This month - Clay Vermulm
Interviewer : 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.
Horror Author: Clay Vermulm is a full-time creative writer and editor from Everett, Washington. When not at his desk, he’s an avid mountaineer, rock climber, and backpacker. His debut horror novella, Crevasse, was published by City Stone Publishing in 2022. This year, two of his short stories have been accepted for publication. One will be featured in Jennifer Brozek’s flash-anthology 99 Fleeting Fantasies, and the other in Tales of Sleyhouse 2023, by Sleyhouse Magazine. Clay is a member of several writing organizations, including the Horror Writers Association, Northwest Independent Writers Association, Cascade Writers, and Authors of the Flathead.
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.
Aigner Loren Wilson: I saw that you’re a full-time writer, something many authors would love to be. Do you have any advice for a writer trying to move into full-time writing as a career?
Clay Vermulm: Marry rich. Hahaha, no, I mean, find a supportive, a support base, whatever that be. Friends who are willing to support you or a really supportive partner is going to be clutch.
Whatever kind of support base you can find and build, start there. Because, yes, I am a full-time writer now and I’m finally paying my bills, but it was a straight year where my wife covered all the bills. I am not ashamed to admit that. I’m really proud to have her in my life and to have her. She’s so supportive and amazing. And I just couldn’t be more thankful for her.
But you have to grind on it. You have to you have to work 40 hours a week like every other job, I think, unless you hit the jackpot somewhere, which, you know, that can happen too. For me, it had to become a day job level commitment, where I wasn’t working two hours a night after a 40-hour work week. I worked manual labor most of my life and trying to write after that every day was completely grueling for me.
Your writing also has to be good. Then you have to have the connections and a good support base. I think that’s what you need. And I would recommend to anybody to find what works for you. You don’t have to work nine to five if you don’t like working nine to five. Like, if you’re not a morning person, then let yourself wake up as you like.
I don’t start work till usually 10, and then I work till like eight or nine. I take three days off. I work four 10s. And that for me works so much better. A couple days out in the mountains, hiking and hanging out with my wife and playing games and resetting my brain. I don’t force myself to write every single day. On my days off, I only write if I want to have fun, but I don’t let myself work. And then I work my four 10s strictly, but I get them when I’m most productive, which for me is like 10 to eight.
Some people like to work at like three am. Like that’s what Brandon Sanderson does. And that’s like, do what works for you. And there are no real rules to it. The only real rule is if you don’t do the work, you won’t have results.
ALW: I love that you backpack and climb and that it seems to have influenced your debut novella, Crevasse. Congrats, by the way! Could you talk a little more about your book?
CV: Crevasse is an exploration on a few different perspectives of the danger in the outdoors. I’ve got three primary point of view (POV) characters. Each symbolizing an approach to the outdoors. And what is important to me is that all three of those perspectives are equally valid.
At the end of the day, the book is about the terror that does exist in nature. And nature is there. It’s not something to conquer. It’s not something that cares if you die. It’s not something that cares if you live. It’s not something that cares if you triumph or fail. It’s just there.
When you go and put yourself out there, that’s a risk very much worth taking. But it’s, it’s a risk and being aware of that is important. There’s a lot of like inherent terror and inherent story value in the natural world like that. So, I set out to kind of explore those things with Crevasse.
What you get from it as a reader, is a combination of an adventure climbing novel and a creature feature horror story. You’re going to get a slow burn, more psychological type thriller than a gory book or anything like that. I do try to draw elements from horror that creeps up on you and kind of lives with you until it decides to strike.
I use an analogy often in that in that book, relating the monster to like a cougar being the most terrifying creature in the woods, because you don’t know they’re there. And that’s kind of the horror that I’ve always enjoyed the most is the stuff that I’m pretty sure it’s there, but I’m not sure enough.
Quinn is kind of the main POV. And Quinn is new to the game, but very enthusiastic, and very capable of doing everything that she’s getting involved in. She is very much based on like me and my wife, when we went out on our first few climbs. For me, the thing with climbing was, I was super stoked and ready to go and not afraid of anything until I had a big fall.
That kind of changed my whole perspective.
So, Quinn is there. She has had a recent experience that kind of woke her up to what is scary about climbing. And her boyfriend, Greg, who’s the other POV doesn’t have that fear, so they are now kind of having a little bit more trouble climbing together. They’re butting heads now a little bit. She’s more cautious than she used to be.
Greg’s perspective is like that gung ho mountaineer, like the Alex Honnold’s of the world? They’re not scared of anything, doesn’t matter what’s happened to them. Greg’s kind of that guy. I enjoyed exploring him because I have kind of been both guys. And I’m trying to put a real face on that, not stereotype it, kind of show both sides of that type of person. I think there’s some negative perceptions about that kind of personality, especially nowadays, that I don’t necessarily agree with.
But I also see there is definitely toxicity in there. Toxic masculinity is a real thing. And Greg’s kind of at a cusp of overcoming some of those previous misconceptions that he’s just sort of realizing he has them at all. Sometimes it takes a relationship like his with Quinn.
Then the third POV is Ellie. She’s the one that nearest and dearest to my heart. She is like the old, grizzled mountaineer.
She’s kind of like the get off my lawn person in the outdoors. She’s very gruff and brusque and thinks that modern mountaineering has gotten kind of soft and frankly thinks that it’s dangerous for people to go out there who aren’t prepared. And people who need a cell phone aren’t prepared. People who can’t use a compass aren’t prepared. People who have to watch a YouTube video before they cross a glacier to put on their crampons should probably not be crossing a glacier or putting on crampons at all.
The flip side of that is she is Greg’s godmother. When Greg doesn’t come back from his trip, now she has to face the fact that somebody she trained is equally susceptible to those dangers. She has to go out there and pull him out just as she has many other people because she’s a search and rescue operative.
Those are the three perspectives or three different ways I see the modern mountaineering community. I think they’re all really important to consider. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if you’re good or you’re new. If an avalanche happens and you’re under it, there’s not much you can do. And the creature in the book sort of represents that indomitable force of nature that no amount of preparation or skill or lack thereof really can compensate for.
It’s a leveler.
ALW: You are a part of Fermented Fiction, a podcast that analyses genre fiction and holds author interviews. Who would you say this show is for?
CV: Honestly, I would say Fermented Fiction is more for readers and watchers of fiction than it is for other writers. It isn’t one of those shows where we talk about the craft too much, except for in regard to how it affects a story. Ultimately, our show, is a vibe show.
We love books and movies. We love genre fiction.
The way it works is it’s a debate game show. We start the show and roll two d20s. The high roll has to defend. The low roll has to attack, no matter what we actually think about it. We spend 10 minutes debating it. Then our guy, Jeremy cuts us off with the timer. We do a couple other little funny segments. Then we spend like 40 minutes talking about what we all actually think.
I wouldn’t come to it looking to learn anything too mind bending.
I think we all have good takes. We all are intuitive watchers that are involved in the industry in some capacity, except for my brother. He’s a master’s educated philosophy and theology teacher. He’s the smartest one out of all of us. Jeremy is a filmmaker. I’m a writer. And Colin is the programming director for Cascade Writers. So, we all kind of have a different perspective. We all have a little bit different tastes and we just have a lot of fun with it.
ALW: Could you share a bit about the themes or elements that you enjoy exploring in your short fiction, and what readers can expect from your short story collection they get by signing up for your newsletter?
CV: Great question. That one I had to think about a lot. I have a lot of mixed emotions regarding my short story collection. I appreciate the opportunity to talk about it honestly. When it comes to my short fiction, very much like Crevasse, I usually combine Stephen King’s idea of put a character in a room. But it’s more like put a character in a philosophical conundrum of some kind or some sort of morality impasse.
I like those conceptual ideas. I like to sort of write psychological, ethereal, poetic type prose. And I like to write in the outdoors. I definitely subscribe to a lot of King’s ideas in On Writing. Stephen King suggests never writing anything down and just like letting things rattle around in your brain and the things that you don’t forget are worth writing.
That’s good for me because I think of like 10 story ideas a day. And if I wrote them all down, I would never find any of them. I won’t write something until I’ve thought about it for at least a few weeks.
My most recent short story I’m working on that hasn’t been published yet, but it’s a woman trying to sell a house that’s haunted by her father. That’s like a story of familial abuse and legacy. Is it okay to sell your legacy if you’re not particularly attached to it yourself? How much does it matter what your family cared about if they’re gone? Whose job is it to preserve your house and legacy at that point?
For the short story collection, what you get is my first solid real try at writing and taking it seriously. Like many writers, I’ve been writing since I had crayons in my hand. I wrote all the way up through high school. I wrote a lot of short stories in college and took all the creative writing classes and submitted all over and never got published. I’ve done all those things.
Frankly, I’m only starting to get published in the last two years. It feels great to get picked up. I’m now in a place where my stories are regularly held for further consideration even if not eventually accepted, which is nice. I couldn’t have done that without the stories in Blue Rare.
I had to write those, and I had to put them out there and hear what other people thought about them and take those licks. They’re certainly not perfect. I get freshman jitters when I look back at them. But I’m proud of them. They are good examples of the type of stuff I like to write. The type of stuff you can expect from me in terms of theme, execution of the creature, or plot device. All that stuff is pretty consistent with what I still write. I do like to think I’m substantially better at it now.
And I still think they’re a good intro into my world. I still think they’re good, fun stories.
ALW: If a reader was unfamiliar with your work, what’s the story you’d suggest they start with?
CV: Crevasse. Hands down. I’m very happy with Crevasse. It’s what I want to write. It is what I write best. And if you don’t like it, you probably won’t like anything I write.
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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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