This month - Aigner Loren Wilson
Interviewer: Luciano Marano is an award-winning author, photographer, and journalist. His short fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies, including Year’s Best Hardcore Horror, The Best New Weird Horror, Monsters, Movies & Mayhem (winner: Colorado Book Award), and Crash Code (nominee: Splatterpunk Award), among others, as well as Nightscript, Pseudopod, and Horror Hill. His reporting, written and photographic, has earned a number of industry awards, and he was twice named a Feature Writer of the Year by the Washington Newspaper Publishers Association. A U.S. Navy veteran originally from rural western Pennsylvania, he now resides near Seattle (www.luciano-marano.com / Instagram: @ghosttowngossip)
Horror Author : Aigner Loren Wilson (she/her) is a 2023 double Ignyte Finalist for best novelette and best critic. She is a senior fiction editor for Strange Horizons, and her writing has appeared in F&SF, Lightspeed Magazine, Monstrous Futures, and more. You can follow her on her website, newsletter, or on Facebook.
This interview is a part of the HWA Seattle Member Blog Interview Series. HWA Seattle members who would like to be interviewed for the blog, reach out here.
Luciano Marano: You work in a lot of styles and forms, including fiction and nonfiction, reviews, poetry, podcasts, even games. How do you manage to stay so productive and balance all your work in progress? Have you somehow evolved beyond the need for sleep? Are you secretly triplets all publishing under the same name?
Aigner Loren Wilson: A really good planner and lots of sleep is my productivity secret. Once I made the conscious decision to make writing my career, I got a solid planner to start building out my writing schedule and learning how to manage different projects all at once without losing track of deadlines, energy, and ideas. My favorite planner for the past three years has been the Planner Pad!
For a while, I did think I evolved beyond sleep. I would get an average of 4-5 hours of sleep each day and would spend most of my waking hours doing something writing related. It was great until it wasn’t. I noticed my mind and body and soul needed something else that wasn’t just writing.
LM: I am fascinated by the "Story Progressions" section of your website, where you share early drafts of published works. I'm a big fan of authors including story notes in their collections, but this is an even more technical look behind the curtain, so to speak. What about publishing early drafts of your stories do you find enlightening and/or rewarding?
ALW: Hmm, I don’t know if I find it super enlightening or rewarding in most senses. I do it as a way of offering something to other writers. I haven’t come across many author websites that show the earlier stages of their work before it was published, but when I have, it’s always been so helpful at my own craft or views on writing.
My hope is that by publishing these early drafts, I’m offering something back like authors before me have done. Maybe those early drafts will be enlightening and rewarding to other writers or even readers of my work.
LM: Is there a particular author (maybe more than one) whose career you look to as an example of what you'd like for yourself and your own writing? Where do you see yourself in five, ten, twenty years?
ALW: As someone who loves to plan, I love this question! Thank you for asking it. I think there’s a small part of all of us speculative fiction writers who wish they had a career like NK Jemisin or Jeff VanderMeer, but the authors that I used at the beginning to help steer my career were authors like Stephen Graham Jones and Joyce Carol Oates. I liked how both of those authors built careers around their novels, short fiction, and teaching to craft sustainable careers.
In five years, I see myself with a novel on submission or in the process of being published. I’ll still be publishing more essays, fiction, and getting into script writing. I’d love to continue exploring and developing my game writing skills over the next few years, too, by incorporating coding and more game design.
In ten years, I’d like to have multiple books across genres out in the world and be working on getting into the script writing game fully and trying to sell them. It’d be great to have a movie made out of one of my books, too.
In twenty years, I’ll be 53 and at that point, I’d love to be a full-time novelist while still publishing nonfiction and short fiction. At that point, I’d also love to have a yearly anthology series that I edit.
LM: You read, write, and edit a lot of short fiction. Short stories are my favorite, but they rarely pay well enough to be an author's main focus and collections remain a hard sell with most publishers. But with so many people today insisting they are busier than ever before, and with the rise to dominance of quality serialized and episodic entertainment in pop culture, why do you think short stories are still not the predominant form in American literature?
ALW: I think it’s because short stories are daunting and at times unsatisfying for readers. You’d think their small size would appeal to modern attention spans, but I’ve heard so many people say they start short stories and don’t finish them because they seemed too long or small enough that they can read them at any time.
I do love that more short stories are getting turned into movies or even TV shows, but we are far from the time before when short story writers could pay their rent and save up with the earnings of their short fiction. I do dream of those days, though.
LM: If a reader was unfamiliar with your work, what’s the story you’d suggest they start with?
ALW: To Carve Home in Your Bones in the Nov/Dec 2022 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction is the best story, in my opinion, I’ve ever had published. It’s a dark fantasy about a swim team that gets shipwrecked on a strange island in a world where trauma monsters burst from your skin. It was nominated for best novelette for the Ignyte Awards in 2023. People can read the novelette for free over on my newsletter.
LM: Do you have any upcoming releases or projects you’re working on that you’d like to talk about?
ALW: I am working on a new horror novelette right now that I’m hoping to start submitting by the end of the summer. It deals with suicidality and depression in children in teens and focuses on a group of teens who team up to fight a forest spirit. I’ve been describing it as Joanna Newsome and Stephen King rewrite The Faculty.
LM: What are you reading, watching, or playing right now?
ALW: Right now, I’m watching 30 Rock for the first time and reading Best of the Best Horror of the Year by Ellen Datlow as part of my grad school reading list
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Thanks for reading. I hope you’ve found a new author or a deeper love for an author you already know.
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