. It's got stories. It's got a few original artist covers that we commissioned and got to have artists create something just for us, and then a bunch of other amazing art covers that already existed that we got to use, and I can't say enough good things about it. So I really highly hope you'll check it out. If you're thinking about awards season and you have the power to nominate things for awards, I will let you know that everything in Mermaids Monthly that is a story is a short story for the purposes of awards categories, except for “The Incident at Veniaminov” by Mathilda Zeller, which is a novelette for awards purposes, and all of the things that are reprints will say at the top of the page “This originally appeared in [whichever thing it appeared in]” so if it doesn't say that at the top of the page. You know it's not a reprint. It's an original story. So it's eligible to be nominated for an award, and if it's not the one novelette by Mathilda Zeller, then it is a short story — and, of course, poems are poems if you want to nominate those anywhere. If you DO, I thank you very much! I really love all of the stories in there, and I hope to see the authors get some recognition, so it's very exciting! Beyond Mermaids Monthly, I also edited some things that I put up on my newsletter or on Patreon. And those included:“The Only Worthwhile Human Cargo” — a short story by Valerie Valdes. That one was super fun and under 1000 words, so a short read. I highly recommend it if you want to have a good time. “How to Defeat Gravity and Achieve Escape Velocity” — a short story by Miyuki Jane Pinckard. That one's a bit longer. It's about 6000 words, but it still counts as a short story for awards purposes. Also, it's got a queer romance, which I love. “Million Year Elegies: Dimetrodon” — a poem by Ada Hoffmann. Ada Hoffmann writes a ton of wonderful poetry and stories, and Million Year Elegies actually is a whole collection that she released in 2021, and she allowed me to release this poem at the same time as her collection came out. It's a lovely poem. “The Galaxy I Found in My Bowl of Phở” — a short story by Allison Thai. That one was another short one. It’s about a young man who finds that aliens are going to communicate with him via the soup that he is eating. It's lots of fun. If that premise is intriguing, I recommend you check it out! “16 Poemas Después de la Muerte” by Héctor González — in English, 16 Poems After Death. Héctor took a series of images by a really famous Mexican artist named José Guadalupe Posada, who was active in the late eighteen hundreds and the early nineteen hundreds, and did a lot of images of skeletons wearing clothing and doing things, and Héctor took these images and then wrote a bunch of small poems on postcards, physical postcards, which he then sent to people, but he also scanned them and sent them to me and I put them all up online. So that was a super fun one. It's very colorful and the poems are lovely. “When the Beautician Thinks of Herself as a Healer” — a poem by Michelle Tracy Berger. It is a poem about how beauty is self-care and how someone at a hair salon can help particularly black women to feel beautiful and find the right look for them. Which is a kind of magic in and of itself. Mid-Autumn Mice illustration from Joyce Chng, who is a wonderful Singaporean writer and artist, and they made me some mid-autumn mice and gave me a little write up about what the mice were doing. And also a little illustration of a mooncake. Those are charming and delightful. “Stovetop Gods” — a short story by D.A. Vorobyov, which came out at the very tail end of the year, and it is a heartwarming story about a young man who is just moving into a new apartment. It’s also got a beautiful cat in it, and a domovoy, which is a Russian household spirit.So, I highly recommend all of those. Those appeared on my personal either substack or Patreon, and I will link to all of them so you can follow those links and see any ones that you didn't already catch up on. If you are a paid subscriber, you'll be seeing more things like that because that's mostly what I've been doing with the money I get from my subscribers. It's pouring back into paying creators to create more exciting things. So those are the things that I edited in 2021. Also in 2021, I did some podcasting. I did a few episodes for this one, although it's pretty catch as catch can. I also did episodes for This Is Why We're Like This, the podcast that I do with Geoffrey Pelton, where we talk about movies that we (or our guests) have seen in childhood, made a big impression on us, and affected who we grew into as adults. What we do is talk about what we remembered about the movies and also how they stood up to a rewatch, and it's a comedy podcast. It's also not safe for children or the workplace. There's lots of swearing and things like that, so be mindful of that.One of my favorites was probably when we had Eugenia Triantafyllou, who is a wonderful speculative fiction writer from Greece, come on to discuss two different things with us. One was an episode of Goosebumps, and the other one was a thing that was on international broadcast that she saw in Greece growing up: The Forbidden Door, which sounds a lot scarier, perhaps, than it actually is. It's more like a fairytale/folklore kind of retelling thing. But it was really fascinating to talk with her about what Greek television was like when she was growing up and how all of this influenced her. And then also of course to bond over Goosebumps, that R. L. Stine popular classic. So yeah, that was a really fun two-parter. We had a lot of other really fun times as well. I encourage you to check out any of the episodes that you'd like to check out. I think that does it for me for 2021, but if you are looking to nominate for awards, all the stories I edited and the stories I wrote are eligible, and I am eligible as best editor short form for the Hugo awards. For other awards, I don't know that there's really an editor award that they give out, but yes, if you would like to nominate these for any awards that you know of, all of these things are award possible, and, especially for the things that I put out by other people, I would love to see some of those things get recognized, and just get read more widely. So if you read any of the things that I edited and you like them, please tell everyone! I've worked hard to make sure that, as far as I know, everything I edited this year is actually available for free for people to read online, so anyone can. I would love to see more people reading and loving them, because the reason I do this is because I love these things and I just want to share them with everyone.I hope your 2022 is getting off to an okay start. I know it's a rough time. Globally, we're having a hard time, and I can only hope that we're all hanging in there and that things will get better. In the meantime, I'm going to keep doing what I'm doing, which is work on creating things and helping other people share their work with the world. I am no longer doing Mermaids Monthly. There will be one more issue, at least, that is done by the new team, and then they may have their own fundraiser for more content, but none of the new issues of Mermaids Monthly will be edited by me. I will be putting things out under my own steam, and there's also Bridge to Elsewhere, an anthology that I co-edited for Outland Entertainment with Alana Joli Abbott. That one will be coming out later this year, and I think there are a couple of other things that should be coming out in 2022 that I contributed to. I'll let you know about those when they come up. And we'll just take it as it comes! I will definitely still be doing This Is Why We're Like This, though. So if you want to tune into that, you can hear me talking about movies that are sometimes good and sometimes terrifying, from my childhood or other people's childhoods, and that will be an ongoing situation.I'd love to hear all about the things that you did in 2021, or that you're looking forward to doing in 2022, so if you'd like to share those please do! Until next time, thank you for listening/reading. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit omgjulia.substack.com/subscribe

Hello!Today I have a really cool project to share! This is the latest thing my subscribers and patrons have sponsored. It went out to them first, and now it’s time to share it with the world for free! If you think this kind mode of story and poem sharing is cool, consider subscribing here or become a Patron! This is the second of my two Texas creator pieces. The first was a story by Allison Thai. I came up with the idea to ask specifically Texan creators back when Texas was facing major ice storms and crumbling energy infrastructure. I wanted to send a little money directly to Texan creators AND to donate to a charitable organization they personally found meaningful. Of course as time passed the ice storms were over and the acute crisis related to them was over, but Texas still has plenty of things it could use help with. Allison specifically asked for my matching fund to go to the VCSA, an organization for Vietnamese immigrants in Texas, and Héctor asked for my matching funds to go to RAICES. Here’s what Héctor has to say about RAICES:RAICES is an organization constantly fighting for immigrant families. Since the start of the concentration camps in the border, their team has fought to help all the immigrants, protecting their human rights. I truly believe in their compassionate efforts.If you enjoy these poems, do consider making a donation of your own! You can listen to Héctor read each of these poems and give a few extras in the podcast episode. 16 Poemas Después de la Muerteby Héctor GonzálezOn my last trip to Mexico City, I found these postcards with the art of José Guadalupe Posada. These images depict skeletons, not as frozen reminders of our mortality but as vivacious and lively entities. Posada’s art celebrated our dearly departed as the people we knew. His work would influence Diego Rivera and lead to the iconic calavera catrina.In México, we see death not as finality but another path in a person’s life. We mourn, but we also celebrate. We regularly joke about our final day. One of the most imaginative traditions around our Día de Muertos celebration are calaveras, rhymes with fun themes, where we create scenarios about the death of others. Sounds grim? These are very tongue in cheek with insights on the person “memorialized.”Partially inspired by calaveras, I chose a postcard at random. I saw the image and created a small poem. I did this across a series of days. I sent these also to many friends. Some expect these, some will not.In a year where we all have either experienced or seen tremendous loss, some of us grieve with stories.1Calaveras enamoradas by José Guadalupe Posada (1852-1913)Back of the postcard with Abuelite Héctor’s handwritten poemDejamos atrás a cadapersona de nuestro pasado.¿Deseas ser mi amada?Quiero vivir a tu ladoTranslation to English:We leave behind eachperson from our past.Do you want to be my beloved?I want to live with you2Calavera Don Juan by José Guadalupe Posada (1852-1913)Back of the postcard with Abuelite Héctor’s handwritten poemUn tenorio yo fuihiriendo los corazones,mas yo nunca conocía quien calmara mis pasiones.Translation to English:A tenorio I waswounding hearts,but I never knewwho will calm my passions.3Calaveras de oficios by José Guadalupe Posada (1852-1913)Back of the postcard with Abuelite Héctor’s handwritten poemEl sindicato de esqueletosmuy feliz esta,vistiendo por completoa todos en la ciudad.Translation to English:The Skeleton UnionWas full of joy,they were making clotheseveryone in town.4Calavera valiente by José Guadalupe Posada (1852-1913)Back of the postcard with Abuelite Héctor’s handwritten poemCorriendo con su cuchilloel machote se anunció.¡Qué triste es este chiquillo!Un corazón que no maduró.Translation to English:Running with his knifethe macho was announced his arrival.Sad little boy!A heart that did not mature.5Calavera valiente by José Guadalupe Posada (1852-1913)Back of the postcard with Abuelite Héctor’s handwritten poemUna heroina divina,la soldadera del pasado.¿Sabe lo que ella opina?Muerte al patriarcado.Transation to English:A divine heroine,the soldadera of the past.Do you know what she thinks?Death to the patriarchy.6Calavera torero by José Guadalupe Posada (1852-1913)Back of the postcard with Abuelite Héctor’s handwritten poem“El tabaco no me mató,”me dijo mi abuelo.“Lo que la vida me arrebatóllenó de tristeza mi duelo.”Translation to English:"Tobacco didn't kill me,"my grandfather told me."What life took from mehas filled my grief with sadness."7Calavera de un Lagartijo by José Guadalupe Posada (1852-1913)Back of the postcard with Abuelite Héctor’s handwritten poemMe enterraron vistiendo elegantepues siempre he sido importante.¿Por qué mi cráneo es gigante?Guarda mi ego, que es abundante.Translation to English:They buried me wearing fancy clothesas I’ve always been important.Why is my skull so huge?To store my ego, which is abundant.8Calaveras bailarinas by José Guadalupe Posada (1852-1913)Back of the postcard with Abuelite Héctor’s handwritten poemAun después de morirbailamos hasta el amanecer.Contigo no me voy a aburrir,tu eres mi placer.Translation to Enligsh:Even after dyingwe dance until dawn.I will not get bored with you,you are my pleasure.9La Calavera Catrina by José Guadalupe Posada (1852-1913)Back of the postcard with Abuelite Héctor’s handwritten poemLas flores de mi sombrerohonran a mi querido arriero.De cempasúchil me cubrióel día de mi entierro.Translation to Enligsh:The flowers in my hathonor my dear muleteer.Of cempasúchil he covered methe day of my funeral.10Calaveras del Montón by José Guadalupe Posada (1852-1913)Back of the postcard with Abuelite Héctor’s handwritten poemEste aguardiente benditolo uso para olvidar.Mi dolor, un grito inaudito.Maldecido a vagar y vagar.Translation to Enligsh:This blessed firewaterI use it to forget.My pain, an unheard-of cry.Cursed to wander and wander.11Calaveras compadres by José Guadalupe Posada (1852-1913)Back of the postcard with Abuelite Héctor’s handwritten poemDescubrí a mi hermano gemelosolo después de mi muerte.Ambos morimos en un arroyuelo.¿Quién creyera nuestra suerte?Translation to Enligsh:I discovered my twin brotheronly after my death.We both died in a stream.Who will believe our luck?12Calavera con guitarra by José Guadalupe Posada (1852-1913)Back of the postcard with Abuelite Héctor’s handwritten poemSolo aprendi la guitarradespués de mi deceso.¿Mi favorita? Pat Benatar.Su catálogo está grueso.Translation to Enligsh:I only learned the guitarafter my death.My favorite? Pat Benatar.Her catalog is dope.13Calavera Zapata by José Guadalupe Posada (1852-1913)Back of the postcard with Abuelite Héctor’s handwritten poemEmiliano nunca murió.Está libre, en nuestras mentes.Aunque por balas sufrió.Su lucha eterna, vive por siempre.Translation to Enligsh:Emiliano never died.He is free, in our minds.Although by bullets he suffered.His eternal struggle, lives forever.14Calavera tamalera by José Guadalupe Posada (1852-1913)Back of the postcard with Abuelite Héctor’s handwritten poem¡Qué belleza es el tamal!Historia envuelta en hojas.Deliciosa nube de nixtamal,manjar para todas las bocas.Translation to Enligsh:What beauty is the tamal!History wrapped in leaves.Delicious cloud of nixtamal,delicacy for all mouths.15Calavera pulquera by José Guadalupe Posada (1852-1913)Back of the postcard with Abuelite Héctor’s handwritten poemUn ratón, el pulque nos dió.Un hombre lo fermentó.Un pueblo lo disfrutó.Una nación lo adoptó.Translation to Enligsh:A mouse, the pulque gave us.A man fermented it.The people enjoyed it.A nation adopted it.16Gran Fandango y Francachela de todas las Calaveras by José Guadalupe Posada (1852-1913)Back of the postcard with Abuelite Héctor’s handwritten poemEn vida nos amamos,más juntos no pudimos estar.Ahora muertos bailamospor los besos que no te pude dar.Translation to Enligsh:In life we loved each otherbut together we could not be.Now dead we dancefor the kisses that I couldn't give.Héctor González (he/they) is a queer nonbinary México-born speculative writer living in Austin, TX. They pair their love for food with their passion for stories and finding more about the secret origins of your favorite dishes. You can find their latest thoughts, cooking and writing as @mexicanity on Instagram, Twitter and Medium. Their motivational ASMR 4 Writers recordings can be found under Abuelita Héctor on SoundCloud (https://soundcloud.com/abuelitahector/). This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at omgjulia.substack.com/subscribe

Happy New Year!Here’s an awesome interview with Nebula and Shirley Jackson Award winning author, Sam J. Miller to start your 2021 off on a fun and interesting note! We talk about his latest book, The Blade Between (a horror/thriller novel about ghost whales, activism, and mayhem in Hudson, New York), Sam’s day job as a community organizer, his creative process, and some of the questions sent in by my paid subscribers!Cover image for The Blade Between, showing the title in white against a teal whale on a black background. Come for the murder and mayhem, stay for the questions about craft, what it’s like to win awards, and perhaps most importantly, whether Sam would rather face 30-40 feral hogs or one ghost whale! This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at omgjulia.substack.com/subscribe

The Mermaids Monthly Kickstarter is in its home stretch! We’re almost to 75% funded, and we have 6 days to get all the way there! In this episode of the OMG Julia podcast, I asked one of our awesome contributors, Patty Templeton, to join me and talk a bit about the limited edition art she created, and about her half of an Each to Each collaboration with her partner, Brett Massé.The Each to Each feature series in Mermaids Monthly is going to be a series of collaborative works by creators who have deep personal connections, and also by creators who have never met before. I talked in depth about the whole idea, and how anyone can submit to be part of a collaboration in our latest Kickstarter update, so go over there to read more if you are curious! Patty’s art piece is called “So Alive” and you can get it as a limited edition, numbered linocut print, or you can back us at the sticker level and get it on a sticker. Patty tells us all about her inspiration for the piece, and the process of creating linocut prints. Long story short, the stamp degrades during the printmaking process, so there will never be more than 25 of these original prints! Image description: “So Alive” by Patty Templeton. A black ink print from a linocut of a live, weird mer-creature inspired by the Fiji Mermaid advertised in old side shows. It’s ugly and weird and magnificent, and Patty envisions it as having evolved this way naturally rather than being a sewn-together dead monster. Stickers and limited edition prints are available through the Mermaids Monthly Kickstarter until the 12th of December, 2020.Patty also tells us a bit about the story she’s writing, which I haven’t yet read, so you get to hear my first reaction to it. Spoiler alert: it sounds so fun! I can’t wait to read the whole story! And she talks a bit about collaborating with her partner, Brett, and about the different kinds of art they’ve both made. Here’s a short list of places to find their work:Patty did the cover for the Brimstone Rhine Album, Corbeau Blanc, Corbeau Noir. Brett did the layout and interior design for Mythic Delirium’s novella anthology, A Sinister Quartet. Patty wrote a historical fantasy novel about Sarah Winchester called There Is No Lovely End. Brett did the cover art for C. S. E. Cooney’s The Witch in the Almond Tree. Patty interviewed Zig Zag Claybourne for Black Gate Magazine about finding joy and Zig Zag’s new book, Afro Puffs Are the Antennae of the Universe.Brett has a zine called Ghoul, and Patty contributed a story to the first volume!And of course, to get Patty’s art and story, and Brett’s art in response to Patty’s story, back Mermaids Monthly on Kickstarter! This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at omgjulia.substack.com/subscribe

Hello! Here’s my first podcast episode for November (notably NOT a podcast month challenge time!), in which I’m talking about what I’m up to these days. I mentioned before that I have a new project called Mermaids Monthly. Right now that is Kickstarting, and we’re just over the 25% mark of our funding goal. I’ve also drawn a silly mershark. Image Description: A mershark with a human torso and a shark tail, and a mouth full of sharp shark teeth!Once our Kickstarter reaches 200 backers (we are currently at 183), I am going to be picking a random winner from those 200, and that person will get this drawing! I will fold it up and mail it in a letter sized envelope anywhere in the world!Click here to support our Kickstarter!In other news, I have a critique (that also comes with a video chat) up for your bids in the Romancing the Runoff auction! This is an auction organized by romance writers, and all the proceeds go to the Georgia senate runoff campaigns. What you get: one story critique (up to 10k words), and a video chat with me after I send the critique notes. You can use the video chat to talk about your story or to ask me any questions you have about the craft or business sides of writing. This is something I usually don’t offer, and right now it’s at a very cheap price point of only $53.50. If I were to offer this kind of one-on-one chat and critique for sale, it would definitely be priced way higher! Click here to bid on my critique!Finally, I hope you’re staying safe out there! I know that this pandemic is really tough emotionally, and I am sorry for everyone who is missing family and friends right now, especially, if, like me, you live in an area where it’s getting colder and darker every day. I’m being really careful because I definitely don’t want to risk getting or spreading COVID, and I hope you’re being careful as much as you can, too. Even though we think I had it in the spring (and I was sick for literally months), I do know a few people who have had it twice now, so I am not at all considering myself immune. That’s it for this time! please do check out those links and spreadthe word to anyone you think might be interested! This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at omgjulia.substack.com/subscribe

I just watched the new version of Rebecca on Netflix, and it got me thinking a lot about adaptations. I personally love them! I love seeing different versions of stories I love. I talk a little about Rebecca in this, but I don’t give away the plot, so if you absolutely don’t want to hear spoilers, this should still be okay. I do love a creepy gothic house story, though! How about you?Image description: a creepy gothic mansion (but not the one from Rebecca). How do you feel about adaptations? Love them? Hate them? Have you watched the new Rebecca? Do you plan to? What about Bly Manor (which is an adaptation of The Turn of the Screw)? This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at omgjulia.substack.com/subscribe

Today, I completely lost myself in… not the work I should have been doing, but rather what we might (extremely charitably) call research. Namely I spent ALLLLLLL day reading newspapers from a hundred years ago. In this episode I share a couple of gems including a Halloween ad from 1919 and a prediction for the future of skyscrapers from 1914—which I mistakenly say is from 1919 or 1920 in the podcast. Oops!Image Description: A newspaper ad from October 30th, 1919 featuring a jack o’lantern and assorted ghouls hilarioursly chasing a terrified child.Here’s the text of the ad: What To Eat On Spooks’ Night. Come, enjoy this hilarious once-a-year festivity. Tomorrow night is Halloween, the night of spooks, witches, goblins, and, above all, of whole, good-hearted laughter. Make out your list now, and telephone, or drop in the store early tomorrow — we deliver. Big 9 inch Pumkin Pies. Corn for Popping. La Crescenta Molasses. Red crisp Jonathan Apples. Jevne’s Golden Brown Doughnuts. Ginger Bread. Fresh sweet Cider. Budded Walnuts (new crop.) California Fancy Almonds. Jevne’s Fuint Nut Cake. Fort Canned Pumpkin. Salted Nuts all Varieties. Jevne’s Supreme Chocolates. Jevne’s Marshmallows For Toasting. Grinning, grotesque ghost masks; funny owl faces to slip over the head. Our Art Paper Dept. carries an extensive assortment of Halloween caps, favors, decorations, etc. H. Jevne Co. Two StoresCor Sixth & Broadway208-10 Spring StreetHome 10651Broadway 4900Do you consider pumpkin pie a Halloween food? Or any of these foods, for that matter. I think of them as more generally autumn foods, I think, and the food I most associate with Halloween now is candy, but I do think of bobbing for apples and eating doughnuts on strings as old fashioned Halloween food activities. Popcorn falls roughy into that category for me, too. But for some reason I don’t think of pumpkin pie as a food for a specific time until US Thanksgiving in the end of November. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at omgjulia.substack.com/subscribe

Today we had a clothing historian come to take my great grandmother’s wedding dress from my mother’s house. We all met up in my mother’s back yard to see the dress and find out more about it from the clothing historian. It was basically impossible to get a full picture of the dress, but I’m including some detail shots here. Image description: The bottom of the skirt of the dress (plus some of the extremely voluminous veil). Here you can see the linen lace overlay, the satin underskirt, and the beaded fringe at the hem. My great grandmother married in 1920, so this is a hundred years old! We don’t know what color the dress or the lace were to begin with. Were they much whiter? Or more of a champagne color? Our clothing historian said champagne was a popular color at the time. She also suggested that the lace could have been taken from an older gown, for instance the bride’s mother’s. This is a theory that makes sense to us since my great great grandmother would have married in probably the 1890s, and also died when my great grandmother was a young teen (12-14ish, I think). We can’t know for sure, but it would make sense for her to use some of her mother’s gown as a way of including her. Image description: a closeup of the lace overlay and the satin underskirt. The lace has a decorative scalloped edge, and there’s also a layer of tulle between the lace and the satin. Having the chance to touch this fabric made me think about how indistinct and colorless the past can seem. It’s easy to see black and white photos and assume the whole world at that time was somehow not as colorful as our present. Even with color images, we can lose touch (pun unintentional, but I’m leaving it in) with the physical sensations of life. Creative assignment for those of you who want to play along at home:What is a piece of clothing that is important to you or a character in your work? What does it look like and feel like? How do you expect it to age? Where will it be in 5, 10, 50, 100 years from now? This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at omgjulia.substack.com/subscribe

Moss has taken this week off of work, so we’ve been trying to do some fun vacation type activities. Of course we can’t go on an actual vacation, and we’re not even going inside anywhere other than essential trips to places like the supermarket. All of this makes vacation a little more challenging, but luckily for us we live in an area where autumn means gorgeous foliage, so we’ve been exploring the local scenery on drives. Earlier in the week we went to Gloucester and walked on the beach and saw some dahlias. Image description: variegated red and yellow dahlias with the ocean in the background.Today we drove to the west and looked at leaves. We didn’t stop anywhere so we have no pictures from today, but the reds and golds of autumn were definitely out in full force. While we were out we passed a working farm that is open to the public during normal times, and it started us wondering about field trips.We both grew up on the other side of the country, so our field trips were much different than the ones kids who grew up here get. In this area, there’s lots of focus on Massachusetts as a colony and as part of the American Revolution. So: a little creative prompt, if you want one!Memoir/creative non-fiction: Write about a typical field trip for you as a kid. Did you grow up in a place where field trips happened? Did you call them something else? If you didn’t have field trips, was there a particular place or part of local history or current profession that you would expect people to learn about? Moss remembers going to a working dairy on a field trip, for instance. Fiction: What kind of childhood experiences did your character have? Were field trips part of it? Were they fun and educational, or full of drama like the camping trip I remember taking in middle school where one of the girls claimed to have been possessed by the devil?Visual art: create a picture of one of the places you remember visiting as a child, or a physical/visual representation of something associated with that place. If you decide to do this one, let me know! I’d love to hear all about it! If you don’t want to do a prompt, but do want to tell me about your childhood excursions, I’m up for that, too! P.S. I spent all day today before our leaf drive working on my wizard’s date recap for the Wizard Seeking Wizard podcast! I also backed Constelación Magazine on Kickstarter because I am extremely excited to see this bilingual magazine! If you want to subscribe, you’ll get a capybara sticker as well as bilingual (Spanish and English) stories! This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at omgjulia.substack.com/subscribe

Hurray! Speculative Fiction For Dreamers has funded! It’s going to be a real book! If you’re reading this before Wednesday morning, there are still a few hours left to back the Kickstarter and order a copy for yourself! This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at omgjulia.substack.com/subscribe

Hello! Welcome back to another October Podcast Month episode! If you’re a free subscriber, you might have noticed you didn’t get an episode on Friday. This is not because I stopped podcasting after one brief reappearance; it’s because I made Friday’s podcast for my paid subscribers! I spent all day Friday practicing for a live reading to promote the Kickstarter for Speculative Fiction For Dreamers. That Kickstarter ends Wednesday, and I’m reeeeeally hoping it meets its funding goal because I haven’t read all the other stories and poems and plays and things in the book! I need it to be real so I can! Image description: a screenshot of the Speculative Fiction for Dreamers Kickstarter as of 7:25pm Eastern time on Monday, October 19, 2020. It still needs almost $4000! Click on the image to go to the Kickstarter page and back the project! ANYWAY! Because that’s what I was focused on Friday, I decided to read that excerpt for my paid subscribers. Then for the rest of the weekend, I didn’t release podcast episodes because my original plan was always to take weekends off. And it’s a good thing, too, because I was Very Busy! This episode is all about the stuff I did and the ways I have seen people coming up with creative ways to hold social events and performances during a time when it’s not really a great idea for most of us to go out and meet each other in person. I talk about FIYAHCON and The Ignyte Awards, which were wonderful, and recognized so many awesome creative works and people. I am particularly excited to see Strange Horizons recognized with an award at long last after being nominated so many times in the past for other awards, but not winning. The team there truly does so much work to make the science fiction community more rich and inclusive. But seriously, every person and work that won an award is amazing, and I encourage you to check all of them out!I also captained a trivia team for Clarion West and attended a cold read of a new play by Liz Duffy Adams. So many cool ways to connect with people and experience art online! Tell me some of your favorite virtual events, or how you’ve seen them go poorly. I think both sides of it are interesting and important to consider as we forge ahead in pandemic time. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at omgjulia.substack.com/subscribe

Hello! This October Podcast Month episode was originally for paid subscribers only, but as of June 24, 2022, it's free for everyone. An excerpt from my story for Speculative Fiction for Dreamers. Full show notes including the text of the excerpt at https://www.juliarios.com/october-podcast-month-a-story-excerpt/

Hello there! Whew, I got a little sidetracked and missed a few days! This episode is all about that kind of thing, and how to deal with it when it inevitably happens to you at some point in your creative journey. I explain how I got there (I didn’t want to talk about much on Monday after the White House issued a white supremacist statement about that day, I wasn’t feeling very well on Tuesday, on Wednesday I got caught up in a weirdly stressful quest for cat litter…), how tempting it can be to just throw in the towel and abandon a challenge, and why I’m back! I also mention that tomorrow (Friday, October 16, 2020), I’ll be part of a reading for the Speculative Fiction For Dreamers anthology. It will be streamed live at 7pm Eastern time on Matt Goodwin’s Facebook page. Image Description: A flyer for the Speculative Fiction For Dreamers reading events on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at omgjulia.substack.com/subscribe

I just bought some candy corn today, and OMG is tastes SO GOOD. I realize candy corn is one of those polarizing foods. People love it or hate it. You may hate it, and that’s fine! You’re wrong, but also I’m cool with it and I will totally take any candy corn you want to offload!Image Description: A porcelain pumpkin box with candy corn artfully scattered around it.Yesterday we talked about taking a walk for inspiration. Today, I’m running with the candy corn idea. Assignment if you want to play along at home:Think of a seasonal food you associate with this time of year. If you can get some, take a bite! If you can’t, just imagine it in as much detail as possible. What does it taste like? What’s its texture? Is it hot or cold? Where do you imagine typically eating it? What kinds of memories do you attach to it? What kinds of moods and stories would you assume would feature it? Consider how it would feel to subvert the typical mood. I mentioned a couple of stories I could think of involving candy corn, and how it seems to lend itself to light and fluffy fun stories. What would it be like to use it in a sinister context? I don’t really want to because I’m happy with it being fun and fluffy, but maybe you DO want to! Let me know what seasonal foods you think of and what you come up with! This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at omgjulia.substack.com/subscribe

In today’s podcast, I talk about podcasts! I start by talking about podcasts that I am currently involved in, and then explore some podcasts I am currently enjoying. First, my main podcast is This Is Why We’re Like This, which I cohost with Geoffrey Pelton. It’s all about rewatching movies and tv shows we saw as children and seeing how they hold up to an adult rewatch. We’ve done a ton of these, starting about one year ago, but our most recent ones are on The Land Before Time and a made for TV retelling of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night called Motocrossed. I’m currently working on editing a more serious discussion of Alex Haley’s Queen for this one. Next, I recently played a wizard named Flora Bunnyhop on a fiction podcast called Wizard Seeking Wizard, and I just got word that Flora got picked to go on a wizard date, so another episode of that one is in the works! Podcasts I mention that don’t involve me: Arden is a fictional true crime investigation audio drama podcast (with humor and some supernatural elements). Beach Too Sandy, Water Too Wet is podcast where the hosts critique one star Yelp reviews.My Friend Chuck is a podcast by erotica author Chuck Tingle and comedian McKenzie Goodwin, which is a lot of fun.You Must Remember This is a documentary podcast by Karina Longworth about the history of Hollywood. She breaks hers into seasons, and I particularly recommend tho ones on The Song of the South. Very Amusing is a podcast by theme park journalist Carlye Wisel, where she digs into questions like where theme park food comes from. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at omgjulia.substack.com/subscribe

In this fourth installment of my October Podcast Month challenge, I talk about getting inspiration for stories or other creative works by taking walks. Assignment if you want to try this yourself:Go on a walk around your neighborhood and pay attention to what you see, hear, feel, etc. Really embrace the physicality of being in this place. What are the seasonal themes you notice? Plants? Decorations? Weather? What emotional tones can you imagine going with these? To go one step further into character development, pick a particular thing your pass by and imagine what kind of person would be associated with it. Today I passed this origami pterasaur mobile in someone’s front yard, and it made me smile and also wonder about the person who made it. Image Description: three pterasaurs fly in a mobile made of twigs. Maybe these are actually just supposed to be cranes? I don’t know. I just saw pterasaurs! This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at omgjulia.substack.com/subscribe

I’ve never been talented at drawing, but lately I’ve been getting to work with some amazing visual artists, and being around their creativity charges my own creative battery. In today’s October Podcast I talk a little about that, and about the exciting creative energy of the Inktober challenge. I also talk about the one drawing I did once of my cousin, which was the best thing I had ever drawn, so I held onto it for many years before finally throwing it out because honestly, it is not amazing and if I personally am never going to hang it up for display, then who exactly am I saving it for?That picture: Image Description: A picture I drew of my cousin, using her colored pencils, while she drew a much better picture for her high school art class many years ago. This picture shows a girl with curly brown hair and a pink dress. She is sipping Coke through a straw from a branded Coca-Cola glass. As I recall, the picture my cousin was drawing was of a partially peeled apple. It had lots of tricky shading and color blending, and was infinitely more realistic than my own drawing. Also, as I recall, we were sitting in her kitchen at a breakfast bar and not a very small round table. And she was not wearing a pink dress. I just sort of … started with her head and then realized OH NO, I don’t have the skill to draw anything else that I see before me! What do I do??? And then I broke from the reality and went to a fairy tale princess in a malt shoppe sort of place, I guess? I also note that the idea of drawing hands was a terrifying though, so I craftily made the table stand between her hand and the viewer. I also feel obliged to say that my actual cousin is much more beautiful and … realistically scaled … than this portrait might imply. Also her ears are not bright yellow. LOL. I was 19 or 20 when I did this, so please don’t think, “Aww, you’re being too hard on yourself! That’s really good for an eight-year-old!” I’m okay with my not amazing drawing skills. It just makes me appreciate all my talented and skilled visual artist friends more. Are you skilled at drawing? Are you participating in Inktober? I’d love to hear all about it! This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at omgjulia.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to the second of my October podcast month! Today is Monday, and this weekend, I actually took time off! This is a rarity for me because often my work ends up happening outside of typical office hours. Image Description: A waterfall overlooking a miniature golf course.I talk a little about what taking Saturday off looked like for me (only fun things and rest!) and how that has affected my work energy coming into this week. Spoiler: it helped a lot! Does taking time off help you? How often do you do that, and what kinds of things do you do to recharge? I’d love to hear all about it! This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at omgjulia.substack.com/subscribe

Hello, everyone! I am back, and back with exciting news: I’m planning to be around a lot more this month! Thank you to everyone who has stuck with me while I’ve been sick and recovering and relapsing and recovering some more. I appreciate your patience!This is the first episode in my October weekday episode extravaganza. I’m taking a leaf out of the monthly challenge books (like Inktober and National Poetry Writing Month), and committing to doing one short (roughly 5 minute) episode each weekday (Monday-Friday) in October. Starting today!Most of these will be free episodes, though a few will be just for my paid subscribers, and I’ll be reflecting on creativity in some way for each one. I know a lot of people who do NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) in November use October to prepare for that challenge, so some of you may be outlining, etc. Some of what I’ll do this month is dig into tips for that sort of marathon creative prep, but I am also open to answering your questions, or diving into topics you propose. Definitely hit me up if you have something you’d like to see me cover. This first episode is mostly to lay the groundwork for the rest of the month, and for catching up on what I’ve been up to. Here are all the things I mentioned:Here’s a Kickstarter for an anthology of Latinx speculative fiction called Speculative Fiction for Dreamers. I have a story in this one, and I am very excited to read all the other stories and poems in it, too! There are many reward levels including ebook, paperback, and things like creative consultations. I am offering a half hour video chat, so if you have always been dying to ask me questions about writing or editing, this is one way to get my undivided attention.I’m also going to be a trivia team captain for Clarion West’s fundraiser trivia night! This is happening on the night of October 17th at 6pm Pacific time. You can join my team for $15, and all the proceeds will go toward supporting the excellent work Clarion West does, including classes, readings, scholarships for people who need them, and so on. Come on and let’s have some fun!Registration is still open for my two upcoming Clarion West workshops as well. If you want to learn how to grip a reader from the start and deliver a satisfying resolution, you can sign up for Beginnings that Grab and Endings that Land, both of which will be happening in early November. There’s also a Kickstarter going right not for Constelación (AKA Constellation), a bilingual magazine of science fiction and fantasy. I am not involved with this one at all, but I know many of the people who are, and I can’t wait to see what they do!Wizard Seeking Wizard is a fun fiction podcast in which a wizard who is trapped in a crystal sphere has decided to be a matchmaker and welcomes other wizards’ personal ads. I have a small role as a wizard named Flora Bunnyhop who’s seeking a rival. This one is just a silly fun time, and also totally free to listen to. If you do decide to listen, you can also vote for which wizards you would like to see more of. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at omgjulia.substack.com/subscribe

Here’s the second half of my two part interview with authors, C. S. E. Cooney and Carlos Hernandez!In my last post for my paid subscribers, I talked about the common advice that creative people should choose one niche in which to specialize. In the first part of this interview, we explored how ignoring that advice can actually help creativity grow stronger, but in this second part we’re diving into the question of how to narrow your focus in order to finish projects, even when they’re really hard and you feel stuck. Image Description: Sal and Gabi Break the Universe and The Assimilated Cuban’s Guide to Quantum Santeria by Carlos Hernandez and Jack O’ the Hills, How to Flirt in Faerieland and Other Wild Rhymes, Bone Swans, and Desdemona and the Deep by C. S. E. Cooney. Carlos’s Sal and Gabi Break the Universe won the Pura Belpré Medal for Latinx creators whose work portrays Latinx experiences well for young readers! Carlos also has a story in The Mythic Dream, an anthology edited by Navah Wolfe and Dominik Parisien. You can find Carlos on Twitter as @WriteTeachPlay.Claire’s Bone Swans won the World Fantasy Award for Best Collection! Her novella, Desdemona and the Deep is wonderful, too, and I am not just saying that because the title character was named after my late cat, Desdemona (but she really was! She is even called Desdemonster sometimes, which we also called my cat!) Claire has also narrated over 100 audiobooks, and has an alter ego as a rock star named Brimstone Rhine. Both of them will be at Boskone in February in Boston, Massachusetts, and so will I! In fact, we’ll all be performing together in one of Claire’s Brimstone Rhine concerts, AND we’ll be reading excerpts of our work together. I’ll post my full Boskone schedule soon, so you’ll know where to find us!Technical note: If you are reading these show notes in email or on the web, you don’t have to listen in a web browser! You can subscribe to this podcast in the podcatcher of your choice by clicking the “Listen in podcast app” link at the top of this message. It will send you an email, which will have a button in it that you can click while viewing the email on your phone, and that will generate a private RSS feed just for you. It will give you options to add it to one of several podcast apps by clicking a link, or to copy the RSS feed and add it to the podcast app you use. Once you add this feed to your app, future episodes should download to your phone automatically if you choose to autorefresh the feed. If you are a paid subscriber, you can use your private feed for both the paid and free episodes. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at omgjulia.substack.com/subscribe

Here’s part one of a two part interview with authors, C. S. E. Cooney and Carlos Hernandez!Claire and Carlos are both multi-talented creative powerhouses. Here’s a picture of some of their books:Image Description: Sal and Gabi Break the Universe and The Assimilated Cuban’s Guide to Quantum Santeria by Carlos Hernandez and Jack O’ the Hills, How to Flirt in Faerieland and Other Wild Rhymes, Bone Swans, and Desdemona and the Deep by C. S. E. Cooney. Carlos’s Sal and Gabi Break the Universe just won the Pura Belpré Medal for Latinx creators whose work portrays Latinx experiences well for young readers! And when I say he just won this award, I mean this happened literally yesterday at the American Library Association’s Midwinter conference in Philadelphia. How exciting! In 2016 Claire’s Bone Swans won the World Fantasy Award for Best Collection. But they don’t JUST write books! Both of them are poets, musicians, screenwriters, game writers, and more! Claire has also narrated over 100 audiobooks, and has an alter ego as a rock star named Brimstone Rhine. In my last post for my paid subscribers, I talked about the common advice that creative people should choose one niche in which to specialize. In this interview, we’re exploring just how many grains of salt you can take that advice with. Technical note: If you are reading these show notes in email or on the web, you don’t have to listen in a web browser! You can subscribe to this podcast in the podcatcher of your choice by clicking the “Listen in podcast app” link at the top of this message. It will send you an email, which will have a button in it that you can click while viewing the email on your phone, and that will generate a private RSS feed just for you. It will give you options to add it to one of several podcast apps by clicking a link, or to copy the RSS feed and add it to the podcast app you use. Once you add this feed to your app, future episodes should download to your phone automatically if you choose to autorefresh the feed. If you are a paid subscriber, you can use your private feed for both the paid and free episodes. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at omgjulia.substack.com/subscribe

Note: This episode was just for paid subscribers originally, but became public on June 24th, 2022Hello, subscribers! Last week we heard from Marie O'Mahony about what it takes to become a professional photographer. This week in a podcast and newsletter, I'm going to show you several of the photos and talk about what my personal experience was like.Full show notes with many pictures at https://www.juliarios.com/the-experience-of-getting-professional-photos/

Hello! In August when I was in Ireland, I got a professional photographer to take some photos of me. This was a first for me. Always before now, I have done my own author photos by taking selfies, but Marie is an old friend of my friend Claire (author and audiobook narrator C.S.E. Cooney), and I had seen some gorgeous photos she’d done of Claire in the past, so I figured I should take advantage of the fact that I would be in the same country as she was.You can find Marie O’Mahony Photography on Facebook here.Image description: Me! A person with short purple hair and an orange hair flower (made by Betsie Withey), wearing a navy blue floral top and glancing upward as if they have a mischievous idea, perhaps? Photo by Marie O’Mahony Photography, August, 2019.I’m just sharing the one photo on this post, but next week, I will share a couple more. This one was the one I ended up using the most recent time someone asked me for an author photo. I love the way Marie captured the colors of the flowers behind me in a way that feels both bright and understated, and I also love the way I am obviously thinking of something that amuses me in some way. That’s extremely true to my general outlook. All my life people around me have pulled me out of reveries to ask what I was laughing about, and usually my thoughts race by so fast I can’t even begin to explain! You can also see that I have big dark bags under my eyes. This is because the photo session happened the day after WorldCon and right as I was coming down with a cold. Alas! One always hopes one will be glowing with healthful vigor when one has a photoshoot, but life doesn’t always cooperate. And, perhaps, another big factor is that I don’t really wear makeup much, so the small amount of lipstick I put on here was about as much as I knew how to do. Even that felt strange to me since I do it so infrequently! But I knew I wanted to have some chance of my lips matching my top, just for the sake of the color pop. I really love colorful things, as most anyone who has ever really met me can attest. I’ll talk more about what the process was like next week in a paid subscribers only post, but for now, please enjoy the interview I did with Marie in which she talks about her journey as a photographer and gives a few tips for how to get started with photography for anyone who is interested, but has no idea where to start.One of her big tips is to search for photography groups on Facebook! There are apparently a lot of them where people share knowledge. She also recommends taking online classes at Creative Live. Okay, so next week, another podcast (but no interview this time, just me!) and several more photos! That’s going out to paid subscribers only. But Julia, you say, I have not paid for your newsletter yet! I’m not sure I can! To you, I say that’s okay! I have a special offer for a 30 day free trial. If you get this trial, you can look at all the past subscribers only letters and listen to the podcasts, too! And if you are already subscribed to the OMG Julia! podcast as a free subscriber, once you activate the trial, the paid episodes will show up as available to download in that same feed on your podcast provider of choice! Click that button or visit https://omgjulia.substack.com/photoshoot to get the free trial, and definitely feel free to share it with anyone else you think might be interested! This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at omgjulia.substack.com/subscribe

I tell you about my inspiration and process for writing my A Larger Reality 2.0 story. I also read the story on this episode. Fo full show notes, including the text of the story in both English and Spanish, visit https://www.juliarios.com/my-story-in-a-larger-reality-2-0-communicable/

At Readercon in Quincy, MA, I spoke to Anaea Lay, one of the founders of Dream Foundry. Dream Foundry is a community that exists to support beginner creators (in art, game design, prose, etc.). They have a forum and are about to launch a contest for artists and writers who are beginners. The writing contest will be judged by CC Finlay and Lisa Rogers and the Art contest will be judged by Rachel Quinlan. The contest winners will get a $500 cash prize for first place and critiques from professionals for first through third places. Dream Foundry is not buying publication rights, so the winners will be able to submit their stories elsewhere for first publication rights even if they win first place. William Ledbetter is coordinating the writing side of the contest, and you can find the full rules for the writing contest at https://dreamfoundry.org/contest.Sara Felix is coordinating the art side of the contest, though the art contest rules are not yet finalized.]The contest runs from the 12th of August to the 13th of October, and is open to anyone who has not sold a piece of their work at what would be considered a professional rate for their medium. For the writing side, this means that if a writer qualifies for the Associate level of SFWA membership, they are not eligible for Dream Foundry's contest. Ultimately, Dream Foundry is planning to expand the contest to include a workshop for future winners, but that will be a couple years down the road at least. The workshop will have all expenses paid for winners, and one of the things they are working to secure up front is a wheelchair accessible location. For people who are not eligible for the contest, Dream Foundry offers a forum community with a Media Exploration Club. The club has cycles of six months themes with different kinds of works discussed each month. Right now the theme is Found Families, and in July Darcie Little Badger is leading a discussion of a The Girl From the Other Side, a manga. In August, S. L. Huang will lead a discussion of the first two episodes of Firefly.The forum is free to everyone and is a moderated community with a code of conduct to keep the conversations friendly and inclusive. The board of Dream Foundry is Anaea Lay, Cislyn Smith, Deanna Rymaszewski, Evergreen Lee, and Coral Moore. To find out more about the staff and the organization, visit https://dreamfoundry.org/about/who-we-are/.To find out more about Anaea, visit her website, and to hear more of her voice, listen to the Strange Horizons Podcast. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at omgjulia.substack.com/subscribe