the older male scientist Lucas Shepard in my novel The Living Blood, I supplement Me with research and character-building techniques such as a resumé. If a character is more difficult to access, i.e. I might have been very much like her in my early twenties. Nayima as a fanciful schoolgirl is one version of me. I exaggerate my own strengths and weaknesses and modify my characters according to their circumstances-but always, I think, with a version of myself lurking in them. What do you do to flesh out your characters before/while writing them?Īs with many writers, my characters tend to be different versions of me. Denial is also a recurring theme in my fiction, since most of us confront the notion of mortality with denial. Much of my fiction is my conversation with myself about having the courage to face loss and death-and hopefully then create more joy as I continue the blessing of life. My mother’s struggle with cancer and her death in 2012 only reinforced this. I have been very aware of death since I was a child, and living with that awareness has been an important part of my life and growth. My African Immortals series that began with My Soul to Keep is about people who never age or die. My first novel, The Between, was about a man who escaped death and had to face the consequences as death chased him.
I am very focused on mortality in my fiction. People living forever, or at least outliving most of the population, appear in a number of your works: Is mortality as a theme just a coincidence or indicative of a larger fascination for the topic? It was difficult to pinpoint “the moment the world ends” with a plague, so this story is about the end of the world for my character.Īnd I almost forgot: I was severely blocked about where Nayima was and what she might be doing as the deadline approached, so I challenged myself to begin my story with a writing prompt I gave my students at a speculative fiction writing workshop at Voices of Our Nations (VONA): I randomly drew the words “trees” and “deep fryer.” That prompt kickstarted the story. I wanted to follow the character from my previous story, Nayima, after she fled for safety. I chose a plague in my first story because a pandemic is one of my true-life concerns, given how small the world has become and how often our population has been ravaged by disease historically. I was intrigued by the entire idea for the Triptych, since I am naturally drawn to apocalyptic fiction as a writer. This story first appeared in The End is Now, volume 2 of The Apocalypse Triptych, edited by John Joseph Adams and Hugh Howey. Series: The Tales of Gorlen Vizenfirthe.Series: From the Lost Travelers’ Tour Guide.People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction!.
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