Llewellyn on Llewellyn: "Long ago, in another millennia, I was born at the icy edges of
Anchorage, Alaska and spent my childhood in the quiet woods of the
Pacific Northwest. And now, in this early sliver of the new thousand
year era, I am a tiny speck in a frenetic East Coast megalopolis that is
one of the centers of the human world. I’m not quite sure how that
happened….By day I’m a secretary. I file papers, create spreadsheets,
update calendars, weep in the restroom stalls — the usual secretarial
things.
At night, I write about lonely girls who sing to colossal sentient
engines born of Tesla’s secret journals, long-horned demons lost in
endless tracts of suburbia, giant biomechanical insects and their sassy
female charges, mothers who are good monsters, monsters who are good
mothers, the mysterious labyrinth of human-&-creature couplings, the
joys of solitude and the horror of the broken heart."
Livia's website is
here; her story collection
Engines Of Desire is
here, and she Tweets
here.
Oh, and her story 'Stabilimentum' is now online at
Pseudopod Magazine today!
1. Tell
us three things about yourself.
I’m trying to think of something that
doesn’t involve ants or bad apartment situations. Hmm. Well,
when I was
fifteen, my father taught me how to drive in the Tacoma Cemetery—he figured
everyone there was already dead, so I couldn’t possibly do any more harm to
them. My mother once closed the garage door on me—I was about seven, I was
throwing some fit and wouldn’t come out to the car, and so she started to close
the garage door and I slid down under it at the last minute because I didn’t
want to be locked inside, and BAM! Garage door on my ass. My mother laughed. I
wasn’t hurt, and I deserved it, I was being a complete little shit. Oh, and my terrible
apartment has about a hundred thousand ants living in it. Sorry, I had to. But,
my lease is up next February! I’m positively giddy at the thought of all the
new terrible places I might be living in next year.
2. What
was the first thing you had published?
I won second place in a flash fiction
contest at ChiZine Magazine with my story “Brimstone Orange”, and it was
published there in 2005. That was both my first publication and my first story
ever written. But it was very much a fluke—it was almost a year and a half
before I had my second piece published.
3. Which
piece of writing are you proudest of?
The story “…and Love shall have no
Dominion” (about a demon who falls in love with the woman
he’s brutally and
violently possessing), which I don’t think a lot of people have read. But it’s
going to be in my next collection, so it’ll be interesting to see what the
reaction is from readers and reviewers. It wasn’t easy to write, and it’s not
an easy read.
[SB: this story was first published in Demons, ed. John Skipp.]
4. …and
which makes you cringe?
Looking over what I’ve had published,
there isn’t anything that really makes me want to crawl into a hole and die—although
I’m sure there’s a lot of people who are thinking that I seriously need to look
again. However, I’ve written plenty of stories like that. My “trunked” folder
is larger than my “published” folder for a very good reason.
5. What’s
a normal writing day like?
I have an office job to pay the bills,
so my normal writing day is confined to a few hours every evening, and whatever
I can get done on the weekends. I write at home, I can’t afford to write in
coffee shops or cafes (they’re too crowded nowadays, anyway—everyone’s a
writer, apparently!), so I just sit on my couch in the living room with the
lights dimmed, and write on my laptop while listening to music. That’s it, it’s
very boring and unglamorous.
6. Which
piece of writing should someone who’s never read you before pick up first?
I think they should read the novella
“Her Deepness”, which is still online at
Subterranean Magazine. It has a fair
amount of everything I love writing: an emotionally (and often physically)
tortured female protagonist who is also somewhat of an antagonist, and is in
all likelihood not fully human; cosmic and geological Lovecraftian horror;
vast, unnatural urban environments; unexplainable systems of logic; and—of
course!—a bit of rather creepy sexual imagery.
7. What
are you working on now?
I have four short stories that are due
to various places at the end of the month—one to an anthology, two original
pieces for my upcoming collection Furnace
(which will be out in February 2016 from Word Horde Press), and one piece of
erotica for my Patreon account. All are close to completion, so it’s just a
matter of keeping my butt planted on that writing couch. Letting the dishes
pile up in the sink also helps. That might be why I have ants…
Since Ellen Datlow began editing The Best Horror Of The Year, I've had three stories published in the series. 
