The Lowdown with... A.C. Wise

A.C. Wise was born and raised in Montreal and currently lives in the Philadelphia area. Her short fiction has appeared in places such as Clarkesworld, Tor.com, Shimmer, and The Best Horror of the Year Volume 10. She has two collections - The Ultra Fabulous  Glitter Squadron Saves The World Again and The Kissing Booth Girl - published with Lethe Press, and a novella, Catfish Lullaby, forthcoming from Broken Eye Books. In addition to her fiction, she contributes a monthly review column to Apex Magazine, and the Women to Read and Non-Binary Authors to Read series to The Book Smugglers. Find her online here and on twitter there.


1. Tell us three things about yourself.
I'm Canadian. I have an uncontrollable book-buying problem, though I don't really consider it a problem. I think corgis are the best, and the two corgis who live in my house agree.

2. What was the first thing you had published?
The first thing I had published was a short story in a yearly journal of work by students put together by a local library when I was in high school. The first thing I had professionally published was piece of flash fiction printed on a coffee label by Story House Coffee. Sadly Story House no longer exists, which is a shame because I love the idea of fiction on coffee labels. As a big coffee drinker myself, it felt very appropriate for my first professional publication.

3. Which piece of writing are you proudest of?

Hmm. That's hard to say. I've always been rather fond of "Final Girl Theory", which originally appeared at ChiZine, back when they regularly published short fiction online. It's since been reprinted in a couple of anthologies, and podcast at Pseudopod.

4. …and which makes you cringe?
Oh, geez. There are any number of embarrassing trunk novels and stories that will never see the light of day and I shudder to think of them.

5. What’s a normal writing day like?
I have a day job in addition to writing, so during the week, my writing is usually limited to whatever I can squeeze in at lunch. If I'm lucky, I can set aside a block of time on the weekend for writing, and it's always lovely to be able to immerse myself versus knowing I have less than an hour to cram in as much work as I can.

6. Which piece of writing should someone who’s never read you before pick up first?
For a single story, I would say "Final Girl Theory" again, however if someone wanted a broader sample of my work, I would recommend my collection The Kissing Booth Girl and Other Stories. It's got a little bit of everything - fantasy, horror, science fiction, erotica, and cross-genre mash-ups.

7. What are you working on now?
Just moments ago I turned in the edits for my debut novella, Catfish Lullaby, which is slated to come out from Broken Eye Books this summer. I'm excited for it to be out in the world, and for folks to read it! It's kind of a Southern Gothic, weird horror type thing that's secretly about family/found family. There are also creatures with too many eyes and too many teeth and the end of the world is at hand, so it's got something for everyone!

Tomorrow's Cthulhu: Between Angels And Insects and The Hyde Hotel on Booked

Two nice things I completely forgot! In fairness, I did have a lot of nice things to talk about already on Friday.

The Booked podcast reviewed The Hyde Hotel in their latest issue. Each of the two reviewers discussing it had to pick three favourite stories - one picked my tale, 'Wrath Of The Deep', and the other picked Cate's contribution, 'The Coyote Corporation's Misplaced Song.'


Which was nice.

You can listen to the podcast here.

In other news, the Broken Eye Books anthology Tomorrow's Cthulhu: Stories At The Dawn Of Posthumanity is now available to buy on ebook! Paperback and hardcover will now be released on 15th February, but you can preorder now. In includes my story 'Between Angels And Insects'. Here's a sample:

'I remembered logging into the computer that night and thinking how the odd the patterns flickering across the screen were. They were hypnotic. Hypnotic. And then: the hive. The rage. Find a target. Destroy it. Here is the target. Kill him. Kill him. Make him kill himself. Night after night, until he broke. And - 

And there are others. Not just me – others. So many others. We are many. The many and the One. We are the One. We are the hive. We are the avatar. We are Cthulhu. Dead but dreaming.'


Tomorrow's Cthulhu: Stories At The Dawn Of Posthumanity also includes stories by: Desirina Boskovich, Lynda Rucker, Samantha Henderson, Daria Patrie, Kaaron Warren, Richard Byers, Damien Angelica Walters, Spencer Leary, Joshua L. Hood, Jeff C. Carter, Matt Maxwell, Shannon Fay, Adam Heine, Mike Allen, Darrell Schweitzer, Cody Goodfellow, Bruce R. Cordell, Pete Rawlik, A.C. Wise, Robert Brockway, Nate Southard, Molly Tanzer, Joshua Alan Doetsch, Thomas M. Reid, Clinton J. Boomer, L.A. Knight, Lizz-Ayn Shaarawi, J.M. Rozanski.

Tomorrow's Cthulhu: Stories at the Dawn of Posthumanity

My story 'Between Angels And Insects' will appear in Tomorrow's Cthulhu, a new anthology from Broken Eye Books. Edited by Scott Gable and C. Dombrowski.

Super science. Madness. Transhumanism.

This is the dawn of posthumanity. Some things can’t be unlearned. 

Gleaming labs whir with the hum of servers as scientists unravel the secrets of the universe. But as we peel away mysteries, the universe glances back at us. Even now, terrors rise from the Mariana Trench and drift down from the stars. Scientists are disappearing—or worse. Experiments take on minds of their own. Some fight back against the unknown, some give in, some are destroyed, and still others are becoming… more.

The human and inhuman are harder and harder to distinguish. Mankind is changing, whether it wants to or not, with brand new ways of thinking. What havoc is wreaked by those humans trying to harness and control their discoveries? As big science progresses and the very fundamentals of this universe are understood, what stories are being hushed up?

Of course, the Old Ones laugh at our laws, scientific and otherwise. 

These are transhumanist near-future science fiction tales of the Cthulhu Mythos. These are tales of more than merely cosmic dread. They exist in our world of the next couple years. This is the era of big science and—what is that? We’ll be right back. ​​

 

Contributors: Desirina Boskovich, Lynda Rucker, Samantha Henderson, Daria Patrie, Kaaron Warren, Richard Byers, Damien Angelica Walters, Spencer Leary, Joshua L. Hood, Jeff C. Carter, Simon Bestwick, Matt Maxwell, Shannon Fay, Adam Heine, Mike Allen, Darrell Schweitzer, Cody Goodfellow, Bruce R. Cordell, Pete Rawlik, A.C. Wise, Robert Brockway, Nate Southard, Molly Tanzer, Joshua Alan Doetsch, Thomas M. Reid, Clinton J. Boomer, L.A. Knight, Lizz-Ayn Shaarawi, J.M. Rozanski.

 

The ebook of Tomorrow's Cthulhu is available from 21st December 2015 (next week!) The hardcover and paperback are out on 21st January 2016. You can pre-order the book here.