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I love the Hell House LLC franchise. The first irony of loving Hell House LLC as my favorite found footage film is that it does use the tropes of the found footage genre: a group goes into already proven haunted location, makes dumb choices, clearly Judeo-Christian influenced demonic forces are at play, etc…, but also twists them on their head.
About halfway through the film you realize in real time that the head guy in charge, Alex, has an ulterior motive to an already satisfying story, and the ending of the film reinforces the fact that no matter what you do, you are doomed to lose your body and soul to the hotel, and maybe always were. It’s both a liberating and terrifying treatise in equal measures. That is where Feats of Fright was born.
Much like its forebearers Ten Candles or Dread (for instance), Feats of Fright celebrates the actual doom of fighting against the inevitable. It reveals something about who we are as individuals and as a corporate species. Nobody that’s playtested the adventure has ever balked at the premise and, indeed, for seasoned TTRPG players, the doomed story itself is sometimes the draw.
The mechanics have a classic Outlast video game flavor where it’s less about creating weapons against bad guys to shoot your way to victory and more about telling a fatal story together. Feats of Fright is one of the most personable and intimate versions of the story of Hell House and it’s cult leader CEO hotelier, Andrew Tully. Given the timelines available in this first core book, it has consistently felt like a side adventure of the main film storyline, even without any of the main cast present.
At the same time, there’s a space for people that are spooky curious or maybe have played a Kids on Bikes or mafia/werewolf game at some point and want to do something a bit more adventurous. It isn’t a secret that nobody leaves the Hotel alive, and that’s certainly not shied away from in character creation. However, the secret in this particular bloody sauce is the journey of getting there.
In the playtests, I’ve captured the souls of indie rock bands, competitive game show crews, late night horror podcasters, and more. Even within these premises there’s so much room to tell the story in a symphony of ways, even if the ending will always be the “same.”
The job of the Host (GM) isn’t just about snatching bodies and murder. It’s about atmosphere. Crafting suspicion. Doubt. Even that classic devil’s bargain, if that’s the way the game pursues itself. I blame my love of Vincent Price movies for that part, but it’s in the Hell House films, too. Anyone could sell you out to try and save themselves, and anyone could go at any time.
That’s the beauty of Feats of Fright. The story is yours to tell, and its always going to end badly. It’s only a matter of (spooky) time.
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John McDonald (he/they) is a queer playwright and TTRPG content creator telling intimate stories not just about connection but what happens when connection breaks both in human and supernatural ways. Currently in Chicago, IL, John is a baker of brownies, a devotee of Carole King’s Tapestry album, an ongoing Power Rangers GM and has had plays shown in both Rhino Fest and Fertile Ground indie play fests. In 2027, you’ll be able to see his work in the Leeds Theater Festival for the first time abroad in Cobblestone Kingdom, a new queer musical take on the Cinderella mythology.
We go way back. Fun fact: Kerrie was the editor who gave me my third pro sale that qualified me to join SFWA back in 2009. (Good gravy, that’s 15 years ago!) She tells me all about the anthology series she edits with Jim Butcher and talks about how the themes came about.
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Jim and I started the anthology series in 2014/15. It was going to be a one book thing as a favor to me because I had an orphaned anthology and needed to sell it to a different publisher. The next thing I knew, Jim was my co-editor and we sold it to his publisher, Ace.
We renamed it from Fierce to Shadowed Souls, and I’m pleased to say it is still selling strong. In fact, it did so well it went into reprint, and we decided to do a second anthology, Heroic Hearts, which is also selling well. We seem to have hit on a good formula so we agreed to do a third, Paranormal Payback, which came out on April 14, 2026.
Why the dark title? I’ve been dreaming about getting payback through paranormal means since I was sixteen. Why? Because the patriarchy sucks, and I really like witchcraft. It’s the reason I started reading authors like Jim Butcher, Kim Harrison, and Patricia Briggs, among others. In many ways this volume is therapy. Who doesn’t want to hunt down the monsters and make them sorry they had the audacity to cross your path?
Jim feels the same, except he’s a bit more mellow than I am, sort of. We’re both urban fantasy curmudgeons. Anyway, we enjoy the anthologies. It gives us a chance to work with our favorite authors and share them with like-minded readers. It’s really all about having some fun while day-dreaming about possibilities, and revenge, tasty sweet revenge.
P.S. We are working on the next one, but the details are super-secret. In the meantime, if you like paranormal drama with cozy chaos check out my Great Lakes Grimoires on Amazon, there will be payback. Jim, of course, is continuing his Dresden Files series, and they seem to be enjoying a revival, especially the audio versions that are read by Spike from Buffy.
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Kerrie L. Hughes is the author of a multi book universe of paranormal urban fantasy called the Great Lakes Grimoires. Her books are about witches, wizards, vampires, shifters, ghosts and the Fae. Her themes live in the realm of found family and cozy chaos with a dash of romantic drama. She also has an anthology series with Jim Butcher. She doesn’t do a lot of social media, but you can follow her on Facebook, Tertulia: GreatLakesGrimoire.com. The Grimoires are available on Amazon. The Butcher anthologies are everywhere.
Lucky 13. That’s how many times I had to submit my novella, Between the Stars I Found Her, before it found a home.
At the 2018 Worldcon (San Jose), I attended a mentoring session hosted by the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA). I was paired with Julia Rios, a talented writer/editor who managed Worlds of Possibility. She heard my pitch about two projects I was considering: a second-world fantasy based on ancient Yemen, and a science fiction story set in a socialist paradise that included cloning and personality transfers (i.e., functional immortality).
Julie said I showed more interest in the second idea and encouraged me to pursue it. She was right.
The result was a novella, Between the Stars I Found Her. My POV character is Mylene Vandenberg, whose ex-wife commits suicide. I wanted to explore themes of grief and loss, especially when the concept of true death had become rare.
The story really clicked for me when I put Mylene on a solo journey that takes her far from Earth. She and her ship, The Flying Dutchman, stumble across the corpse of an astronaut lost over a century before. That gave me the opening to play around with several puzzles—who was this person? How did their life pod get into deep space?
The answers could lead Mylene back to Earth. Full circle, as it were.
Easier said than done, certainly. The draft became a story which was rejected several times. I kept at it. My helpful critic group correctly pointed out that the story was too short (and boy were they right), so the story grew into a novella. It was rejected again. And again.
On the thirteenth submission, I found an editor (Mark Bilsborough at Wyldblood) who liked it enough to help me develop Between into a proper novella. Mark had published several of my flash fiction stories and I was happy to work with him again.
The novella’s journey wasn’t an easy one, I’ll be honest. Writing Between the Stars forced me to do research and—Gods forbid—write a real outline rather than simply banging at the keyboard for a few thousand words and call it a draft.
There was also Mundane Reality™ that many writers face: jobs and family and COVID, etc. Somehow, though, it all came together in a shiny wrap-around cover that you can hold in your hand. Imagine that.
In retrospect, I’ve learned a few important lessons. First, my idea for a secondary world fantasy novella/novel wasn’t bad, but I was trying to write something I thought would be popular (Everyone loves epic fantasy, right?) rather than telling a story that meant something to me. Bottom line: listen to your Muse. She knows the score.
Second, you have to back up your Muse with perseverance. And patience. The best stories sometimes take years to find the right editor, the right agent, the right publisher. And even if they do, shit happens. (Buy me a cup of tea and I’ll tell you all about it.)
I’ve often remarked to friends that I hesitate to write longer stories because I’m not willing to let the characters live in my head for at least two years. Well, Mylene lived in my head much longer than that and I still like her a lot.
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Karl Dandenell is a graduate of Viable Paradise and a Full Member of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association. He and his family, plus their feline overlords, live on an island near San Francisco famous for its Victorian architecture and low-speed traffic. Karl has published over 50 works of short fiction in the United States, Canada, and Great Britain. Follow his occasional posts at Bluesky (@karldandenell.bsky.social) and read more about of his fiction at www.firewombats.com.
Most of my writing career has been spent in long form novels set in the grim and perilous worlds of Warhammer, but I often like to venture beyond that into other forms of writing, genres, and tones for variety and texture. What I mean by that is I need to feel like I’m exercising different writerly muscles when I embark on different projects, whether it’s a novel, a comic, a short story, a screenplay, or whatever. I feel this is good for me and the reader, as it helps keep things new and exciting. It means that when I return to each different genre or project type, I’m enthused to explore it again and not likely to get pigeonholed into one corner. Likewise, as a reader, I like to vary my diet of books between SF, Fantasy, Horror, Crime, Non-Fiction, etc., so I don’t ever get tired of one genre or writer.
The reason I do this with my writing is that each project employs different sensibilities and creative choices, whether it’s the discipline of the word count in a short story, where you want to get in and out of Dodge with speed and clarity, or a novel where you can afford multiple sub-plots and be (a little) more self-indulgent. Then you have screenplays, which have a very definitive structure and format, where all the emphasis is on the dialogue and providing a ‘blueprint’ for the folk who have to shoot what you’ve written. When it comes to comics, I love working with an artist to bring the words on the page to life and leaning on their talents for how to lay out the page. With comics, you also have the fun challenge of pacing the story in such a way that the big reveals, splash pages, and so on all come at the right time on the reader’s page turns.
It’s the same with genre and mythologies, I love to mix and match or slam together wildly different origins to see what comes out. So, you’ll get books like Dead Sky, Black Sun, that fuse a grimdark SF tale with Barker-esque body horror, or A Thousand Sons, that’s a story of space wizards in a gothic tragedy of hubris.
That variety is what I had in mind when I first started developing the ideas for Wolves of Winter. I wanted to write an epic story of Viking warriors that ventured into magical and supernatural territory, which combined my love of various mythologies. As much as I love Roman, Greek, and Egyptian mythologies, I didn’t feel they were the right fit, and given that as a kid in Scotland, I’d grown up on stories of Celtic mythology, with its Kelpies, Selkies, and the Tuath Dé Danann, that seemed entirely appropriate a mash-up. Bringing the grand mythologies of the Norse and the Celts together allowed me to delve into both cultures in a way that felt real and authentic (and, most importantly, exciting!).
It’s my hope that, so long as I stay enthused for my craft by allowing for that blending of story types and genres I can keep entertaining my readers in exciting and unexpected ways for many years to come.
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Graham McNeill is a Scottish, LA-based, award-winning, New York Times best-selling author, screenwriter, and games developer. Over the years, Graham has written for numerous global franchises, working on Riot’s League of Legends and on their Emmy-Award-winning Netflix show, Arcane; Games Workshop’s Warhammer and Horus Heresy settings; Blizzard Entertainment’s Starcraft universe, and the Dark Waters trilogy for Fantasy Flight Games Arkham Horror range. To date, Graham has penned forty-five novels, ninety-plus short stories, audio dramas, and comics. His novel, Empire, won the David Gemmell Legend Award for Best Fantasy Novel in 2010, and four of his novels in the Horus Heresy series have gone on to become New York Times best-sellers.
You’ve all heard it said: Two great tastes that taste great together. Peanut butter and chocolate. Yum. I tend to look upon writing fiction in the same way I look at my snack options. I love mixing genres. Blending genres into something unique thrills the creator in me and I think my characters enjoy it too.
I write thrillers often. The beauty of this is that thrillers pair well with almost anything. Action/thriller. Check. Crime/Thriller. Yep. SciFi/Thriller. Uh huh. You get the idea. If you look at any of my thrillers, there is definitely a blending of multiple genres. It even boils down to the way I pitch titles to potential readers. For example, the pitch for Evil Ways, my first novel that was released in 2005, is “Imagine if Die Hard’s John MacClane found himself in an 80’s slasher movie.” It also works outside of thrillers. Horror also pairs well with others. I write a horror/western series, for example. In my Dante series, it’s “Imagine if Deadwood also had monsters.”
This blending of two different, but recognizable, ideas let readers know what they are in store for before they open to the first page.
How do writers know when blending genres works? That’s a tough question to answer because all writers are different and our unique voice helps us determine how scenarios play out. If I am writing a mystery, for example, there are different types. A cozy mystery has no, or very little, elements of danger. The odds of your main character getting hurt, killed, or even severely startled is infinitesimal. Mixing in a thriller component changes the dynamic because thrillers inherently come with an element of danger, of thrills. It’s right there in the description. Characters aren’t always safe in a thriller.
Even if a cozy mystery and mystery/thriller use the same plot, you will get two different stories because of the thriller element added. Thriller adds a sense of danger to stories and, as a writer and reader, that appeals to me. I recently co-wrote a cozy mystery with a friend and it was a bit of a struggle to not add in thriller elements as I normally would when writing a novel. I use thriller elements to enhance the story. A lighthearted story gets a bit of bad news that gives the characters a problem to overcome. In a mystery, thriller elements can knock a character down and then help them grow by how they rally and get back up. Thriller elements are usually impediments to the status quo. How your characters respond to these elements adds weight to the story and the characters themselves. Do they learn something from this element? Do they grow? Do they buckle under the pressure? Thriller elements allow me, as a writer, to test my characters. The best of them come away from these stories stronger thanks to the adversity they faced.
For me, writing always starts with character. Not every character is the right fit for every story. Certain characters are perfect fits for a thriller while others are not. Also, thrillers can be funny, romantic, and even heartfelt, each with an element of danger. That’s one of the reasons I like using the genre as a mixer. I encourage everyone to experiment with blending genres. You might discover something interesting in the process.
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Bobby Nash is an award-winning author, artist, and occasional actor. He writes novels, comic books & graphic novels, novellas, short stories, audio scripts, screenplays, and more. Bobby is a member of the International Association of Media Tie-in Writers, International Thriller Writers, Southeastern Writers Association, and Atlanta Writers Club. From time to time, he appears in movies and TV shows, usually standing behind your favorite actor. Sometimes they let him speak. Scary, we know. For more information, please visit Bobby at www.bobbynash.com, www.ben-books.com, and across social media.
All four Dante ebooks are currently $0.99 for a limited time.
I love writing short story horror because the swing of ideas can be boundless even within a single book. You can be transported from modern settings to my favorite: Gothic backdrops. There is something spectacularly spooky about old weather-worn, eerie mansions, houses, and the time period itself. The creak of floorboards, the chill in the air, the distant tolling of a bell—those are the sounds echoing in your mind long after the last page is turned. These decaying structures hold secrets in every shadowed corner, and it’s easy to imagine their walls remembering every scream, whisper, or tragedy that’s ever unfolded within.
What fascinates me most is the way horror allows you to explore deep-rooted fears through different lenses. One moment, you are in a suburban neighborhood where things seem normal, until they go wrong. The next, you are wandering through fog-choked moors toward a crumbling estate that feels alive. The flexibility of short horror fiction means you do not need hundreds of pages to unsettle someone; a single well-placed sentence, a twist of imagery, or the slow reveal of something deeply wrong can do the trick. That brevity forces you to be sharp, precise, and atmospheric—every word counts, and every detail needs to serve the chill.
To me, the Gothic setting in particular is ripe with symbolism. The decay of the building often mirrors the decay of the soul or mind. Rain lashes the windows like ghostly fingers trying to get in. Candles flicker in halls where no wind should reach. These are the environments where shadows do not behave quite right, where time feels slowed or twisted. I love tapping into the classic themes of madness, isolation, fear of the dark, haunted objects, etc.—but presenting them in new ways that still honor the roots of the genre.
Writing these stories also feels like being in conversation with the greats—Poe, Lovecraft, Shirley Jackson. (I take great pride in mimicking the Gothic period language for many of my stories.)
Each one of the greats brought their own flavor to horror, and I strive to do the same. Whether it is a haunted diary, a malevolent mirror, or something unspeakable lurking beneath the floorboards, I want to leave readers with that lingering feeling of unease. The kind that stays with you in the quiet moments. The kind that makes you hesitate before turning off the light.
Ultimately, I think short form horror reminds us, in a snapshot version, of the unknown all around us. It plays with our sense of safety and dares us to look closer. And I cannot get enough of it.
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Mark K. McClain is a multi-award-winning author who discovered his love of writing as a pre-teen, inspired by the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, David Eddings, Isaac Asimov, Robert Jordan, Agatha Christie, Stephen King, and many others. His 20-year military career carried him around the globe, experiences that enriched his worldbuilding and grounded his stories in realism.
Beyond fiction, he has published a wide range of outdoor-themed and human-interest articles, from local history features and parenting columns to international pieces written in China and Uganda. He writes fantasy, science fiction, and Gothic horror—and sharing the magic of storytelling remains one of his greatest joys.
Mark makes his home on an island off the coast of Washington State with his life partner, Rochelle, and their beloved furry companions.
I have been writing video games for over a quarter of a century, which, in hindsight, is kind of terrifying. I have seen games go from teams of a dozen being “maybe too big” to working on teams with a thousand developers spread out across a half-dozen countries and an equal number of time zones. I have gone from writing wall-of-text mission briefings because we couldn’t put dialog in the actual gameplay to games where we literally had to write well over a hundred thousand lines of just systemic dialog, never mind the stuff related to the plot and the characters. I have seen game writing grow from a last-minute “oh, the designer will do it in their spare time” afterthought to a distinct role. And I have seen nonsense the likes of which you would not believe, and which I ultimately decided maybe somebody should say something about, to keep it from happening again (and again and again).
The thing I realized is that while there is a ton of advice out there on how to do the actual writing for video games—and don’t get me started on how writing for video games is very, very different than writing for anything else, or we’ll be stuck on that all day—but there was pretty much nothing on how to do the day to day job of being a game writer. There were no classes, there was no formal training, there was no core body of institutional knowledge, and since every studio treated their writers and their writing process differently, that meant that there was no way to learn how to actually function and survive in the role except by marching boldly into a field of rakes and stepping on every single one. Plus, if you changed jobs, you had an all-new set of rakes to play with.
Also, it occurred to me, that if all us game writer types had a playbook to work from, we could then start pushing for good practices from our end. We could explain why game writing needed time in the schedule for iteration and polish, and how to give useful feedback, and all that good stuff that would hopefully prevent some of those age-old mistakes from getting made over and over and over. We could actually make game writing better.
Here’s the thing: Game writing has very much become my calling. When I first stumbled into video games in 1999, I had no idea that it was going to be my life’s work. But somewhere along the way, that’s what happened. I’ve seen the craft germinate and grow and evolve. I’ve been there for the foundation of the first professional organization for game writers, and I’ve done my best to nurture the community and students who are looking to be the next generation. I don’t want my name on anything; I want this form that has defined my professional life to keep improving, and to do anything I can to help create a craft that the next cohort of game writers can pick up and do things I never dreamed of with.
That is why I sat down to write this text book (The Video Game Writer’s Guide To Surviving an Industry That Hates You). I jokingly tell people it took me 25 years to write but six months to type. It’s a joke, but there’s some truth there. This is my thank you to the craft, and to the people who helped me along the way, and maybe a toolkit for those coming after me.
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The author of 8 novels and 2 short story collections, Richard Dansky is widely regarded as a leading expert on video game narrative and writing. He has written for franchises including The Division, Assassins Creed, Far Cry, Splinter Cell, and many others, and was also a key contributor to White Wolf’s classic World of Darkness horror RPG setting. His upcoming projects include the novel Nightmare Logic from Falstaff Dread, the graphic novel Bridgewater from Delcourt, and the nonfiction book The Video Game Writer’s Guide To Surviving an Industry That Hates You. He also likes scotch.
Everyone is a philosopher; this is a core sentiment of mine. Some are certainly more formal and exploratory in their reflection, but we all meet with life’s great abstractions, and we all carry doubt and curiosity. Most of us will, in one way or another, attempt to pin some logic to our grief, purpose to our existence, shape to our sense of self.
The characters in my collection, A Song for Wildcats, pull such introspection to the forefront of their experiences. Each story explores some form of grief, trauma, and intimacy while spanning distinctly different settings, from an Irish peninsula at the height of the Troubles, to the Corsican seafront during the 1968 student revolts. But they also squint through a metaphysical lens, and my characters (like myself) often find themselves fixated on unanswerable questions: What defines love and violence? How far back should blame extend? What’s the essence of self, especially if self is fluid, and how does one hold onto it?
“The Lyrebird’s Bell,” for example, follows the friendship between two young girls in the isolated bush of 1940s Australia. Facing a severe, lonely homelife, each girl crafts stories, often unsettling and fantastic ones, that are somehow more rational and less painful than the truth. As one girl is consumed by these fantasies, the other grows desperate to remain grounded in reality. In doing so, she begins to question what constitutes reality—and as no one person’s reality is definitive, whose versions are worthier, or more valid?
As I wrote the collection, I rediscovered a love of philosophy, particularly the works of Plato. (Even the title A Song for Wildcats is a little wink to Homer’s Iliad—due to what we’ll call an “enthusiasm” for ancient humanism.) It became an obsession—a healthy obsession, I would argue—which drove me to make dramatic shifts in my life. I gradually began to reconfigure my relationship with human interaction, identity, and the world around me—all of which led me wandering quietly through mountains, sitting alone in faraway villages, and more deliberately layering my work with metaphysical questions to which I’ve long been intuitively drawn. If grief does not leave us, when does it become wisdom? Why does suffering lead toward deeper empathy for some, and for others, a desire to harm?
However, I did not want to write a textbook, nor would I condescend to readers by assuming they required easy explanations. Instead, my hope was to offer stories in which the various layers—such as narrative, emotional, symbolic, and philosophical—connect patiently and meaningfully, so that one does not need to research ancient Greek philosophy, or Irish folklore, or twentieth-century existentialism, in order to be impacted by them. My characters are driven by a desire for connection and clarity, and it was important to me that the philosophical lens amplify each story’s heart, not clog it. These stories are my effort to capture, in my own small way, the peculiar human habit of stumbling, unwittingly, into transformation.
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Caitlin Galway’s short story collection A Song for Wildcats has been featured as a must-read by the Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star, and named an Indigo Best Book of 2025. Her debut novel Bonavere Howl was a spring pick by the Globe and Mail, and her work has appeared in journals and anthologies across Canada, including Best Canadian Stories, EVENT, and Gloria Vanderbilt’s Carter V. Cooper Anthology, and on CBC Books.
During the pandemic, I was in a comics writing group. I was convinced we’d all be dead and there would be no more conventions. Conversations turned, as they inevitably do, to the franchises we’d love to take a crack at. I have always encouraged creators to focus on their own ideas more so than other IP, so I dreaded the conversation getting to my turn. And when it did, I began to answer (shocking myself even): it was Dark Shadows.
You see, I’d also been rewatching Dark Shadows (the entire 1225 episode catalogue) during the pandemic. If it was all going to be over, what better family to go out with than the Collins family of Collinsport, Maine? So as I began to answer the IP question, the idea for the story sprang, fully formed, into my mind. That very rarely happens for me as a writer.
No spoilers here, but thematically, inspiration can be found in WE HAVE ALWAYS LIVED IN THE CASTLE by Shirley Jackson.
There’s Truman Capote and Harper Lee and William Faulkner all in there, too, but all good Dark Shadows storylines were based on some classic fiction. So my approach would be Southern Gothic, channeling my own lived experience and my fractured family ties into a story about the Collins family. Why Southern Gothic? It’s hallmarks: dilapidated mansions, deeply flawed humans usually entrapped in a generations-long family feud, and the sinister events which arise from all of the above. If you know Dark Shadows, then you can see the connections.
I do feel connected to Dark Shadows. My mother would race home from school to watch when the show was originally airing. I haven’t spoken to her in almost 15 years, thus this project was an incredibly healing one. I found the resolution I won’t find in this life. I’m at peace with that. We never discussed Dark Shadows when I was a child. I knew she liked it. While we shared a love of the show, what could have perhaps made us closer never did. But in watching the show in its entirety, I felt that I was able to make a relationship with it (the show) separate from her, and also resolve some of our conflict for myself in writing this new chapter of the show.
So here we are, almost three years later from the comics Discord discussion, and the book is coming out soon. There’s a short and sweet story behind my entrance into the officially licensed world of Dark Shadows, but I’ll save that one for another dark and stormy night.
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Craig Hurd-McKenney is a Xeric grant recipient and Ignatz-nominated comic book writer living in Seattle, WA. He has been making comics since 2000. For more information about Craig, please visit: https://www.hspcomix.com/
Answering the question of WHY DO I WRITE? (something I encourage all writers to do), I have concluded that my WHY is this: I write to tell stories about underrepresented people and underrepresented places in a way that is accessible, and hopefully, entertaining.
The underrepresented place I most often write about is Saskatchewan, my home province. The underrepresented people I most often write about are members of the LGBTQ+ community. The combination of the two is, I feel, truly underrepresented and rarely found in Canadian mystery genre material.
As a writer writing about LGBTQ+ characters, I have on occasion encountered people, usually interviewers or reviewers understandably looking for an angle, decide that I am the spokesperson for that community. They are mistaken. I am one person, one voice. Deciding I am the spokesperson for the LGBTQ+ community is like a Martian, freshly landed on earth, deciding I am the spokesperson for all humans.
That being said, as a mystery writer who is a member of, and advocate for, the LGBTQ+ community, my hope is that my singular voice, my presence and representation in the publishing industry, encourages more voices to speak out and helps to move the community out of the category of being underrepresented.
Even so, I have found you cannot please everyone, outside or even inside your own community.
I was fortunate to find a publisher for my first book without agent representation. I was about 4-5 books into my first mystery series when I received a letter from a graduate student completing his Master’s thesis at Carleton University. I was quite surprised—and I must admit, rather flattered—to learn that the subject of his thesis was my Russell Quant series.
He sent me a copy of the abstract which, in part, read…now, keep in mind the series has a main character who is gay:
“With Russell Quant, Bidulka has shifted the originally well-defined, straight-forward, stolidly masculine identity of the hard boiled, urban crime-fighting hero to a marginal landscape, where subversion, introspection, and humour reign.
“In this paper, I contend that Bidulka’s writing queers not only for the detective fiction genre, but also the regional landscape that his imagined communities inhabit, and myths of Canadian nationhood that bind them.”
Making no claim of being a great academic or literary scholar, I readily admit I didn’t really understand most of the abstract’s claims—but it sounded pretty good.
Some months later, this same grad student sent me a copy of his now published thesis. Once again, this was a high-minded, rather lengthy, scholarly document, but I was smart enough to recognize that in slow methodical fashion this student had deconstructed every book in the series and then completely tore them to shreds for:
“carelessly giving voice to the “homonormalization of the entire lesbian and gay community in Canada today.”
So, yup, if you were wondering, that was me. I did that to the entire LGBTQ+ community in Canada.
Lesson learned. You can’t please everyone all of the time. But—and here’s where light comes from dark—about a year later, this same graduate student was delivering his paper at a conference in California. In the audience that day was another gentleman who, for some inexplicable reason, after hearing the same conclusion noted above, felt compelled to read my books. And today, that gentleman is my literary agent.
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Anthony Bidulka’s books have been shortlisted for Crime Writers of Canada Awards of Excellence, Saskatchewan Book Awards, a ReLit award, and Lambda Literary Awards. Flight of Aquavit was awarded the Lambda Literary Award for Best Men’s Mystery, making Bidulka the first Canadian to win in that category. In 2023, in addition to being shortlisted for a Saskatchewan Book Award and Alberta Book Publishing Award, Going to Beautiful won an Independent Publisher Book Award being named Gold Medalist as the 2023 Canada West Best Overall Fiction novel and was awarded the Crime Writers of Canada Award of Excellence as Canada’s Best Crime Novel for 2023. https://anthonybidulka.com/
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 multiple Hugo Awards. 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.
