Tell us a bit about your latest work.
I am really happy to announce that Mocha Memoirs Press has picked up my horror / paranormal romance series. The series revolves around a series of Greek deities known as Oneiros who are aspects of dreams, personified. This in particular revolves around the subset of erotic nightmares. The books combine horror, dark fantasy, romance, and kinky erotica. There are four books at this time: Happiness and Other Diseases, Somnalia, Insatiable, and Akmani. And I am already getting started on the outline for a fifth book, Phobetor.
The series starts with Happiness and Other Diseases. The central protagonist, Flynn Keahi, is being haunted by disturbing nightmares where a succubus-like creature calling itself Mercy is latching herself onto his repressed sadomasochistic sexual desires. Initially, he finds himself exhausted, depleted of energy. Overtime, things worsen and he wakes up with unexplained injuries on his body. The creature is becoming increasingly able to affect him in the waking world. Mercy and her siblings are trying to break out of the dream world and into the mortal realm.
What happened in your life that prompted you to become a writer?
I started writing when I was very young. I dreamed of being an author from the time I was in kindergarten, and I was on my high school newspaper. I was a published poet by the age of 19, but I didn’t achieve my dream of being a novelist until I was 42. What prompted me to write my first novel was finding out that both of my parents had cancer. My mother was diagnosed with Multiple Myeloma, a cancer in the same family as leukemia and lymphoma, which affects African Americans at a rate twice as high as the general population, in August 2009. My father was diagnosed with lung cancer a year and a half later, in 2011. I decided that I should write a novel while they were living, so they could read what I wrote, and generally be a part of my achieving my dreams, while they were still living. I became very focused, and I wrote three novels between 2011 and when my father died in January 2013. My mother was a survivor. Against all odds, she fought multiple myeloma for 9 ½ years, despite it having been so advanced by the time it was diagnosed that she was only expected to live 1 1/12 years. She passed away in January 2019.
What inspires you to write?
I have a compulsion to write, which I think is due to my bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder – and very likely, to my basic personality other than my mental health issues and trauma. But writing horror is definitely something that helps me to process the traumas that are behind my PTSD diagnosis. I also often write very topical sociopolitical horror based on issues in the headlines that I find inspire me.
What are the themes and subjects you tend to revisit in your work?
I wanted to have children and wasn’t able to, and I find that fertility issues and difficulties in procreation have resurfaced in various ways in many of my works. Mental illness also shows up in a lot of them. Flynn Keahi has bipolar disorder, and the title of Happiness and Other Diseases is a reference to how, whenever he is truly happy, his doctors accuse him of having a manic episode. He has trouble getting people to take his problems seriously because he’s mentally ill. He isn’t the only mentally ill character I have written, but he is the first central protagonist who is. I wrote a lot of other characters of one sort or another who had mental health issues before and after Flynn.
What would be your dream project?
Honestly, this is my dream project. I have a deep love for this series. Anne Rice said that people should write the book they want to read, and that’s what I did. I wrote a series of books that told a story that I wanted to read. And about two-thirds of the way through the first book, the stories just started writing themselves. The characters lived for me, and they told their own tale, and I had a deep and still abiding love affair with this world and these characters. Of course, if they made a movie out of them that would be even better.
What writers have influenced your style and technique?
Like anyone, I am influenced by what I read a lot of. That would be Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, LA Banks, Anne Rice, Stephen King, Robin Cook, Peter Straub, Frank Herbert, Susan Cook, C.S. Lewis. Also mythology, I was a huge fan of Greek, Roman, and Norse mythology as a kid.
If you have any former project to do over to make it better, which one would it be, and what would you do?
Where would you rank writing on the "Is it an art or it is a science continuum?" Why?
For me, it is an art. The only science I know is computer science, and although I put some planning into my books, the notebooks full of character notes and world-building are pretty chaotic. There is something frenetic and organic about the process. Which is not to say that writing isn’t a science for someone, nor is it to say that there is nothing mechanical in it for me. I use the three-act structure, so that is a method I find useful. But most of it is like intentional daydreaming for me.
What is the most difficult part of your artistic process?
Definitely editing my own work, as there are always a lot of things you miss when you look at the page. Reading aloud helps – missing words or phrases are more noticeable when reading aloud. When you read what you wrote on a page, your brain inserts what you think you meant to say. So that makes it harder to catch. My English teacher also taught us that it helps to read backward from the last page to the first, a page at a time. It stops your brain from focusing on the story and forces you to look at the words themselves. Working with an editor can also be difficult – although, I tend to just approve 95 to 100 percent of the editing suggestions. They usually know what they are talking about. But sometimes they have rewrites. I can love rewrites, but they can also be frustrating.
How do your writer friends help you become a better writer? Or do they not?
Being in writer’s groups and critiquing one another’s work has also helped me as a writer. Other writers are able to give specific, constructive critiques that are useful and can be acted upon.
What does literary success look like to you?
Every time something new and exciting happens, I feel like I have succeeded – so I take it one day at a time, just like any other job. When I reach a new level, it is like getting a raise at a 9 to 5 job, or a promotion. So I try to appreciate each new plateau and I still feel very excited about it. I know I am going to get to go to DC and present in person at WorldCon in December, and I am thrilled. Not only will it be my first in-person convention appearance since March 2020, but it is the furthest I will have traveled for an appearance. Writing is a humble career for most of us – most of us will never exceed a middle-class standard of living as an author, and honestly, many of us will never make that. For me being able to support myself as an author looks like literary success. Having an audience looks like success.
Any other upcoming projects you would like to plug?
I have a poem, “Darkest Night of Faerie Bright,” in the upcoming Horror Writers Association Poetry Showcase 8, and one called “With December Comes Elune” in a poetry anthology called Infectious Hope.
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