Sandra McDonald has written several short stories and novels, including “The Ghost Girls of Rumney Mill”, which was shortlisted for the Tiptree award in 2003, and the science fiction series, The Outback Stars, The Stars Down Under, and The Stars Blue Yonder. Her latest book, Diana Comet and Other Improbable Stories follows the coverging paths of three people including an openly gay character and a genderqueer character.

Sandra has an MFA from the University of Southern Maine, and spent 8 years traveling the world as a Naval Officer. In addition to her personal site, she keeps a LiveJournal where she posts about writing.

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OA: Diana Comet and Other Improbable Stories features some gay and transgendered characters in an alternate Earth. How is their world like ours, and how is it different in the ways its societies treat LGBTQI people?

SM: Geography is a fun aspect of the book, and I like the idea that they’re in an alternate Earth or dimension. Another way of looking at it is to treat their world as our own, with an ongoing game of names. Ed McBain did this in his famed 87th precinct novels by using “Isola” instead of “Manhattan.” In fact, he renamed all five boroughs, and critics have argued over whether he meant to make a truly fictional city or a simple copy of New York City. However we treat the places, the people in Diana Comet are exactly like the people here, with a wide variety of orientations, prejudices, hopes and secret desires.

OA: You’re organizing the writing workshops for next year’s Gaylaxicon in Atlanta. What can writers expect to get out of these workshops if they attend?

SM: We’re aiming for that half-day, Milford style experience you see at other cons, with a small group of writers and lots of respectful, honest critiques. The difference with ours is that we will be encouraging positive portrayals of gay, lesbian, transgender and other characters. We’re all really excited about this. I first attended one of these workshops at Boskone, and our group was run by Theodora Goss and David Alexander Smith. It was a great learning experience for a fledgling writer like myself and I want to pay it forward to new writers now.

OA: When did you get the idea to make a periodic table of awesome female SF writers, and how did you decide who to include?

SM: Web surfing one night (as many writers are known to do), I came across Squidspot’s Periodic Table of Typefaces. It’s a very cool chart if you’re into web or page design. That meshed up with some thoughts I had about one of the footnote characters in Diana Comet, a female science fiction writer in the 1940′s. Soon I started fooling around on Macromedia Fireworks. Six weeks and 300 objects later, I had my own chart! The names were drawn from Hugo, Nebula and other awards lists, and I think represent a solid foundation of fabulous women writers. I wish I’d had room for dozens more. At the same time, the chart and the accompanying video point out some areas where we can improve – gaining Nebula nominations for urban fantasy writers, for instance, or seeing more women in leadership at SFWA.

OA: You were in the military for 8 years, and you’ve lived on at least 3 different islands in your lifetime. How has occupation and habitat influenced your writing?

SM: Being in the Navy was a great experience and definitely exposed me to a lot of different cultures and customs. At the same time, it opened my eyes to the hypocrisy of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and how great sailors were being discharged only because of their sexuality. Being on islands helped me appreciate small communities and how people function when they’re not part of the “the norm.” I still love the military- Navy jets fly over my house several times a week – and still love islands, especially Key West.

OA: Writers have cats like planets have moons (they’re not a given, but it’s hardly surprising to find a few hanging around). Will you tell us about yours?

SM: I love that analogy. Right now I have three official cats and one unofficial stray, plus another on extended vacation with grandma. I never intended to be the cat lady of my neighborhood, but all animals deserve good homes and I’m happy to do what I can. The only time I regret having adorable small furry animals around is when one decides to plop down on the keyboard while I’m typing.

OA: Are you working on anything new? What might we hope to see from you in the future?

SM: I’m working on lots of new things, but also very excited about my stories being published this year. Over at Futurismic, I had a great time with “Tupac Shakur and the End of the World”. It’s my tribute to disaster movies. Clarkesworld just published “Beach Blanket Spaceship”, which is an homage to all those Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello movies I used to watch as a kid. And soon Strange Horizons will publish “Seven Sexy Cowboy Robots”, which was inspired by a great video called Brokeback Skaters. Really, check it out. Lots of fun!

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Thanks, Sandra! Join us next week for another Spotlight, and in the meantime, check out Diana Comet and Other Improbable Stories.

John is a gay artist and writer based in Manchester, UK. He designs and illustrates books and comics as well as creating CD and DVD cover art, and original visual art. His Psychedelic Wonderland 2010 calendar was featured on Boing Boing, and inspired his cover art for Alan Moore’s Dodgem Logic #4. He has work on display as part of the A Love Craft exhibition at Observatory in Brooklyn, New York, which will be open until the 23rd of this month.

Though he doesn’t read as much science fiction as he used to, John feels indebted to the genre for giving him queer characters he could identinfy with as a teen. He’s an Outer Alliance member because of that, and because he believes LGBTQI visibility is important. John maintains a Twitter feed and blogs on his personal site.

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OA: The cover for Dodgem Logic #4 is a beautiful and striking Art Nouveau image. How did you come up with that design concept, and what was the process like?

JC: Alan Moore enjoyed the Alice in Wonderland calendar which I produced last year and which had a psychedelic theme. Issue 4 of Dodgem Logic is a kind of psychedelic special so he asked if I could supply a suitable cover image. Many of the psychedelic artists of the 1960s borrowed styles and motifs from the Art Nouveau era and I’m very familiar with the culture of both periods so it seemed natural to bring them together.

Since I had carte blanche I wanted to be a little provocative. I’d discovered the work of Yannis Tsarouchis a month or so before; he was a Greek painter, very well-regarded in his native country, who produced a lot of homoerotic work including a number of pictures of men with butterfly wings. So the idea was to throw a lot of butterfly and peacock motifs together and see what worked. Having two guys kissing gave it an edge which takes the cover away from being just a pretty picture. If you had two women kissing I doubt anyone would notice. A picture of two men kissing is still a great provocation for some people so the idea was to make that an unavoidable focus of the design. Alan Moore was fine with this, he’s always been a big supporter of gay rights. The magazine is called Dodgem Logic because it’s “colliding ideas to see what happens” so that was the approach I tried to take.

I found a suitable photograph of two guys and did a large outline drawing based on that. If you’re working with vector graphics you need strong, clear outlines so I often draw things first at large size then scan them and convert them to vector shapes. After that it’s a case of colouring things and shuffling them around in Illustrator as you might do with cut-out pieces of paper. The butterfly woman on the back cover was also a drawn outline, based on Frank X Leyendecker’s “Flapper” cover for Life magazine. The logo which I based on Roger Dean‘s lettering styles of the 1970s was done half on paper and half in the computer at a very large size to ensure all the curves were perfectly smooth. I was obsessed with Roger Dean’s album cover art when I was 14 but this was the first time I’ve ever imitated his lettering designs.

OA: You designed the Thackeray T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases, and you also contributed a piece of short fiction to it. Have you written any other fiction?

JC: Well, since you asked…yes, I have, rather a lot of it but this is the first time I’ve owned up to it in public. The Lambshead piece was just a throwaway idea but I began writing fiction when I was 16 and was doing so more-or-less constantly up until the age of about 24. I started out writing fantasy then lost interest in that and produced a lot of very dense and reader-unfriendly prose influenced by Modernist experiment and speculative fiction of the sort found in New Worlds and the Dangerous Visions anthologies. When I’d left school in 1979 I actually had more of an ambition to be a writer than an illustrator since writing fiction is personally creative whereas illustration is always subordinate to the work of another. I’d also decided to avoid art school and was told by everyone that I’d never have an artistic career because of this. In 1985 I was halfway through a very condensed surrealist novel heavily influenced by J. G. Ballard when I realised no one would ever want to publish it and I’d be better off concentrating more on the art side of things. So I abandoned the novel and started work on what became my series of H. P. Lovecraft adaptations. If I’d not had an aptitude for drawing or painting I definitely would have persevered with the writing. It’s just at that point I’d lost interest in writing stories but didn’t have a strong enough idea for a longer work.

That was then. By 1999 I’d produced 270 pages of the Reverbstorm comic series with David Britton and also put together the book of my Lovecraft work for Oneiros Press. I was in the mood to start something fresh and I wanted the new project to be completely my own, not an adaptation or a collaboration. I’d had a half-formed novel idea in mind for some time so in 2001 I started writing again, this time creating a very dark, urban fantasy which, in atmosphere at least, owes something to the Reverbstorm comics. I spent six years working on one novel and I’ve spent another four years working on the follow-up which is now halfway through. I have a UK agent who’s currently trying to sell the first book; not anyone I’d known previously, her interest came through a blind submission.

I’ve been quite resolute in not mentioning this recent work at all until now for a couple of reasons. The first is that it seems insufferably presumptuous to have a career going in one area and blithely announce to the world that you’re branching out into new territory with no indication of having done anything before in this direction. People are understandably sceptical about such moves. The other reason was that I was only going to make an announcement when I had something concrete to announce, rather than telling the world that its surplus of unpublished books had increased by one. As it turns out the agent has had difficulty selling the book, not because it’s necessarily bad or uncommercial–we’ve received praise from editors–but on account of the sex content. This has happened three times now and I’ve been rather surprised by the reaction, especially since I didn’t set out to create something that was wildly transgressive. I should emphasise that it’s not gay sex which is being rejected–there’s a minimum of gay stuff in the first one–and I haven’t tried to write Naked Lunch 2 or anything. It seems to be that my imagination is too weird and nasty for publishers. Or something. You’d have to ask them.

So that’s where things stand at the moment. This isn’t a dilettantish endeavour, I’m as serious about this new work as I am about anything I’ve ever done. Probably more so, since it took me twenty years to reach a point where I could create something which felt wholly my own. Congratulations, you’ve outed me as a writer!

OA: A Love Craft is an exhibition of artwork inspired by H.P. Lovecraft’s writing. What is your relationship with Lovecraft’s work? Do you have a favorite piece? How did you decide what to contribute to this show?

JC: As mentioned above, I spent ten years on and off producing the comic strip adaptations and illustrations of Lovecraft which became The Haunter of the Dark and Other Grotesque Visions. The impetus was a desire to see Lovecraft treated seriously in illustration form. Many of the comic strips based on his work at that point were either jokey or rather inept and didn’t give any conception of the cosmic nature of his stories. I tried to create the kind of book I’d want to read myself.

I’m not sure which is my favourite piece. I can tell you the three which people seem to like the most. The colour pictures of Cthulhu and R’lyeh have been very popular, and both have been used on reprints of Lovecraft’s own fiction. And many people seem to appreciate my depiction of poor Wilbur Whateley’s demise from “The Dunwich Horror”.

I didn’t have to make a choice for the show, fortunately, Dylan Thuras of Observatory approached me with suggestions of the works they’d like to feature.

OA: You and Alan Moore are planning a new graphic project called The Soul. Can you tell us anything more about that? Or about any other new projects we might look forward to?

JC: This is one of those unrealised projects which haunts the CV. The idea was originally to do a comic strip for the books Alan was producing for ABC in 2000. The Soul would have been an occult detective, a kind of Belle Epoque female equivalent of Carnacki the Ghostfinder, John Silence and others. Alan was pretty overworked at that time so it never got off the ground but the idea has recently transmuted to being an illustrated story for the magical primer he’s been writing with Steve Moore. That’s also stalled at the moment, partly because of Dodgem Logic.

I have two more books I’d like to see in print. The novel is one, of course, the other is the complete edition of the Reverbstorm comic series. Savoy Books are still planning to publish the latter although given their sluggish schedule I can’t say when it might appear. People will wonder why someone else couldn’t publish it but it’s a controversial and frequently experimental series and we’ve been assured in the past by other companies that they’re not keen. It’s frustrating since I don’t really want to do anything more with comics and that work is the best thing I’ve produced in the medium.

Aside from that I’m still designing things for Tachyon and there’s more titles due from them which I’ve worked on, mostly doing interior designs although I’ve done a cover for a forthcoming Joe Lansdale collection. One of the new books is Steampunk Reloaded, the sequel to the Steampunk anthology edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer which will have quite a lavish interior.

OA: As a teenager, you read a lot of science fiction because it wasn’t afraid to explore queer themes, gender-swapping, etc. Were there any stories you found particularly important or influential?

JC: Yes, many stories. The subversive quality of sf throughout the 1960s and 1970s is rarely mentioned but for a decade or so it was a very potent thing. I think Michael Moorcock‘s work was the first to catch my attention. Many of the characters in the Jerry Cornelius stories are bisexual, Karl Glogauer in Breakfast in the Ruins has an homosexual encounter, and so on. The impressive thing in the work of Moorcock and other writers such as Samuel Delany was the way the sexuality of the characters was taken completely for granted. There was never the slightest trace of hand-wringing or angst of the kind which was common in feature films and TV dramas. That seemed to be one of the great values which sf had as a genre, it could turn social mores upside down or inside out and have everyone behave as though things were fine.

As far as turning things upside down goes, one story which really made an impression was a story by Rachel Pollack called “The Second Generation” which appeared in a short-lived sf mag in 1978. It’s quite a simple piece, almost a fable, about a teenage couple who regularly use pills to change their sex. This happens immediately so it’s almost a magical process. The story isn’t concerned with the technology, it’s more about the couple’s relationship and how they cope when the gender swap goes wrong. A friend at school pronounced this “disgusting”; I said nothing because I was secretly fascinated by these characters who were our age. I was rather thrilled at the idea of being able to change sex at will, and by the matter-of-fact same sex description. I’ve never had a great urge to be female at all, I think it was the idea of sexual fluidity which fascinated, and being able to step out of rigid gender roles. There was also description of imaginary sex organs which was quite unprecedented. Eventually the pair in the story decide to remain the boys they were born as so it comes out gay in the end.

A year or so after reading that, the editorials in New Worlds anthologies pushed me to find William Burroughs’ work. I fell in at the deep end with The Ticket that Exploded which just happens to contain some of his more overt sf scenarios, he even swipes an idea (which he credits) from Henry Kuttner. I was fascinated again, as well as rather appalled and it took some time to admit why these books and stories were so attractive and what they were stating for me that I couldn’t fully articulate for myself. (I was a late developer; can you tell?) In Alan Bennett‘s TV play about Marcel Proust, the author has a discussion with his housekeeper about books. Alan Bates plays Proust and at one point he says the following:

“Every reader while he’s reading is a reader of his own self. A book is merely an optical instrument, a lens, which the author offers the reader to enable him or her to discern what, without the book, they would never have perceived in themselves.”

That’s what I’d discovered by reading sf. And Proust’s words are a perfect description of the value of writing as art, even when that art is being presented as merely another form of entertainment.

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Thanks, John! Join us next Friday for another Spotlight, and in the meantime, check out John’s website and Dodgem Logic #4!

Sacchi Green is the erotica writing pseudonym for Connie Wilkins, and she’s got a list of publishing credits that’s about a mile long. She identifies as a lifetime bisexual person with strong lesbian leanings, and a definitely lesbian writing muse. Most recently, she won the 2010 Lambda Award in the Lesbian Erotica category for co-editing Lesbian Cowboys with Rakelle Valencia. She also edited Girl Crazy, and the forthcoming Lesbian Lust (due out in August), and is currently taking submissions for Lesbian Cops.

As Connie Wilkins, she edited Time Well Bent, an anthology of queer alternate history stories. Her personal fiction contribution to that volume is reprinted in Bedazzled Ink’s Year’s Best Lesbian Fiction 2009 and (with slightly more erotic content) Circlet Press’s Best Fantastic Erotica. She also has a story coming out in Hellebore and Rue, an anthology of stories about lesbian magic users due otu from Drollerie Press later this year.

Sacchi blogs on LiveJournal, maintains a Facebook profile, and is active on the Lesbian Fiction Forum. She lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, and will be reading in various East Coast cities this fall.

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OA: You’re a big proponent of erotica with high standards of plot and craftmanship, as evidenced by the Lambda award you recently won for co-editing Lesbian Cowboys. What are some common mistakes you see in the submissions pile?

SG: There are some mistakes that all editors see, such as stories that have nothing to do with the required theme (or have been stretched to the breaking point to try to make them fit.) Then there are the erotica-specific blunders, using words that don’t mean what the writer thinks they mean, or metaphors that are worn-out clichés or downright ridiculous if you stop to think about them. Anatomical improbabilities are troublesome, too; if a reader has to pause and wonder how part one can be in contact with part two without someone being a contortionist or breaking in half, the mood and suspension of disbelief have been destroyed, and in erotic scenes, more than in most others, that sort of interruption can be (metaphorically) fatal. And don’t try to write BDSM scenes unless you know what you’re talking about, because those who do know will catch any mistakes. I won’t go into grammatical misadventures, since those can usually be fixed, but like every editor, I do have my pet peeves.

OA: You write erotica as Sacchi Green and speculative fiction as Connie Wilkins. What’s the story behind your two names?

SG: When I started writing for publication, rather later in life than most, I focused on science fiction and fantasy. I managed to sell enough short stories to qualify as an active member of SFWA (Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America), and planned to keep on that way, especially after I sold a couple of pieces to Bruce Coville’s series of anthologies for kids. Those paid better than anything else I’d written, and I hoped to do more along those lines. When I sold my first erotica story (to Best Lesbian Erotica 1999) I figured that was a one-time thing, and if I were going to be writing extensively for children, it might be wise to use a pseudonym for my erotic work. Things didn’t work out that way; I was seduced by the erotic side of the force, and never wrote for children again (although I haven’t given up on the idea,) and by the time I noticed that my alter-ego Sacchi Green had racked up a lot more credits than Connie Wilkins, it felt too late too undo the damage. I do sometimes use my given name for speculative fiction, even when it’s erotica, but it’s all become somewhat muddled. My advice to anyone considering using a pseudonym is to consider how you’ll feel if your alter-ego becomes more successful than “you” do.

OA: Lesbian Cops is open for submissions until the first of August. The title is pretty self explanatory, but are there any kinds of stories you’re particularly hoping to see for that one? Any tropes you’re sick of?

SG: I always hope to see stories that are so original that I didn’t know I wanted them until I saw them. And I try to have a wide variety of themes, styles, settings, etc. As to tropes, in theory I believe that any idea, however overworked, can be done creatively by the right writer, but at this point I really don’t want to see any more traffic cops stopping drivers and demanding sex. A major problem with this kind of book (and with most erotica, though even more so here) is in meeting the varying hopes and expectations of the readers. I know people, personal friends, who have deeply-felt cop fetishes that involve officers doing things that would make others see them as villains. For that matter, I know people who have villain-fetishes. I also know women who are cops, real people with complex lives, and I don’t want stories that make them into caricatures. No single reader is going to like every story in a book, and many readers will find at least one story offensive; I need to find a balance. The best advice I can give is to pick a setting and characters that interest you, and take it from there.

OA: Time Well Bent is an anthology of queer alternative history stories you edited, and you contributed a story as well. What is it about history that draws you? Do you have any favorite time periods?

SG: I’ve always loved to read stories set in different eras. History itself, as we perceive it, is a form of story. I could pontificate about needing to understand our history in order to understand the present that grows out of it, but really, I enjoy reading and researching and writing about historical periods in the same way that I like to know about other cultures and parts of the world. Why limit yourself to one point in time, any more than to one point on the surface of the earth? As to favorite time periods, as a kid I was interested in the Medieval period because so much fantasy literature was set there, and as a young teen I was wrapped up in Jane Austen and Regency romances, but the older I get, the more history there is, and recently I’ve been working with the WWII period and on to the Vietnam War, which was my “present” not all that long ago, it seems.

OA: You’re arranging readings for the fall. What new projects are on the horizon, and where can people find your tour schedule?

SG: I’ll be posting readings and events on Face Book and Live Journal. Definitely one during Women’s Week in Provincetown (October 8-17), featuring several Cleis Press books including Best Lesbian Erotica and Best Lesbian Romance and my Lesbian Lust (because we can’t get enough readers together for any single book,) probably one in Philadelphia in mid- to late September, and possibly one in NYC in November. Boston is possible, too, if enough readers are available. I don’t “tour” much out of the Northeast, since I can’t afford the time or expense, but occasionally I’ll have a few writers close enough to each other to organize readings of my books in other parts of the country.

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Thanks, Sacchi! Join us next Friday for another Spotlight, and in the meantime, check out Lesbian Cowboys and Time Well Bent.

Rose grew up with a jumble of native and semi native languages including Russian, Yiddish, and Hebrew. She began writing poetry and fiction in English as an adult after pursuing a Ph.D. in Linguistics at UC Berkeley. Her poetry has appeared in many places including Abyss & Apex (which published last year’s Rhysling nominated “Odysseus on the War Train”) and Goblin Fruit (which published this year’s Rhysling nominated “Godfather Death”), and her short fiction has appeared in G.U.D., Strange Horizons, and Fantasy Magazine.

Stone Telling is Rose’s newest project, an online magazine devoted to literary speculative poetry. The title is the name of a character from a story by Ursula K. Le Guin, and the first issue will feature a previously unpublished poem by Le Guin. The first reading period opened on the 14th of June, and will close on the 14th of August.

Rose is on LiveJournal and Twitter, and also maintains a Stone Telling LiveJournal community. She is currently a professor at a large research University in the Midwest.

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OA: Stone Telling is open for submissions until the 14th of August. What sorts of poems are you hoping to receive?

RL: I am looking for literary speculative poems with an emotional core. I’d like to receive poems that blow my mind, bend my brain, make me fly, make me cry, and hopefully don’t make me throw up or throw the laptop against the wall. As you can see from the guidelines, I am pretty open genre-wise, style-wise and length-wise. I am a very open-minded reader, but also a very picky one.

Ideally I’d like to regularly showcase poetry that illuminates the experience of being Other, or encountering Others. Speculative poetry, I feel, is a perfect vehicle to deal with othering; real life also offers us plenty of othering experiences, some incredibly painful and some less so. I want to read poems that consider what it means to feel alienated or lonely or different or changing or belonging to a community that’s different from other communities; I want to read about what it means to grow up in a different place, to speak a different language, to think about the world in different colors. However, I am not going to reject poems simply because they do not deal with the issues I list. I will consider all poetry I receive.

OA: Are you actively interested in poetry with LGBTQI themes?

RL: Yes, I very much hope to receive poetry with LGBTQI themes. Please send them to me!

There are some very fine poets already in the genre who are active in the LGBTQI community, whether or not they choose to explore LGBTQI issues in their work. And you don’t have to be a member of the LGBTQI community in order to write poems that explore these themes. One of my first published poems, “Two Births of a Bird Shaman” (in Mythic Delirium 19) dealt with gender change.

OA: What other themes interest you?

RL: Simply put, I am most interested in speculative poems that explore diversity. To give one example not at random, I would very much like to publish poetry that deals with race, and I’d like to see poetry by people of color (whether or not they are writing about race) in my magazine and elsewhere. I am also very much into disability issues.

OA: Why did you decide to start a poetry magazine in the first place?

RL: I first got this idea last year, when Lone Star Stories folded. Journal of Mythic Arts, another beloved market, folded in 2008. I sorely missed both venues, and asked myself what I’d do if I had a chance to launch my own zine. The answer was clear – I would consider a broad range of speculative (and occasionally, outstanding non-speculative) poems, and I would work hard to promote diversity in speculative poetry. But 2009 was such a disastrous year for me, I had to shelve the idea for a better time – and now I feel that the time has come. I was immensely encouraged by the positive responses from the community, and I feel that together we can create something worthwhile.

OA: Like Vladimir Nabokov and Joseph Conrad, your first language was not English. Do you think this makes you more mindful of the words you choose when you write in English? Does it influence your writing in other ways?

RL: Absolutely. The multilingual experience is at once very enriching, and very humbling. As a poet, I have been shaped by the multilingual poetry I read, and I learned some of my languages through poetry. The humbling part comes from never quite knowing the right words – so have to I use wrong words, odd words, triangular words, words that smell like linden flowers, words that smell like tar. I can make embarrassing mistakes, so I have to check every word, and that makes me mindful. My imagery and rhythms and associations are an amalgamation of everything I’ve experienced so far, and that experience is foreign everywhere. It’s not a very comfortable personal place, but it is also a place of strength.

OA: “Godfather Death” is a Rhysling nominee in the long form category this year. What drew you to revisit that fairy tale in modern poetry?

RL: That’s quite a story. In December 2008, I banded with Deirdre S. Moen and Josh Moore to run a charity fundraiser, HelpVera, in order to help the speculative author and publisher Vera Nazarian save her home from foreclosure. The fundraiser was nothing short of amazing – there was such an unforgettable outpouring of love and community spirit. As a part of the fundraiser we ran a charity auction, and I auctioned a custom poem there, which was bought by one of my favorite speculative poets, JoSelle Vanderhooft. When I received JoSelle’s prompt, “Godfather Death”, I had a sinking feeling, since I had never before (or since!) written a poem about death. But I knew this was an important theme for JoSelle, so I dutifully sat down to reread the Brothers’ Grimm fairytale. And then the poem just bled itself from my fingers. I had nothing to do with it.

OA: On the Stone Telling website, you list three examples of literary speculative poetry: “The Seven Devils of Central California” by Catherynne Valente, “The Bone Harp Sings Nine Moods” by Shweta Narayan, and “Hungry: Some Ghost Stories” by Samantha Henderson. Who are some of your other favorite poets?

RL: Non-speculative or speculative? I read a lot of poetry and I read poetry in many languages. Some of my favorite poets composed epic poetry, and are anonymous. I love Old Norse and early Icelandic poetry, and my favorite poet in that language is Egill Skallagrímsson, who lived in 10th century Iceland. As an undergraduate, I spent a lot of time translating various Taliesin poems from Welsh for my own entertainment, and I love those. Russian poetry is amazing. I grew up reading Anna Akhmatova and Valeriy Briusov and Mikhail Lomonosov, who was born a poor peasant and became a 18-century polymath – a scientist and a poet and an artist and a linguist, among other things. My favorite Russian poet is Vladimir Mayakovsky. In English… there are too many to list. I love Ted Hughes and Winfred Owen and Elizabeth Bishop. Speculative poets, in addition to those already mentioned? Ursula Le Guin has been an inspiration for everything I do since my early teens, when I first read a Le Guin novel. It was Rocannon’s World and it changed my world. And Ursula Le Guin is a wonderful poet. Jane Yolen, I think that’s a given. And I was just telling a friend how much I love Delia Sherman’s “Snow White to the Prince”, a poem that is true and heartbreaking. And last but not least, Amal El-Mohtar.

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Thanks, Rose! Join us next Friday for another Spotlight, and in the meantime, check out Rose’s work, and consider submitting something to Stone Telling.

Lauren’s fiction debuted in 1992 with the collection, Mate: And More Stories from the Erotic Edge of SF/Fantasy. Since then she’s written several more pieces, both long and short. Most recently Torquere Books released her m/m romance, Wishbone,  and her short story, “Double Edged Bomb” appeared in the collection of erotic superhero stories, Like a Mask Removed. As an editor, she works on single author projects and anthologies such as the transgendered themed Up For Grabs, the BDSM themed Kneel to Me, and the M/M SFF erotica collection, Wired Hard 4. She is currently editing the sequel to Up For Grabs, and writing a cookbook for people with Autism and Asperger’s Syndrome.

Lauren lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, near the Circlet Press headquarters. If you’d like to catch up with her in person, she’ll be attending Readercon in July.

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OA: Your first collection of stories, Mate, was first published nearly 20 years ago, and has a cyberpunk feel to it. How has your vision of the future changed since then? How has it remained constant?

LB: For me, science fiction is less about the future than the present. Cyberpunk was 1990 remixed, shinier, with room more room to play and new ways of looking at the world.

Then we met the future of 1990, and it’s not as fun to live in as we imagined.  It’s made of ComCast and Facebook and Windows.

Now all the cool kids have gone steampunk–H.G. Well’s future, where science could solve all of our problems and men still knew how to dress.  I’d like to build worlds that the reader has never seen before, and I hope they’ll stay for a while.  “When” the world is may not matter to the reader as much as how well it is constructed and who lives in it.  In that way my current writing most resembles the middle story in Mate.  That story was told from the point of view of a straight young man in a world ruled by lesbian warriors.

OA: Circlet Press exists to fill a niche for erotic speculative fiction because the other speculative fiction publishers seem unwilling to take erotica. What draws you to the genre, and why do you think it’s a difficult sell for most houses?

LB: I’ve never understood why we don’t see more books that explore sexuality. Faster-than-light travel gets all the attention. I’m not sure why; when we get it, it will be just as buggy and overpriced as the internet.  Sexuality, on the other hand, is something we think about all day, every day. I want to explore sex because FTL has been done to death.

On the other hand, what are my chances of being a break-out author in science fiction? Science fiction publishers are drowning in slush, and their sales are shrinking.

We joke that science fiction editors think that all their readers are fourteen year old boys, and that any sex will upset their mothers. It’s not a joke. Sure, we get some awesome exceptions, like Catherynne M. Valente’s Palimpsest. But they are exceptions, not the rule.

Meanwhile, the 14 year old boys are playing video games and watching DVDs, and women purchase more than half the books sold every year. But they’re not buying from science fiction houses. They’re buying romances, because they like fiction about relationships. If you look at a romance publisher’s catalog, you’ll see urban fantasy romances, science fiction romances, heroic fantasy romances, vampire and werewolf romances. You could certainly argue that romances are poorly-written and repetitive, but they’re what readers want. Or so says my last royalty statement.

OA: You’ve edited several anthologies for Circlet. What is the most rewarding aspect of the editing process for you? How does it compare to the rewards of writing?

LB: You know how excited you get when you sell something? When I edit an anthology, I get to make a bunch of people that happy. It’s just as much fun as you might expect.

Of course, the rejections outnumber the acceptances. Sending rejections is sad, because I know most authors sweat over their story every bit as much as I sweat over mine. The saddest part is that if everyone sent me a winner, I wouldn’t necessarily have to reject some of them. I could put out a second or third volume of stories, because e-publishing is flexible. That’s why it depresses me to get trunk stories from someone who woke up that morning and decided to submit to every publisher that starts with “C.”

Editing also requires a whole new set of skills. You’re still writing, but now it’s introductions and press releases. Some stories are good, but need re-writes to be better. I find it tricky to improve an author’s voice without imposing my own, but it’s worth the work. I think that being the editor who bought the first story from an author who subsequently takes off is as exciting as selling a novel. That makes up for all the rejection letters I have to write.

OA: You’re working on a cookbook for people with Autism and Asperger’s Syndrome. As someone with Asperger’s, you are coming at this from a place of personal experience. What sets this apart from other cookbooks?

LB: Recently I was making chicken stock. Stock takes all day. My last step is to reduce the strained stock by boiling it so it will take less room in the freezer. Then in the middle of the night one of our cats woke us up with that plaintive cry that says something is wrong with the world. I took one sniff and knew that I had left the stock cooking. It had cooked down and just started to burn. I spent a couple of hours the next day cleaning the pot.

Well, that showed me. I’d be more careful the next time. Except I did it again. The cat was too disgusted with me to bother, and I spent the next day cleaning the pot again.

And then I did it a third time.

After that, I set an alarm to go off every hour while I was making stock, so I would have stock at the end, not a dirty pot.

In my cookbook, recipes will include instructions for setting alarms, because I know I’m not the only Aspie who does silly things like that.

OA: In January, Torquere published your m/m romance, Wishbone. Can you tell us more about that? Do you anticipate writing more m/m romance books in the future? Are there any other genres you’d like to explore?

LB: I’m currently writing the sequel to Wishbone. However, I tend to get bored if I do the same thing over and over. My next work after that may be a traditional heterosexual romance, just to prove I can do it. After that I may go back to Wishbone’s world. It’s got a lot of room for stories.

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Thanks, Lauren! Join us next Friday for another Spotlight, and in the meantime, check out Wishbone.

Brandon is a straight ally who is ethically opposed to any group having lesser rights than the majority. His work has appeared in several places including M-Brane SF, Byzarium, Everyday Weirdness, and Return to Luna. Together with Chris Fletcher of M-Brane, Brandon is editing an anthology, The Aether Age: Helios, which is due out this Summer.

Brandon is a Rissho Kosei-kai Buddhist who lives in the Dallas/Ft. Worth, Texas area with his wife and daughters. His favorite movie is The Night of the Iguana, and his favorite book is Zod Wallop by William Browning Spencer. In addition to his blog, he maintains a Twitter feed as @Nithska.

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OA: Aether Age: Helios, the anthology you teamed up with OA member Chris Fletcher to create, is due out this summer. Can you tell us a bit about it? What’s the premise, and how did it develop?

BB: Aether Age started out as a conversation on twitter. From the beginning, I pushed the idea of ‘open sourcing’ the shared world and the stories written in it. That isn’t good terminology (we’re edging toward Liberated Lit.) but the idea is there. Something that recent Aether Age (AeA) observers may not realize is that the world bible was a collaborative effort too. Derek Goodman originally suggested an alternate Earth where space travel happened a long time ago, with a habitable Mars or such. From there I suggested that the Earth floated in a Niven-style gas torus, and the idea of an aether of sorts was born.

The aether was controversial at first and the torus idea was nixed, but the aether remained with the caveat that we’d not give a definitive rationale for the aether, only theories, until one of the theories in the cannon emerged as dominant. Those initial rap sessions included Neil Colquhoun, Rick Novy, T. J. McIntyre, Kaolin Fire, and Clifford Green. I know I’m leaving someone out, but the point is: AeA isn’t ‘writing in someone else’s world as some of the writers initially conceptualized it, but rather it is picking up the starting conditions this collaborative effort defined, and then further defining the world through the process of telling stories within it.

As for ‘What is Aether Age: Helios?’ It is the first in a trilogy that imagines the early introduction of a technology leads to industrial revolutions in the ancient world, roughly around 400BCE. Meanwhile the Earth has passed into a breathable aether into which mankind soon ventures.

The stories exist in this interesting space somewhere between short story and novel chapter, both discrete units and part of a greater whole.

The book will arrive this summer in both print and ebook formats, with unique covers for each format. The book has extensive quotations from the era, story art, and a timeline.

If we are successful, we’ll see Aether Age: Tartaros and Aether Age: Cline in the near future. And since AeA carries the license that it does, this universe is free for anyone to write in and any venue to publish, they just have to give attribution and release under the same license.

I should mention the multi-talented Chameleon Chamber Group remains on board to create music for the anthology and are reading the rough arc now. Voice actress T.C. Parmelee is also reading in preparation for the audio work. Both CCG & TCP should go on to be millionaires in their respective fields: they are amazing talents. I can say the same about the writers and M.S. Corley, our cover (and more) artist.

Working with Chris has been awesome, by the way. I think he’s the Schwarzenegger to my Devito: twins separated at birth. Of course I’m the short dumpy one. lol.

OA: You are one of the OA’s founding members, meaning you were there for the first discussions that led to the group forming. As a straight cisgendered male, why does a group like this seem important to you?

BB: Because hate is the cancer eating away at the heart of humanity. Which sounds grandiose, but I think it boils down to that. I have an unattributed quote taped to my laptop: “Act or Accept”. I like the simplicity and symmetry of this statement. Do I accept the world as it is? Then it is my responsibility to take action to change it.

OA: You say you’re a proponent of culture unfettered by excessive copyright. As a writer and editor, how do you hope to see your projects distributed? What is the ideal balance between free information and paid artists in your opinion?

BB: First, I believe creators should be able to make money on their creations. Bottom line. And I do use the phrase ‘excessive copyright’ because I’m not sure how some of these ideas scale. How would it work for Stephen King? At the least I suggest that if copyright exists past the life of the creator it should only do so to benefit that person’s children and grandchildren, not big media. At that point, creative works rightly belong to all of humanity. And, there is still money to be made on those works as is demonstrated by all those public domain book ‘apps’ on the Pre and iPhone, or on the shelf at Barnes & Noble. The Disneys of the world display their intellectual dishonesty when on one hand they make mounds of cash with their redactions of other people’s public domain creations, but then don’t think they should in turn contribute back to the culture from which they so profited. This is the failure of a very limited pro-mega-corporation take on modern commerce and culture. If only mega-corporations can own creative culture, it ceases by definition to be culture, but is rather a product parading as culture. If instead, future generations can expect to have today’s products freed of their copyrights, then that becomes a part of the cultural heritage that is not owned by anyone… or perhaps that is owned by all.

Ok, so getting off my soapbox and more to the point: short story writers don’t make much money at all. You know, if F&SF would just buy one of my stories I could finally buy that vacation home in Saint Martin! By applying a CC-BY-SA license, on a certain level it is throwing a conceptual bottle into the stream of cultural history. We’re not letting these works fall prey to time and vague/thorny copyright issues by specifically stating that they are freed of those copyrights. If someone takes my copyleft story, puts it in their book, and sells a 100k copies, you might object: you fool, you missed out on all that money! But in practice, if contributors are getting paid, I probably will too. And even if not, due to the license, this becomes 100k fingers pointed back to me. It’s a win-win for me.

Weather it is a physical book, or an ebook on the iPad or whatnot, people like to be able to go to a reliable source for their reading. Copyleft works do not function any differently when it comes to this transaction. I can make money on each of those. What it does ensure is that the media companies who own/stock the bookshelves (virtual or otherwise) never have exclusive control of the content therein.

OA: You do some local (Dallas/Ft. Worth area) work with a non-profit called SOS at Zac’s Ridge because they are LGBTQ friendly unlike many of the other charitable organizations in your area. What sort of work do that group do, and is it looking for new volunteers? How can interested people get involved?

BB: Let me just say first, in fairness, that I don’t know of any other charitable groups that are LGBTQ ‘unfriendly’. But the reality is this is the American South and many people who care enough to do volunteer work are Christian and there is a prevalent meme in many denominations that could be summed up as ‘Homosexuality is a sin’. This despite that Jesus never uttered a word about the subject.

I want to be clear that my criticism isn’t of Christianity –most of the gay & lesbian friends I have are Christian– but rather of this Old Testament view. If we went by that, we’d have to stone the neighbor when he mows his lawn on Sunday. It is easy for us to rationalize that this is an outdated idea because we can put ourselves in the neighbor’s shoes. I’m merely suggesting those inflicted with this meme make the next conceptual leap.

The Zac’s training is an ‘experience-based’ training, which means it is not a Tony Robbins ego gig or lecture, but really just a series of games that are played over the course of the weekend designed to lead the participant through a series of light-bulb moments. As a pretty self-aware and liberal sort of guy, the idea of ever doing something to me sounds like a workshop for rich WASPy housewives is just… well, crazy talk. But I swallowed my pride and judgments almost a decade ago (the training was born out of another non-profit which is where I originally attended) and discovered that even without a huge train wreck to deal with, I still found it a liberating experience. Because the trainee finds his/her own answers in the processes, there is never a time that someone dictates something like ‘you should be xyz’, hence it works for the one Buddhist in the room. Several LGB(I can’t say T unfortunately)Q people have attended and remain around as volunteers.

What else… Ah, it’s the sort of thing that you’d need to attend the training in order to be a training assistant. Which might sound odd, but I know Ms. Gretna Carrey and Mrs. Veda MacGregor and the others who started this thing: no one is on a payroll and they are just now doing the training at cost (Gretna would give it away for free if she could and did just that for a time, but it can’t continue on those terms). Bottom line, they are doing good work and the training changes lives: anyone who wants to test the waters should check out the website, sosinc.org, and each weekend they have the training there is a free session for anyone to attend for a couple hours on Saturday.

If you do check it out, I’m just going to say: this is DFW and most of the people anywhere here are Christian. So, though the training isn’t religious, most of the people attending it are, and they’ll share their content in that context. I’d say, if that is a challenge for you, that just as surely as I expect people ‘in the room’ to honor me for being Buddhist, or my friend for being gay, we should in turn honor those people for being true to their hearts. Not to erase the differences, but to find value in them.

OA: The first part of your new novel is going to appear in M-Brane SF. What’s that about, and what else is on the horizon for you?

BB: The working title is On the Demise of Captain Fantomas Patton-Guererro and Loss of La Amenoza Elegente. The part to appear in the M-Brane Double follows the titular incident as a crew of ‘Slicks’, men and women who wrangle kelpies and other fauna on the moon Shanama, attempt to survive the huge bulges of ocean that occur in high tide. The settlers in this story are descended from refugees of the tech singularity taking place in the background of my Abraham story from M-Brane SF #5. Incidentally, that is the issue of M-Brane that Tangents Online reviewed, and they really didn’t like my story. My first bad review: woo hoo! It also takes place in the same background as my story in Return to Luna. It’s a fun story, a multicultural space western that is more familial than ‘rag tag crew of misfits’. I hope people like it.

Other than that, I’ll keep writing stories as long as people will read them. Actually, I’ll probably write them anyway.

We’ll do the other two Aether Age books, if there is demand. So if you think we’re doing good work, please buy a bunch of copies when it goes on sale.

And last, we’re in talks now to launch a new magazine called Fantastique Unfettered. All I can tell you for certain is that it won’t be a monthly zine, but if we can manage quarterly, I’ll do it. All content will carry a CC-BY-SA license. I’d love to pay great rates to writers and artists, but again: right now this remains a labor of love and just as you can’t buy love, it usually doesn’t pay you back in cash either. Good with the bad, right? This zine would be the F to M-Brane‘s SF and we hope this will further establish the M-Brane empire as a source for great short genre fiction. Oh, and we can refer to it as ‘FU‘ for short. What’s not to love about that?

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Thanks, Brandon! Join us next Friday for another Spotlight, and in the meantime, check out Brandon’s work.

tycho garen (also known as Sam Kleinman) is a young, queer science fiction and tech writer living in the Philadelphia area. His interest in communities and the work people can do in groups comes through in most of his pursuits. From dancing and shape note singing to science fiction writing and open source software theory and development, tycho actively engages in group discourse and creation.

His projects include The Cyborg Institute (think tank exploring the intersections of communities and technology), Knowing Mars (a science fiction novella), and the Outer Alliance wiki. In addition to his personal site, he also maintains a twitter feed.

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OA: You’ve been instrumental in the creation of the Outer Alliance wiki. What’s there right now, and how does it work?

tg: The OA wiki is a community space and I started it fairly early on as a proof of concept when the OA was attempting to figure out what the best kind of web presence might be. It’s utterly simple and plain, but the software is deceptively powerful and allows the creation of hybrid blog/wikis, and other a number of interesting off-line options. In a lot of ways the software allows us to think of and work wikis as if they were software rather than some sort of fixed type or encyclopedic text, which I think is utterly appropriate given the long term history of the wiki.

Let’s take a step back for a moment though, and talk about what’s in the wiki at the moment. On the OA email list we’ve talked about having a queer friendly market list and that’s the primary content of the wiki at the moment. There’s also the very beginnings of a recommended reading list. We’ve attempted to create not only a useful resource, but to also document the reasoning and policies that we’ve used to create these resources.

OA: How do you hope to see the wiki expand in the future? Who can contribute, and how?

tg: In terms of the future, I think a lot depends on what people are interested in working on. I am a huge proponent of the wiki and I like to think of wikis as a process for creating a unique textual form rather than something to collect and consolidate knowledge a la wikipedia. I think the OA wiki would benefit from many different perspectives, contributions and discussions. Like I said above, technically there’s a lot of possibility in our wiki, all people have to do is say “I’d like to work with OA folks on [this] project,” and I’ll help them make it work. Or they can just start using the wiki, that’s what it’s there for.

OA: You describe your novella, Knowing Mars, as a reluctant queer superhero story. Can you tell us anything more about it?

tg: I suppose it’s less that the story itself is reluctantly a queer superhero story and more that I’ve been reluctant to call it a queer superhero story. Nevertheless, particularly in retrospect, it’s very clear to me that’s what it is. I wrote a quasi-cyberpunk story about a group of exiled telepathic people arriving on Mars to get away from a sticky political and social situation on Earth. Separately, and after the fact, I was talking about the superhero sub-genre with someone, mostly in terms of how I didn’t really get superheros, and they said “so what about the telepaths, in those stories that you wrote,” and I realized that of course they were right. It’s a superhero story of a certain sort.

Having said that I’m not sure how this story fares in the final analysis. I’m ambivalent about it: the story needs to be set free, and I think it’s an admirable attempt but I’m acutely aware of the flaws, but then isn’t that how it’s supposed to be? In any case, you can judge for yourself at http://www.tychogaren.com/mars/.

OA: Widespread internet use makes it easier for us to communicate and share information in wider circles than we could 20 or 30 years ago. For instance, you’ve put Knowing Mars up for free online, and opened each chapter’s page to comments. Why did you decide to do that, and how would you like to see authors and readers interacting generally?

tg: The narrative of Knowing Mars is structured around a series of historical accounts recorded several decades following the conclusion of the main thrust of the story: and work since finishing Knowing Mars has been primarily occupied with thinking about ideas related to the formation of narrative and the creation of historical thinking through narrative.

I’m very much of the opinion that texts, once authored and published are very much out of the control of the writer. This isn’t to say that I won’t fix errors or even clarify awkward sentences that readers might (will) find, but more that I think that *reading* and *writing* are very different kinds of skills and that while I very much enjoy creating stories and working as a writer, at least with regards to my fiction, I’m far more eager to see what the readers do with this thing I’ve made: so comments are enabled, at least in part so that I can more easily see what readers are doing with what I’ve written and more than that provide a space, albeit limited, for readers to communicate and collaborate on the project of reading.

More pragmatically, because of the way I’m generating the text of Knowing Mars for the web, it was incredibly simple to enable comments and so I seized that opportunity. I’m not sure if people will use them, but I’m looking forward to seeing what happens.

OA: tycho garen is a name that pleases you because it sounds like the kind of male alter ego a mid-20th century woman might choose (see: James Tiptree, Jr.). As a queer male identified person with a somewhat ironically hypermasculine pseudonym, how much importance do you place on names? What do you think they tell us about people? Do you have any favorites?

tg: I suppose I’d like to think of myself as the kind of queer who rejects labels and has somehow moved beyond them, but that’s always bullshit. Realistically, I think I (and a lot of people) take labels like queer gay, man, fag, and make the best of them. They don’t do a particularly good job of communicating who we are or what we’re really interested in doing in the world *but* they provide a useful short hand and within the right social context they’re useful. Beyond saying “queer,” to draw attention to a number of different personal and socially relevant ideas, I’ve mostly stopped explicitly identifying as *anything*. Having said that I accept a great deal of labels like gay, queer, writer, and geek, and I have terse relationships with some labels like man and my given name. It all works and it doesn’t.

Names, are, I think fundamentally the same as those labels and I think my complicated relationship with my name grows out of the same sort of complex relationship I have with the other labels I identify with.

Names at base are just containers with numerous interesting possibilities, of course, but they are nonetheless incredibly fraught and limiting. My given name is not one that I’m terribly comfortable with if I give it any great deal of thought: it’s out of time in its own way, it is distinct without being terribly memorable or easy to pronounce. So on some level my use of “tycho garen,” is an aesthetic and commercial decision. On another, much more important level, my use of tycho garen, creates the opportunity for me to write and work on projects *for myself* and with a great deal of freedom: this has been fundamentally freeing for my writing and work.

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Thanks, tycho! Join us next Friday for another Spotlight, and in the meantime, check out Knowing Mars and the OA wiki.

When Sara ten years old, a teacher gave her some notebooks to fill with stories, and the storytelling habit stuck. Sara’s first novel, A Year and a Day, was published in 2006. Her short stories have appeared in magazines and anthologies including Beneath Ceaseless Skies and Kerlak Press’s Dragons Composed. Apex Books published the first volume of her Penemue trilogy (steampunk horror novellas starring a lesbian half-angel with mad fighting skills), The Convent of the Pure, in 2009. The second volume, The Labyrinth of the Dead is available for pre-order now, and the third volume, The Tower of the Forgotten is scheduled for a 2011 release.

One of Sara’s other passions is costuming. She teaches, constructs, and frequently speaks about costumes on panels at conventions. She’s also contributed chapters to several costuming textbooks including The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Clothing Through World History. Her essay on the Juni-hito styles of Heian Japan is available free online at Clothesline Journal of Costume and Dress.

Sara lives in Nashville, Tennessee with her husband, Matt and their three dogs. She is acttive on LiveJournal, Twitter, and Facebook in addition to her personal site. She will be attending Hypericon in June and Pi-Con in August.

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OA: The Convent of the Pure is the first in a trilogy of steampunk novellas about Nephilim. What drew you to write about Nephilim, and how did your conception of them develop?

SH: Oh, sure start with a hard one!

I like myths. I like angels. I especially like apocryphal Biblical myths and things existing on the edge of Christian mythos.

I wanted to create a group of individuals that were supernatural, to an extent, but also human and (relatively) mortal. I didn’t want vampires or shifters or fae. And I am sure I was watching one of those weird quasi-religious History Channel shows when it came to me that the Nephilim would be perfect for what I had in mind. I did a lot of research and I drank a lot of tea before inserting them into my society in the Penemue world that is part class/caste/clan system, part scholarly emphasis, so a little Vampire: the Masquerade meets Harry Potter.

I also liked the idea of no one liking or trusting the Nephilim and their duty being a sort of sacrifice, to protect a humanity that fears and despises them. It’s been fun to mold and stretch the old myths to fit these characters, which are (to me anyway), very real people

OA: You regularly participate in Discarded to Divine. Do you have a tried and true technique for designing fabulous clothes out of thrift store rejects, or do you take a completely different creative path each year? Is there any one piece you’re particularly proud of?

SH: Well, I have a two-pronged approach to selling my piece every year- the first is to offer larger sizes. The bulk of what comes into Discarded to Divine is wonderful work by fashion design students, not unlike the ones I teach in Nashville, but they are usually very limited on sizes since the size 8 is standard for fashion. So I try to make my stuff to fit me, a size 14. I find that the average buyer (like the average consumer) is about a size 14 and in the four years I have participated, I have never had garment go unsold!

The other part that makes for good sales is that I make a jacket or coat. Jackets are much easier to fit on a wider variety of bodies than say pants, dresses, or even skirts. Plus, jackets are more versatile and easier to integrate into an existing wardrobe.

I try to do something completely different every year and I have done a crazy-quilt style patchwork kimono, a hand-painted 18th century waistcoat meets 1960s shift dress, a design off an antique Muslim prayer rug painted in the lining of a jacket, and this year a cocoon-coat that is Art Deco meets Egyptian.

My costume art, is a lot like my books and my dogs- they are each wonderful and unique creations and there is no way to choose a favorite!

OA: The world of the Nephilim books is rich with steampunk imagery and exquisitely dressed characters. Do you have a favorite object, place, or outfit from that world? If you could go there, where would you want to visit, and what would you wear?

SH: I like the world I created. It is based loosely on places I have known and loved and that are currently very far away from me. I think I would love to walk through the Penemue Chapter House with it’s totally decadent Victorian decor (and I mean decadent both in the rich, sumptuous way, but also that over-the-top cloying way that old hotels are where there are just random things crammed into nearly every corner). The Village of Penemue itself seems like a daydream of a place with cobbled streets and a town square and a farmer’s market. I like to imagine the places that aren’t in the story- the book shop, the clothing store, the candy store, the funky witchy shop that sells candles and tarot cards, the cafe, etc. It’s always a sunny late afternoon-either mid-spring or late fall- in the Penemue of my imagination.

I had way too much fun with Portia’s weapons. Her crossbow in book one was amazing but really, the axe in books two and three really take the cake. I would love to have that thing!

Lucky for me, though, I already own a trusty duster, but I could really use a Gladstone bag!

OA: Your first novel, A Year and a Day, is your love letter to New York (where you lived for two years, including 2001), and you’re working on a related book set in Nashville (where you live now). Have you learned anything new and wonderful about your current home city in the process of researching and writing this new book?

SH: Nashville totally sneaked up on me and stole my heart. New York made its intentions known from the start, but Nashville, Nashville was stealthy. And it took a long time for me to puzzle out what kind of story to tell about it.

Cesar was born and raised in Mexico City, but has lived in Chicago for the past 23 years. An advocate of both art and science, Cesar has been involved with performance arts groups like Barrel of Monkeys and The Neofuturists, and  is currently working towards an MS in Human-Computer Interaction at DePaul University. His diverse interests inform his writing, which he describes as weird and wondrous.

Cesar maintains a Twitter feed in addition to his blog. He will be reading from The 12 Burning Wheels on the first of June at Hopleaf as part of their Gothic Funk reading series.

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OA: Your publisher, Chris Fletcher of M-Brane SF describes The 12 Burning Wheels as an astounding cycle of stories. Can you tell us more about it?

CT: The 12 Burning Wheels comes from all corners of that rotted walnut I call my brain. There’s a huge spectrum there. Some stories are pretty frightening, some a are a bit abstract, some are set in the future, and some are in alternate versions of Chicago. You could call the stories fantasy, but the sub title “Stories of the strange and the wondrous” is closer to how I think of them. I like for each story to give the reader a sense of the possibilities of the new, of the unknown. The use of the word wonder has more ancient applications. In centuries past, it was used to describe the wonders of the natural world, in things like butterflies and plants. I would love to bring that usage back.

OA: You’re doing a reading in Chicago on June 1st as part of a Gothic Funk series. What constitutes Gothic Funk, and how does your work fit into it?

CT: Gothic Funk is a collection of artists and writers. They also are a press. They hold Tuesday Funk here in Chicago to showcase writers and poets. I will be reading on June 1. I have about 15 minutes, so I think I can squeeze in two stories from The 12 Burning Wheels. Strangely enough, I was chatting at the reading last night with organizer Hallie Palladino, and I thanked her for including a spec fic writer like myself into the mix. A lot of the readers fall more into the category of literary fiction, but the Gothic Funk bunch is very forward thinking and open minded. They are all about good writing. And I got myself in there through my connection to fatnasy writer William Shunn, who’s also a Chicagoan.

OA: As one of the group’s founding members, you suggested the name, The Outer Alliance. How did you come with that name, and what do you hope to see the OA do in the future?

CT: Queer and trans people, as far as my eye can see, will be “the other” for a long time in our society, meaning they live on the fringe of society. I am not playing down the progress we have made here, let me be clear about that. What I mean is that we still operate on the outside of things. We are not fully integrated into society. Outer space and the outer reaches of space seemed like the perfect metaphor for this. And to go back to the sense of wonder, outer space also poses a plethora of good possibilities. And a group like OA should also do that: promise great possibilities of tolerance, inclusion and hope to its members.

OA: You’ve lived in a lot of different places including Mexico, Ireland, and Japan, but you settled in Chicago. What led you there, and what do you love about your current home city?

CT: I came to Chicago in 1986 because I have family here. And indeed, it changed my life. It was tough to be be an immigrant, to learn a new language, tough to adapt, but I enjoyed a lot of my experiences. After I graduated from journalism school at Northwestern, I went to Ireland for some time, just to work and live life. I made two pounds an hour and could barely afford food. It was pretty awesome! Ireland is an amazing place and Dublin is one of my favorite cities in the world. I came back to Chicago and worked for Tribune Company and Encyclopedia Britannica for some years. Then in 2001 I went away again, this time to teach English in Osaka, Japan. I came back in 2002, to get back to my career. The return to Chicago also marked the time when I got really serious about getting published. I was turning 30, and I knew I didn’t want to hit the age of 60 or 70 and regret not having worked harder to get published.

I must say, though, Chicago is a brilliant city, alive and roaring with life, full of pretty hearty people. It’s definitely home. Viva Chicago.

OA: You’re interested in turning The 12 Burning Wheels into performance art. What kind of show do you envision? What other projects can we look forward to seeing from you?

CT: I spent about 9 years of my time in Chicago working with the theater company and education organization Barrel of Monkeys, and I was privileged to work and perform with some amazing performers there: Clowns, writers, dancers, actors and great directors. I realized how important it was to bring storytelling alive in front of an audience. And now, seeing how crappy some author readings can be, I want to change that. At Tuesday Funk in June, I will likely just read, because I am pressed for time right now with grad school deadline. But I am making plans to reconstruct some of the stories in 12BW in a more presentational way later this year. Perhaps “Lemonade” performed with puppets? Or maybe “Honey” performed using beams of light and pre-recorded video and my face bathed in blood? Kind of like David Byrne meets Grace Jones meets Skinny Puppy. Of course, it’s dependent on budget and venue, so if any artists want to collaborate with me on performing 12BW, gimme a shout….

The bottom line is that The 12 Burning Wheels should have propulsion to them, whether it’s on the page or beyond. I just want to do my weird stories justice.

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Thanks, Cesar! Join us next Friday for another spotlight, and in the meantime, check out The 12 Burning Wheels.

Kal is a genderqueer, pansexual, kinky switch in a stable polyamorous triad, which makes him^[1] pretty familiar with non-heteronormative sexual and gender identities, even before you factor robots in. He made his first queer speculative fiction sale three years ago when “The Lift” appeared in Circlet Press’s Best Fantastic Erotica collection. Since then, his stories have also been included in Richard Labonte’s Best Gay Romance and Boys in Heat, Queerpunk, and Circlet’s upcoming Best Erotic Fantasy and Science Fiction. Robotica is his first solo story collection.

On the non-fiction side of things, Kal writes essays and articles related to alternate gender and sexual lifestyles and identities. His essay, “Gender Evolution” is included in Toward 2012: Perspectives on the next age, and he also writes for edenfantasys.com and Reality Sandwich. His hobbies include knitting, playing Wii, and attending industrial and electronica shows. In addition to his personal site, Kal maintains a Twitter feed, and shares a food blog with his best friend at foodn00bs.typepad.com/.

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OA: Robotica is your e-book collection focusing on the sex lives of robots. What range of robot and human sexuality can readers expect there, and what makes robot sex so appealing in the first place?

KC: There are so many ranges of sexualities to describe! In terms of orientation, some of the stories are gay male, some are bisexual, and some are what my editor, Cecilia Tan, calls “post-gay.” In terms of tone, there’s everything from innocent coming-of-age stories under the control of human scientists on through to painful, rough interactions with alien robot “species” where the humans are very much not in control. Mostly, you can expect humanoid robots, but there’s some sex involving a sentient spaceship as well. That in itself is one of the things that makes robot sex so appealing: the interesting and unexpected ways that sexuality can come to pass outside of human biology. For me, a big writing payoff comes from the double whammy of separating sexuality from biology and viewing human sexuality from the outside — that’s led to a lot of surprising personal revelations.

OA: How much of the robot sexuality in your stories is within the realm of possibility in our non-fictional future? How much human/robot sexual interaction already exists, and what are the ethical concerns around that both now and as technology advances?

KC: I could see a near-future situation where artificial intelligence assembles information regarding sexuality in a logical yet entirely different fashion than we’re accustomed to, which is part of what happens in “Charlie.” “Star Fucker” is about identity, idolization, and rock ‘n’ roll robotics, which I think is another very plausible near-future. Chances are, though, that “The Sex Drive” is closer to where we’re going — imbuing robots with the capacity for sexual activity without quite thinking through the consequences. “Agrathia’s Freedom,” about a sentient, sexual spaceship, and “Survival-Compatible,” about a very rough human introduction to an alien species, are such far-future tales that it’s hard to say whether our paths will lead us there or elsewhere.

Right now, I think we’re in a phase with robotics and sexuality much like we were a decade ago with PDAs and cellphones. We had two gadgets that had some overlap in functionality, but it took a while to finally merge the two so fully that having a smartphone — PDAs and cellphones gene-spliced together and then given steroids — is fairly ubiquitous. I see a similar thing happening with robotics and sex toys at this point. The 1970s blow-up “sex doll” has given way not just to better simulations of genitalia but better simulations of humans. RealDolls are absolutely incredible — if you saw a five-second clip of a guy having sex with a female RealDoll, you probably wouldn’t even know the difference. Because they’re meant to mimic human sexuality, the focus is very much on things like breasts with realistic sway and lips with realistic give. These are the things that the scientific robotics community is only slightly delving into, as their focus is more function than form. Some companies are already combining the two; there’s a Japanese company that makes what are essentially RealDolls with artificial heartbeats that speed up to signify excitement and have accurate body temperatures. In a hundred years’ time, I think it’s plausible that we’ll have fairly human-realistic, reasonably-intelligent robots, some of which will be “optimized” for sexual behaviors.

The ethical concerns are immense, but I’ve noticed a very specific gap in the cultural conversation about robot ethics. We are, by and large, quicker to assume sentience than we should be. This is how Furbys and Tamagotchis are so popular: they get “sick” and we feel guilty. We anthropomorphize very easily. I think the biggest, and nearest, ethical concern we’ll face is that of wanting to protect artificial beings which are not yet actually sentient but make us feel like they are. At some point, the question of what exactly constitutes sentience will come up in that debate, and suddenly we’ll have an issue that’s so far-reaching it impacts things like the rights of people in comatose states, how we treat people with low IQs, and even what we decide about abortion. There are a slew of ethical issues that will affect artificial intelligence, but I think we’ll be bowled over by the ethical issues that artificial intelligence raises about ourselves first.

OA: “Analog Christmas” presents a future in which electronic stimulation is par for the course, and reminds us that good old fashioned human contact is also worthwhile. In your opinion, is there an ideal balance between mechanical and analog sexual interaction?

KC: In my opinion, it’s an entirely subjective, personal thing. Is your idea of an ideal weekend holing up with The Sims or mall-crawling? Do you check Twitter a dozen times a day or do you not even own a smartphone? There’s no static right answer. It all has to do with the balance you strike in your life that’s ideal for you.

OA: You were recently on a panel about gender and sexuality in SF, and were dismayed at the narrow focus on feminism and homosexuality that people expected the panelists to have. What other avenues would you like to see the speculative fiction community exploring?

KC: Everything! While it’s true that SF has to, in some aspect, speak to present-day society in order to be relevant to present-day readers, it amazes me how many SF writers build mostly-monogamous, mostly-heterosexual, mostly-humanoid cultures a hundred or two hundred or a couple thousand years into our future. If you look back at our last fifty years, not even just on Earth but within the narrow confines of the United States, you can see enormous social changes in gender and sexuality norms. The idea that we’ll still be pretty much here in a future so advanced as to be science fiction seems ludicrous. Let’s talk about English evolving into a language with non-gendered pronouns and the good and bad that ensues. Let’s talk about starships filled with 200 crewmates all bonded to one another in a polyamorous commitment. Let’s talk about starships filled with 200 crewmates who bed-hop regardless of gender or species and none of them have even heard of this “commitment” thing. Let’s talk about what the heck we humans do when trying to interface with a species that has sex like slugs do (YouTube it^[2], it’s amazing and would cause some serious diplomatic issues). Or a human who falls for someone in a “black widow” species. The possibilities with sexuality and gender are just as endless as every other topic in SF, and it amazes me that we don’t do more with that.

OA: You’re a big J. G. Ballard fan in part because of his unflinching portrayals of non-mainstream sexuality. Have you got any other recommended reading for us?

KC: How large a font can I use to say CHARLES STROSS?^[3] Sometimes it’s easy to read the queer SF “ghetto” and lose sight of what’s seeping into the mainstream. I was completely shocked the first time I picked up a Stross book because I had no idea we’d come to the point where his ideas could be handled by a mainstream publishing house and land on the shelves of airport bookstores everywhere. I highly recommend his Glasshouse for anyone interested in seeing some truly creative and plot-integral explorations of gender and sexuality. You also can’t go wrong picking up a James Tiptree, Jr. Award winner. The Award’s short-story anthologies are a particularly good way to get exposed to authors with non-mainstream ideals. Circlet Press, my publisher, focuses on really terrific erotic SF/F, and there’s a lot of free content on their website to get you started.

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Thanks, Kal! Join us next Friday for another Spotlight, and in the meantime, check out Robotica.

1. Kal identifies as pangendered, but tends to prefer male pronouns.
2. It really is amazing! Here’s a video link for you (warning: contains graphic depiction of slug sex).
3. Rather large, as it turns out.