Five For Writing – Michael G. Williams

Versatile and talented, Michael G, Williams is the winner of the 2020 Manly Wade Wellman Award, an honor which he richly deserved. He’s also the the author of the Withrow Chronicles, a series of books about a vampire living in modern North Carolina, a series of time-traveling adventures featuring the legendary Emperor Norton, and more. He also co-hosts the deliriously enjoyable Arcane Carolinas podcast, and he’s a staple on the North Carolina speculative fiction scene. It is my pleasure to present to you Five For Writing with Michael G. Williams.


1-Why vampires? And why in North Carolina?

I always (only?) want to write about the queer experience in some way, and vampires are the perfect metaphor for how I want to represent my own experiences as a gay man. They’re always among humans but never quite of them and never quite free of them. They might choose to “pass” as human, they might not, and mostly I imagine they would find themselves negotiating that choice contextually, night to night, moment to moment, century to century. They have a secret truth they know many people actively fear and would readily attack them for revealing, and sometimes they most feel themselves only in situations they feel they must never reveal for fear of facing hatred. Each of those aligns in some way with significant elements of my own experience as a gay man living in a cishet world. From the first time I read Interview with the Vampire (may Anne Rice rest in well-earned peace), I’ve always seen vampirism as a useful mirror for reflecting back some of my own life as a queer person. 

As for why NC, in part because I’ve lived here all my life and know it so well. Locations are easier to capture and convey when we’ve literally been there, and every book in The Withrow Chronicles is about a place I know well from firsthand experience. But also North Carolina because I love fish-out-of-water stories and the idea of a vampire getting by in the southeastern United States was a great chance to present several different takes on that and set up some interesting tension. Compelling characters, for me, always start in a place of untenable circumstances. Right out of the gate I want them in a place (literal or otherwise) they can’t  stay. A vampire in suburban North Carolina would be running huge risks that might not even occur to us–or to them. The southeastern United States is a place where religion can be especially acidic and deviation from the mean can be met with especially sharp suspicion. That’s also true of the suburbs, regardless of region. I wanted to play with the idea of a vampire living in a suburban neighborhood with all the nosy neighbors and big box stores and everything else that involves, and how he handles it when his truths run headlong into the polite fictions of those environments. Vampire stories are almost always about some equivalent of the monster in the castle on the hill, whether that’s a literal castle or a skyscraper. I wanted a story about a guy who drives a regular car and writes his own check to pay his power bill, not some jetsetting bloodsucker. We have enough jetsetting bloodsuckers in reality.

2-You won the Manly Wade Wellman Award. How has that affected your life?

The biggest thing is that it gave me much-needed confidence to write my weird little stories and not constantly question my own instincts for topics and tone. A Fall in Autumn is a book I felt was uniquely “me” in that it includes some of my favorite flavors and inspirations and genre elements, and when I wrote it I remained absolutely convinced no one else would ever connect with it. Instead, this helped me really learn the lesson that people connect best and most with the stories that speak to us as writers. I used to respond to people who asked me about The Withrow Chronicles by saying, “Well, they’re not for everyone,” and I still think that’s true of everything else I write but the Manly Wade Wellman Award made me much braver with writing what I want to write and feeling confident it will be for someone. It’s also made it easier for me to try to find that someone who will really connect with it. I contend with both generalized anxiety and social anxiety and have never allowed myself to do much promotion out of fear of imagined negative consequences. The validation from winning the Wellman has allowed me to finally start working my way out from behind some of that. 

Hand in hand with promoting myself, it gave me a little more of a platform to highlight other writers in the region who are also doing absolutely stunning work. Getting to announce the next winner at ConGregate in 2021, and having it be my friend and colleague Natania Barron, and to have some small role in recognizing her work, and the work of T. Frohock, who was a finalist and was also there, is a real privilege.

3-What is the Arcane Carolinas podcast, and what inspired it?

Arcane Carolinas is SO FUN! My friend and co-host Charlie and I talk about legends, lore, obscure history, and modern oddities found in North and South Carolina. (We originally described it to others as “The X-Files of the Carolinas.”) We’ve talked about everything from the Devil’s Tramping Ground to the Brown Mountain Lights to UFOs over Myrtle Beach to the Ghost Hound of Goshen Hill, South Carolina, and yet there is so much more to discuss! Every location in the Carolinas has something fascinating just under the first coat of paint or the first inch of earth: hidden history, a forgotten story, a local monster, a legend people mostly only hear in a song, you name it. We’ve done episodes that are hard science and episodes where we dig into census records to find out who a figure really was and episodes where we are 100% certain the whole thing was made up, and we’ve loved every one of them. Every place in the Carolinas has a story to tell–more like ten or twelve stories–and I will never get tired of unearthing those and seeing how they shine in the moonlight.

The story of its origins is funny, though, at least to us. Charlie and I used to work together. We already were making a podcast as part of our job, so we knew the tech and we knew we had a good rapport, a good dynamic. Through a series of other people’s departures and desks getting rearranged we wound up in cubes next to each other off on one end of the office, far away from everyone else, which allowed us to let our guard down and admit to enjoying this stuff and really bonding over that. Also, making a show about something purely for fun was a great way to have something to look forward to early in the pandemic and to grow a new community around something we all love. 

4-You bounce around genres quite a bit, from horror/urban fantasy to lighthearted time travel to science fiction noir. Is there one that speaks to you more than the others?

Oh, I think I’ll always be most interested in vampires and in detectives. (I will, eventually, write a vampire detective.) The vampires and witches who populate The Withrow Chronicles are always in the back of my head, whispering ideas, telling me what they’ve been up to. When the pandemic started, they were the characters I found my mind wandering toward, letting myself noodle around with, wondering how they were coping. (In the case of the vampires, at first they sort of scoffed at how some mortals rejected meaningful precautions that impose no real hardship; eventually they got depressed about what this might mean for the world they plan to live in forever. The witches do a much better job of keeping each other in good spirits but are extremely frustrated at the way magic can’t readily cure a problem of science.) I love all my characters and all my books, but the world I know I’ll go back to some day is The Withrow Chronicles. That’s the one I’m likeliest to grow into an expanded universe of novellas. It’ll just… be a few years.

5-What inspired you to write about Emperor Norton?

Norton embodies so much that is good and so much that is terrible about America, and about the struggles faced–and rewards reaped–by anyone who sets out to make themselves into someone they’ve been told they can never be. Here’s this guy who was king of the hill, a member of the most prestigious social club in San Francisco at the height of the gold rush, trading commodities in such volumes and so shrewdly that he had a very good chance of personally cornering the market on rice, a basic food staple heavily relied on by everyone else in the city. He was one part Dallas, one part tech-bro venture capitalist, and one bad break later, one too-ambitious overreach, he was destitute and totally vanished from the public eye. 

A few years later he walked into the offices of a newspaper, bought a small ad, and used it to declare himself Emperor of the United States and began issuing edicts. Rather than become some bitter, angry person willing to do anything and hurt anyone to get back into that position of privilege, he became a champion of the marginalized. He physically intervened on multiple occasions to stop racist attacks on people of color. He spoke out in favor of desegregating city transit, in favor of women’s suffrage, in favor of building a bridge to connect San Francisco and Oakland, and against judicial discrimination against poor people. City police were instructed to salute him when he passed. Theaters would reserve the best seat in the house on opening night, and if he attended the audience would rise at his entrance. He ate for free in restaurants, he attended lectures in science and medicine. He sold his own imperial treasury notes–and conveniently died a month before they could be redeemed. His image is still found all over San Francisco. 

He also wore a mismatched wardrobe of donated clothing and discarded military uniforms and lived in a six-by-nine-foot room in a boarding house where he perpetually struggled to pay a pittance in rent while street vendors sold dolls in his likeness to tourists. People loved the idea of Norton, but the average person who might rise in a theatre or salute him on a city street did precious little to actually help him survive.

Norton spent the last two decades and change of his life scraping to get by and being a cultural force so powerful, and a voice for change so strong, that here we are talking about him a century and a half later–and still struggling with the same issues he tried to get his contemporaries to face. In a city where the neighborhood with the highest rates of homelessness and poverty (the Tenderloin) is bounded by a high-end shopping district (Union Square), startup-offices and tourist attractions (Market Street ), luxury mansions (Nob Hill), and the city’s palaces of government (Civic Center), the story of Emperor Norton is still powerfully relevant. 

Norton consciously chose to remake himself, his identity, how he presented himself to the world, and the treatment he would accept as respectful afterward. Again, everything I write is ultimately going to touch on queer themes or otherwise reflect some aspect of the LGBTQIA+ experience as I live it and understand it, and I think a lot of queer people can see something of ourselves in Norton’s story. We do find ourselves culturally powerful, but many LGBTQIA+ people are otherwise politically, financially, and socially marginalized. We grow up in a world that tells us we can’t be who we are, and the more we work to realize who we know ourselves to be–the more we wield that cultural and personal and I’d even say spiritual power–the harder it becomes for us to “make it” in any other realm. Norton’s story is one of powerful personal vision and agency and of being an object of pity, even scorn. I will never not be fascinated by the lessons he can still teach us today.

 

Many thanks to Michael for giving such thoughtful answers. Check out his books and his website, and you’ll be glad you did!

Next week, I have the pleasure of sharing with you a Five for Writing with Steven Mark Rainey! Until then…

 

Five For Writing – P.D. Cacek

A winner of the Bram Stoker and World Fantasy awards, P.D. Cacek is a superb, versatile author who just happens to keep a mannequin named Sebastian by her desk at all times. (More on him below). I have known her for well over twenty years, ever since she agreed to write a short fiction piece for me back in the White Wolf days, and she doesn’t hold that against me. Witty, wise and wonderful, here’s Five For Writing with P.D. Cacek.

(Just cover your ears when you get to the last question. Trust me.)

1-Werewolves or vampires? Which do you prefer and why?

Hmmm…hard choice, but I think I prefer werewolves over vampires…and that’s not because my grandfather was from the Carpathian region of Romania and sounded like Bela Lugosi, or that I’m allergic to garlic and have a tendency to burn in the sun. It’s not. Really.

Vampires are fine, but they tend to be a bit more arrogant about themselves and their needs, seeming to delight in the hunt and flaunting their total disregard for their formal corporal selves (unless I’ve written them*). Okay, so you’ve lived centuries…get over yourselves. I feel werewolves, even though they are monsters, still retain more of their “humanness” for the simple reason that not only are as much a victim of their curse as the poor (slow) souls they hunt, but are doomed to live with the knowledge of what they have become. They have no power to
fight the transformation that turns them into ferocious, ravening beast (again, unless I’m writing   them**).
And the fact that I sometimes get a little twitchy around the time of the full moon and love my steaks so rare they might be could be considered bleeding has nothing to do with my answer. Really.
[* NIGHT PRAYERS, NIGHT PLAYERS. ** CANYONS. Yes, they’re plugs…sue me.]

2-You bounce back and forth between Colorado and Pennsylvania. Which is more conducive to horror writing?

Although I do the majority of my “keyboarding” in Pennsylvania where my desktop computer is, I have been known to grab a pen (!) and legal pad (!!) and write longhand (!!!) in Colorado. It doesn’t matter where I am when inspiration strikes, and I’ve used both states as backdrops. [Stand by for another plug] I set SECOND CHANGES in both CO and PA, (CA for SECOND LIVES) and while bunny-sitting in the small mountain town of Nederland, Colorado (Home of Frozen Dead Guy Days) used it—modified for creativity’s sake—as the setting for my current work in progress.

3-You’re an experienced first reader for a publisher. What is it like being the editor’s first line of defense?

Sometimes it’s very, very hard.

I know all too well what it’s like to put your heart, soul, and, on occasion, spleen into a novel which, after countless hours spent polishing it, reworking it and suffering the critiques from readers who may or may not “understand” what you’re trying to do, you send it to a publisher only to have it rejected. It’s the worst feeling in the world and I think about that each and every time I read a submission.

In a perfect world, each manuscript I read would be a masterpiece…but this is not a perfect world and all too often the hopeful author’s hopes and skill are not equally matched. I was once of the opinion that “anyone can write” and as far as it goes, that part is true: anyone can put words down on paper or screen. The question then becomes should they? Sometimes the answer is very obvious and then it’s my job to take the hit, so to speak. But there are also times when gems appear and I get to forward it with a “YES! READ THIS!”

And those make it all worthwhile.

4-Your upcoming novel has a unique premise. Where did it come from?

[This plug was requested, so shush!]

My upcoming novel from Flame Tree Press is about the relationship between a man and his world-famous photographer mother…and their relationship with a small mannequin named SEBASTIAN.

First, a little bit of personal background of yours truly: I don’t like dolls. Never did, although, beings a female child, I was given a number of them from baby dolls to those high fashion icons with oversized…endowments.

And while I don’t suffer from automatonophobia, I’m not overly found of mannequins. Always thought they’re just a little too creepy, especially the molded plastic, faceless kind.

Another personal bit of info is that I love what I call “vulching,” which, in my case, is to swoop in like a vulture on a “Going Out Of Business” sales in search of bargains. Usually I come away with a few things, so when I saw that the JC Pennys in the King of Prussia mall was going out of business, I swooped.

The “bones” had been picked pretty well clean by the time I got there, but I wandered around a bit and found a few things. While standing in line I noticed a herd, flock, assemblage of mannequins along one wall behind an EVERYTHING MUST GO/60-75% OFF sign. All of the mannequins were adult-sized (made of molded while plastic, faceless but with enough gender features to distinguish male from female)…with one minor, and very small exception. It was near the middle of the flock/herd, half hidden behind the legs of those in front of it…about the size of a two-year old, faceless, child.

I didn’t think anything of it until the cashier rang up my purchases and asked if there was anything…at which point I asked if the little mannequin was for sale and how much it cost. It was and cost me a whopping $36.00.
So I bought it and the moment I picked it up, not only did the whole novel popped into my head: beginning, middle, and end, but also his name: Sebastian.

Sebastian stands next to my desk as I write this, dressed for the season. What? You want I should have a naked mannequin in my office? I’ll have you know that Sebastian has a full wardrobe, plus a couple Halloween costumes. My hope is to one day do a SEBASTIAN calendar which means he needs those outfits, right? Right.

5-You’ve notably given public performances as a banshee at a festival in Pennsylvania. How do you get that job?

By accident.

A bunch of us were whooping it up at the World Fantasy Convention in Minneapolis (back in 2002) where I shared the stage with Neil Gaiman and others, to perform a script in hand radio play of Gene Wolfe’s “The Tree Is My Hat.” My character was Mary, who, as it turns out, gets eaten by a shark god.

Our first read-thru went well but when I got to the point where Mary gets eaten, the stage direction said scream. Now, I’d never screamed professionally before this, but I thought ‘how hard can it be?’ As it turned out, not hard at all. So I screamed. I mean I screamed as was befitting a woman being eaten by a shark god. Method acting. I honestly didn’t realize how loud (and long) my scream was until the doors at the opposite end of the massive room burst open and two hotel security guards raced in.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

Gene Wolfe seemed pleased with the show and only a few people left the play rubbing their ears. I did offer to teach Neil’s daughter the scream but he politely refused on her behalf.

If you’re ever in Phoenixville, PA, the second weekend in July, head over to The Colonial Theater for BLOBFEST and hear for yourself.

And there you have it, folks – P.D. Cacek, author, reader, and banshee. Many thanks to her for taking the time to answer some unusual questions!

Next week, strap in for Five For Writing with Todd Keisling, author of Devil’s Creek!