In Sunlight or in Shadow

A few years ago I participated in Brian Lindemuth's "Short Story a Day" challenge for a year. I discovered a lot of new writers that way and it also gave me an excuse to re-read short stories that I'd always loved. I'd like to read more short stories in the coming year and I'm going to start with this colleciton. I'm intrigued by the concept but look at the lineup of writers--Stephen King, Megan Abbot, Joyce Carol Oates, Craig Ferguson!!!  In Sunlight or in Shadow is currently available in both digital and hard cover here.

Guest Post: Patricia Abbott

 Novelist Patricia Abbott, whose debut novel Concrete Angel is a nominee for the 2016 Macavity Award for Best First Mystery, discusses some of the thorny issues facing writers of crime fiction.

The Difficult Centerpiece of SHOT IN DETROIT

by Patricia Abbott

SHOT INDETROIT is the story a female photographer desperate to find artistic success. Through her relationship with a mortician, she comes up with the idea of photographing young black men who have died in Detroit over a six-month period. I wrote the character of Violet Hart as ambitious, a loner, a pest in getting what she wants. An artist in other words. She lives on the outskirts of conventional society--at least in her mind--reasoning that an artist is given license to bend societal norms. Or is she? Does Violet exploit the men she photographs or does she honor them? Is it somewhere in between? These are the issues I wrestled with in writing SHOT IN DETROIT. Both in creating a character who thought like this and in making her the book's centerpiece. And was I guilty of the same transgressions?

I set SHOT IN DETROIT almost totally within Detroit. It's a city often accused of exemplifying transgression: the murder capital of the world plunged into bankruptcy, suffering the lowest rate of high school graduation in the country, imprisoning the most black males, enduring the most extreme poverty. The art and literature coming out of Detroit was edgy, bleak, transgressive. How could it not be? To find a Detroit prompting a different story, I'd have to have set it much earlier. Even in Joyce Carol Oates' brilliant THEM, set in the fifties and sixties in Detroit, the plunge is well underway. 

Early readers of SHOT found Violet a difficult sell. An agent gave me this advice: change her name, make her younger, give her girlfriends, find her a best friend who isn't a gay Filipino who sells drugs. Make her more appealing to women: they buy the books. I took some of his advice. But each time I stepped farther away from the Violet in my head, the story felt off-beam. If the central premise of the novel was going to work, Violet could not be the sort of woman who sat on PTA boards or lunched with former sorority sisters.

Interview with Amelia Mangan

Amelia Mangan is a writer originally from London, currently living in Sydney, Australia. Her writing is featured in many anthologies, including Attic Toys (ed. Jeremy C. Shipp); Blood Type (ed. Robert S. Wilson); Worms, After The Fall, X7 and No Monsters Allowed (ed. Alex Davis); The Bestiarum Vocabulum (ed. Dean M. Drinkel); Carnival of the Damned (ed. Henry Snider); and Mother Goose is Dead (eds. Michele Acker & Kirk Dougal). Her short story, "Blue Highway," won Yen Magazine's first annual short story competition and was featured in its 65th issue. She can be found on Twitter (@AmeliaMangan) and Facebook.

You’re originally from London. What brought you to Sydney and how long have you been there?

My dad went to prison for fraud when I was seven, so my mum and I came over here to stay with my grandmother. I've lived here ever since (in Australia, not with my grandmother), so that makes twenty-six years come August.

You’ve published a number of short stories, was it hard for you to transition to longer work like Release?

Yeah, longer work's tougher, no question. First drafts of short stories usually take me about ten days to complete, which means it's out of my system quicker and I can move on sooner. The thing about longform work is that you really need to be sure you like these characters and this world enough to soldier on with them for months, maybe years at a time, and even if you do like them enough to do that, there's gonna be points where you get thoroughly sick of them and begin to cast longing glances at your notebook full of ideas for other novels. But if the idea is genuinely good - and bad ones will reveal themselves relatively quickly; they're unsustainable and blow over like cardboard - then it's worth pursuing to the end.

Was Release your first novel? How long did it take to write?

It's not the first novel I attempted, but it's the first I ever finished. I'm a little embarrassed to say it took eight years, mainly because I was at university and then did the postgrad thing and, basically, life and physical exhaustion got in the way for a bit. At one point I came dangerously close to just destroying the file and salting the earth behind it, but reason (I won't say sanity) prevailed.

Do you have a “process” for writing? A certain number of pages a day? Or words a day? Do you write on your birthday and holidays? Take weekends off?

I try to do at least five hundred words a day, but if I don't meet that, I don't sweat it (unless I'm on a deadline, of course). My feeling is that, even if you only get one sentence down in a day, you're a sentence ahead of where you were the day before. And I hate that whole "REAL WRITERS WRITE EVERY SINGLE DAY OF THEIR LIVES NO EXCUSES I DON'T CARE IF YOUR WHOLE FAMILY DIED" thing that's become prevalent in writing communities; I see how it can be useful to some who find it difficult to actually sit down and do the work, but too often I see it used as a stick for writers to beat themselves with when they fail to meet that self-imposed standard. And writers don't need any more excuses to hate themselves.

Do you listen to music when you’re writing? What’s most often on your playlist?

Not while I'm writing - I need silence for that - but adjacent to writing, absolutely. Everything I've ever written has a playlist; a few of the ones on Release's (Irma Thomas' "Ruler of My Heart", Wanda Jackson's "Funnel of Love", the folk song "In The Pines", Patsy Cline's "Walking After Midnight") made it into the text. The style and tone of the music on each playlist varies according to the style and tone of, and emotional state I want to evoke with, each individual story, but PJ Harvey seems to show up on all of them eventually - which, seeing as how she's my favorite musician, is not entirely surprising.