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Author, Editor, Media Tie-In Writer

Tell Me - Sarah Day

I’m pleased to present Sarah Day to you. She was once one of my mentees. Now she is someone I look forward to reading. She is a fabulous author and I can’t wait to read her newest novella, Greyhowler. Today, she tells us why she wanted to write a monster book and what makes her monster special.

 

Greyhowler is a monster book. Okay, it’s a bunch of other things too, but it started as a monster book.

Ever since I was tiny, I’ve loved a scary monster. Or rather, I’ve loved being scared by a monster. I saw both JAWS and ALIENS when I was much too young to see movies with that many teeth in them, and sharks and xenomorphs chased me through my dreams for years afterward. To this day, I watch every creature movie I can, probably because I’m looking for something to replace the monsters that hunt me in my dreams.

(We all have dreams where something is hunting us, right? It’s not just me?) (Editor: No, it’s not just you.)

Now that I’m an adult, I can look at my fixation with monsters with a more clinical eye. Monsters give me a container to pour my constant low-grade anxiety into, something I can point at (or boop on the nose) and say “This is it, this right here, this is the thing I’m afraid of.” A monster condenses ambient fear about concepts (death! helplessness! mutilation! oblivion!) into something observable, but still inescapable.

Y’see, I want a monster that looms. I do not want a monster that’s basically “what if a human, but more powerful and more evil.” Not for me, the werewolf and the vampire. I want a monster that’s an extension of nature, with all of nature’s beautiful ambivalence to human life. A slow monster, a creeping monster, a monster that can slide up behind me and wait for me to notice it, patient as the grave.

The fun part of being a discovery writer (or a “pantser,” if you prefer an inelegant term, or a “gardener,” if you prefer a more elegant term) is that I maintain the ability to scare myself. Greyhowler started as a 10,000 word short story unwisely titled “The Wild World Has Room for All Manner of Things,” which I later revised into a trim novella. As I wrote my way through those first 10,000 words, the greyhowler prowled around the outer edge of my brain. It’s a constant question on the protagonist’s mind: does the greyhowler exist, or is it just a folktale? Up until I finished the first draft, I didn’t know the answer to that question myself.

When I started writing Greyhowler, it wasn’t about religious trauma. It wasn’t about friendship, or a mystery, or betrayal, or murder, or magic. All of those things are in the book now, but when it started it was because I had this persistent mental image: A woman arriving at the border of a small town, far away from home, out in the remote and golden prairie. A woman, and something just off the side of the road, crouched in the tall grass, waiting.

The greyhowler found me first, you see. I didn’t have to invent it. It was waiting for me.


Sarah Day lives in the SF Bay Area with her cat and too many LED lights. She is an author of horror, sci-fi, fantasy, and many other flavors of speculative fiction. Her work is heavily influenced by festival culture, body modification, mental illness, family trauma, non-traditional relationships, and scary ghosts. She’s been published in PseudoPod, Cosmic Horror Monthly, The Future Fire, Underland Arcana, and many other great places. She’s terrified all the time and considers that an asset.

What is the “Tell Me” guest blog? It is a 400-600 word (more if you need it) blog post where you tell me something about your project. Tell me why you did it. Or what inspired you. Or something that you’ve always wanted to tell the world about the project. Tell me why you love it. Or hate it. Or what you learned. Tell me anything you want. I’m listening….

Meet Jennifer Brozek

Jennifer Brozek is a multi-talented, award-winning author, editor, and media tie-in writer. She is the author of Never Let Me Sleep and The Last Days of Salton Academy, both of which were nominated for the Bram Stoker Award. Her YA tie-in novels, BattleTech: The Nellus Academy Incident and Shadowrun: Auditions, have both won Scribe Awards. Her editing work has earned her nominations for the British Fantasy Award, the Bram Stoker Award, and the Hugo Award. She won the Australian Shadows Award for the Grants Pass anthology, co-edited with Amanda Pillar. Jennifer’s short form work has appeared in Apex Publications, Uncanny Magazine, Daily Science Fiction, and in anthologies set in the worlds of Valdemar, Shadowrun, V-Wars, Masters of Orion, Well World, and Predator.

Jennifer has been a full-time freelance author and editor for over seventeen years, and she has never been happier. She keeps a tight schedule on her writing and editing projects and somehow manages to find time to teach writing classes and volunteer for several professional writing organizations such as SFWA, HWA, and IAMTW. She shares her husband, Jeff, with several cats and often uses him as a sounding board for her story ideas. Visit Jennifer’s worlds at jenniferbrozek.com or her social media accounts on LinkTree.

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