Outer Alliance Spotlight #1: Michele Lee September 18, 2009
Posted by juliarios in : interviews, publications , trackbackWelcome to the first Outer Alliance Spotlight. Each Friday the Spotlight will feature an ally who writes, reviews, publishes, or is in some other way involved with LGBTQI speculative fiction. Our first guest is Michele Lee, a writer and reviewer from Louisville, Kentucky.
Michele is bisexual and happily married to a straight ally. She thinks of herself as an inclusive writer, who doesn’t necessarily focus on including queer content, but instead on exploring the machinations of relationships, and how our sexual and gender identities develop. One of her two children is autistic, so Michele is also active in autism awareness.
Her short fiction has appeared in several places including Aoife’s Kiss, Black Ink Horror XXX, and Cthulhu Sex Magazine, and her novella, Rot is available through Skullvines Press. In addition to her personal book review blog, Book Love, Michele has written reviews for The Fix, Monster Librarian, and Dark Scribe. She is planning a Horror Day event in the Louisville area tentatively scheduled for the 14th of November, 2009, but she managed to carve out some time from her busy schedule to answer a few questions for us.
The zombies in Rot are real people with feelings and memories. In your personal opinion, does that make them more or less scary than traditionally mindless ones?
I’d say they were scarier, but the big secret is that I made my zombies human because I am truly terrified of the idea of zombies. Creatures that want to–need to–eat you and there is no killing them. You can cut them to bits and the bits will come after you. I wrote people-like zombies because I needed to make them a different kind of dangerous in order to work with them.
One of your three main characters in Rot is a gay male. Can you tell us a little bit more about him?
No one knows how exactly Patrick died. What we do know in Rot is that he’s in the zombie care facility, forcibly raised and held prisoner against his will so that his family can visit him weekly and try to convert him back to straightendom. They fear that if he is “dead” he’ll go to hell for being gay. However in their attempts to save Patrick from hell they’re forcing him to live in a body that’s slowly rotting around him, in a care facility where he is little more than a moving object. His family has completely taken his free will away from him, even his ability to die has been stripped.
The scariest thing is that I can see that happening. I do see it happening all the time in these gay “treatment” camps and classes. Prisons of guilt, shame and punishment are created for these people, and because of the belief system of the perpetrators even in death they can’t escape. As a metaphor it’s a very thin one.
Novellas are notorious for being hard to sell. How did you end up writing one, and how long did it take you to place it with a publisher?
I wrote Rot because a friend of mine had been talking about herding zombies on her blog. On one hand the visual was hilarious and I wanted to use it. On the other, zombies are so scary to me personally that I didn’t feel right making it just a humor piece.
It ended up a novella because the story is pretty fast. It happens in a short period of time, and the plot is very consuming. The two male characters, Patrick and Dean, are quite obsessed with their missing friend, Amy, and because of the nature of zombies if the story went on too long they would find Amy as a jar of goo, not a woman. I thought about cutting it down to short story length, but I didn’t think I could do it without losing something.
It took me about a year to sell it. Many places said no because it was zombies period, or because it wasn’t post-apocalyptic, Romero-style zombies. I ended up getting a few of Skullvines’ books sent to me as a reviewer and I was really impressed with them. So I asked if they looked at novellas and the publisher told me they love novellas.
I pitched Rot to them, and while they said they were zombied out they were willing to look at it since I insisted it was a different kind of zombies, and they ended up loving it. And that’s how we got here today.
You’ve had your share of difficulties with things like small presses collapsing before publishing your work, so I’m wondering if you have any tips for new writers who are trying to find out if a publisher is reliable before submitting.
Well the small press in question had no negative information out there when I submitted. You’ll see a lot of people say “Avoid a publisher with complaints against it, or a history of nonpayment,” but those things didn’t come out about the press until it was in the process of collapsing.
What I advise is go to Writer Beware and the Absolute Write Water Cooler and study what has happened to people taken by scams and to people who have been involved in these press collapses. They all read the same. When you learn how a normal and abnormal press operate it will help you identify suspicious presses before they go bad. Because a lot of the bad presses out there aren’t trying to be bad, they just get in over their heads. But we have a hard enough time as it is without getting caught in that.
Also, focus your submissions to markets and presses who put out work of good quality. Buy a book from them to see if that’s the kind of work you want your work to be associated with. Start with the top/best markets and work down. But “any publication” is not better than “no publication”. Don’t be afraid to think “My work is too good for you”. Being informed and having confidence in your work goes a long way to help avoid the desperation that leads to making you an easy target for publishers of questionable value.
And finally, do you have any book recommendations for us?
I am especially passionate about GLBTQ inclusion in SF/F/H so let’s start from there.
Ann Aguirre‘s Sirantha Jax series (Grimspace, Wanderlust, Doubleblind) features a lesbian spaceship mechanic as part of her Serenity-style crew. Likewise Ilona Andrews’ Kate Daniels series features supernatural creatures with fluid senses of sexuality and sexual identity.
Jennifer Pelland should have won a Nebula for her twisted SF love story between two women, “Captive Girl” which is part of her Unwelcome Bodies collection.
I also recommend Queer Wolf, a collection of gay/lesbian werewolf stories and Body Parts by Adrianna Dane, an erotic retelling of Frankenstein which also tackles sexual and gender identity issues.
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Thanks, Michele! Look out for another Outer Alliance Spotlight Post next Friday, and in the meantime, check out Rot.
Comments»
I went to high school with Laramie Dean, one of the authors included in the Queer Wolf anthology. It sure is a small world. These are great recommendations, and I’m putting several of them on my to-read list.
Your novel is on my reading list after it was highlighted on a blog dedicated to zombies.
I think it will be a blast. Your idea to use zombies as a certain metaphor for the “prison” homosexuals are forced in by the surrounding masses is brilliant.
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