Stories Behind the Stories – Author Suzanne Church

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The Final Story “Soul-Hungry”

Below, dear reader, please find bonus content for Suzanne’s book: ELEMENTS: A Collection of Speculative Fiction.

This series of posts provides stories-behind-the-stories for each tale in ELEMENTS.

The last story in the Table of Contents is: Soul-Hungry

The last story in ELEMENTS was written specifically for the collection.

Near the beginning of January of 2013, my publisher sent me three different cover art possibilities for the collection. I studied them carefully, but none of them spoke to me. I selected the one that I felt was the best of the three. He agreed that my choice was adequate and he also felt somewhat uninspired.

Fast forward to January 30th when he sent me an email that read…

I was not happy with the way the cover design was heading, so I’ve switched things up. What do you think of this cover mockup?

For the other cover options I had sent emails to my “peeps” asking them which cover they liked. But for THIS cover by Neil Jackson I immediately responded…

I love this cover. The font, the shadows in the background, all of it!

And so, the cover of ELEMENTS was chosen. Release the doves!

From the moment that I saw the cover, I was inspired to write a story. At that point in the editorial process, we had pretty much decided on the stories and the order they would appear in the collection, except for one story that we were debating replacing.

So I suggested that I write a story based on the cover. The publisher agreed.

On the 13th of February I sent him Soul-Hungry and after a minor edit, it became the last story in the collection.

Fun Fact

I’ve always loved the word “posse” which I believe resonates more than words like “friends” or “peeps” and I tend to use it liberally in conversation.

I’d already submitted the Acknowledgements page before I even considered writing Soul-Hungry. In retrospect, I’m glad that I had thanked Sandra Kasturi and Marcy Italiano as my “girl-posse” because after writing Soul-Hungry, the term had that much more meaning to me.

It really does take a posse to put a book together. I can’t possibly list everyone here, but the people who come to mind first are:

My publisher at EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing: Brian Hades. And the rest of the remarkable people at EDGE including Ella Beaumont, Aviva Bel’Harold, Anita Hades, and Janice Shoults. And a big WOW to Neil Jackson for the fantastic cover.

My DC2K writers’ group: Eugie Foster, Lisa Guilfoil, Scott Hancock, Amy Herring, Teresa Howard, Alan Koslow, Aaron Longoria, Jenna Lundeen, Linda Pickett, Gwen Veazey, and Debbie Yutko.

My Stop-Watch Gang writers’ group: Richard Baldwin, Bard Carson, Costi Gurgu, Ian Donald Keeling, Stephen Kotowych, Tony Pi, Mike Rimar, and Pippa Wysong.

My Writing in the ‘Loo writers’ group: Suzanne Carter, Stella Congi, Rick Hipson, Marcy Italiano, Danielle Lowry, Nick Matthews, Sarah Tolmie, and Catherine Warren.

The authors who graciously read early ARCs of ELEMENTS and “blurbed” the collection: Kelley Armstrong, Ed Greenwood, Kij Johnson, Nancy Kilpatrick, David Morrell, and Robert J. Sawyer.

Fellow EDGE author Michael J. Martineck who’s generously donated his time and expertise to help organize the best double-book-launch of all time at Ad Astra this coming April 5th.

The group of attendees at the Clarion South 2005 workshop in Brisbane, Australia, and especially tutors Ellen Datlow, Ian Irvine, Margo Lanagan, Michael Swanwick, Scott Westerfeld, and Sean Williams.

The 2004 group of attendees at the two-week short fiction workshop at the Center for the Study of Science Fiction, and especially teachers James Gunn, Kij Johnson, and Chris McKitterick.

My friends and family…you know who you are!

Cue the curtain and turn up the house lights. That’s a wrap.

And so ends the month-long adventure of blogging the stories behind the stories in ELEMENTS. I hope that you — dear readers — enjoy reading them as much as I enjoy sharing this journey.

See you on the book tour.

ELEMENTS: A Collection of Speculative Fiction is available in Canada and the USA from EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing.

ELEMENTS of Me in “Muffy and the Belfry”

Elements LJ size Below, dear reader, please find bonus content for Suzanne’s book: ELEMENTS: A Collection of Speculative Fiction.

This series of posts provides stories-behind-the-stories for each tale in ELEMENTS.

Sitting in the 20th slot in the Table of Contents is: Muffy and the Belfry

I’ve written several stories about ghosts. Probably because I believe in ghosts.

Most writers include ELEMENTS of themselves in their stories. It’s part of how we speak our truths. How fitting that this story, new to the collection, has so many pieces of the young version of Suzanne.

Christmas Suzanne 1974 mini The young protagonist in Muffy and the Belfrynbsp; is named “Penny.” (For those of you who think I named her after the character in the television show Big Bang Theory you’re wrong.) I chose her name because of the ways that Russell-the-bully teases her.

Penny is built of many pieces of me, including…

She anthropomorphises her stuffed animals, as I do to this very day.

Elise and Suzanne Christmas 1974 mini She lives in an apartment above a store, as I did growing up.Her mom works long hours and comes home hungry and weary, so Penny has dinner on the table for her when she arrives.

She’s afraid of the dark. Like most kids, I was also terrified of the dark, especially if I woke up when my mom and sister were asleep.

And because it’s fun to humiliate ourselves online, here are a couple of photos from Christmas in 1974. My older sister and I are wearing our special holiday outfits that our mother sewed for us.

Fun Fact

The creepy skylight in Muffy and the Belfry was a real part of my life.

From when I was three until I was about thirteen, we lived in an apartment above a store on Pape Avenue in Toronto. The creepy skylight was in the bathroom.

Many, many times while sitting in that room, I would look up and see …

…four crinkly glass panes shaped like triangles. A big crack zigzags along the one closest to me. The black wood posts holding it together meet at a point and an old piece of rope with a knot at the end hangs down from the center. A bunch of spider webs cling to the knot, and on windy nights, like tonight, it sways back and forth.

Boo Bear mini That description is from memory. I don’t have any pictures of the skylight, and I haven’t seen it in over thirty years. But I swear it looked just like that description and used to scare the bejeebers out of me at night.

I spent a long time this morning trying to find a picture of a skylight that comes close. I came up empty. Sure, there are photos of skylights online, but none of them looked creepy enough. They were all very pedestrian.

Instead, I give you one of the many stuffed bears from my collection. His name is Boo Bear or Boo for short. Because, hey, he’s blue. He was a gift from a high school friend. To use a stuffed animal term, he’s “well loved” AKA old-and-scruffy, just like Muffy in the story.

ELEMENTS: A Collection of Speculative Fiction is available in Canada and the USA from EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing.

Exploring Gender Issues in “The Flower Gathering”

Elements LJ size Below, dear reader, please find bonus content for Suzanne’s book: ELEMENTS: A Collection of Speculative Fiction.

This series of posts provides stories-behind-the-stories for each tale in ELEMENTS.

Sitting in the 19th slot in the Table of Contents is: The Flower Gathering

As a woman writing genre fiction, I’ve heard the “equality” debates and “gender” discussions enough to understand my position in the mix.

I’m a woman. (go figure)

I write Fantasy (so do plenty of other women). I also write Science Fiction and Horror. So do…oh, wait a minute.

tiptreeaward Search on “gender” on any speculative fiction blog/website and you’ll have plenty of reading material. There’s so much dialogue on the topic that there’s even an award specifically designed to initiate the gender conversation in speculative fiction.

From the Wikipedia entry,

The James Tiptree, Jr. Award is an annual literary prize for works of science fiction or fantasy that expand or explore one’s understanding of gender.

I wrote The Flower Gathering as a way of exploring the gender topic. I wanted to ask the question, “What if a colony was designed, populated, and governed entirely by women?”

Tecmessa is the Prime Minister of the Pyleia colony on Titan. She describes the colony’s origins in her own words:

On Titan, our settlement, named after the Greek Amazon Telepyleia, had been populated only with women. To escape the war-ravaged turmoil of Earth, our foremothers organized the evacuation, built the transport ships, and gathered supplies, all with minimal male assistance. Radical lesbians, the original colonists believed men were a threat to a sustainable civilization. They sought a place to build a new culture.

All sociological arguments aside, a single-gender population can’t biologically sustain itself. So the colonists in my story had to build rules to be able to procreate and sustain their population.

carnation The Flower Gathering takes place more than a generation after the fictional colony is established. The frozen sperm samples show signs of deterioration and need to be replenished with carefully bred donors.

But if they allow men to be born into their population, they need to ensure that they will always remain a minority in the population, so they pass the “law of the fourths.”

All pregnancies occur via in vitro fertilization, selectively breeding girls. If a woman wants to bear a son, she can only choose a male embryo after she’s successfully delivered three healthy girls.

Fun Fact

With a title like, The Flower Gathering several types of flowers are mentioned in the story.

fabric carnation I garden. I wouldn’t say I’m good — more like competent. This story provided an opportunity for me to share my love of flowers and the feeling I get when something I’ve planted and nurtured blossoms. I haven’t had much success with carnations, but they are one of my favourite flowers.

Since the story takes place inside a domed colony on Titan, I had to be careful about what plants the colonists would have brought with them and what they would spend valuable resources growing and nurturing. They wouldn’t bother with ornamental plants like roses and carnations, so Tecmessa has to create her own carnations with fabric scraps and glue.

220px-Okie_0102 The colonists would need to eat, so they’d bring harvest seeds. But what about coffee?

Coffee is too hard to grow in a domed environment, but I wanted the characters to have a tolerable substitute. After some research, I discovered that okra is easier to grow and you can roast its seeds as a coffee substitute AND eat it as a nutritious vegetable.

The blooms, seen in this photo, are white with a dark center.

ELEMENTS: A Collection of Speculative Fiction is available in Canada and the USA from EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing.

The Origins of Rentiniapox

Elements LJ size Below, dear reader, please find bonus content for Suzanne’s book: ELEMENTS: A Collection of Speculative Fiction.

This series of posts provides stories-behind-the-stories for each tale in ELEMENTS.

Sitting in the 18th slot in the Table of Contents is: The Needle’s Eye, winner of the Aurora Award for Short Fiction (English) in 2012.

I became fascinated by the global effort to eradicate Smallpox from Earth after reading Scourge: The Once and Future Threat of Smallpox. That research inspired me to write a story where scientists used components of the Smallpox virus to generate a biological weapon that caused blindness.

And so Retiniapox was born.

I’m still not certain if scientists have made the right decision to maintain Smallpox samples at various Biosafety Level 4 Laboratories. But if I spend too much time thinking about BSL4 protocols, I’ll never sleep again.

Originally published in Chilling Tales: Evil Did I Dwell; Lewd I Did Live, The Needle’s Eye imagines a world where a genetically engineered virus has been used in a Middle Eastern skirmish…

A biological weapon of war, the virus had been designed to blind its victims, rendering an opposing army helpless. Nature, in its random cruelty had mutated the pathogen to a deadly cousin of Smallpox since its introduction in the battle of Baqa el Gharbiyye.

I don’t come right out and name the medical organization that Lise and Rideau work for in the story, but in my mind they work for Medecins Sans Frontiers / Doctors Without Borders (MSF/DWB).

MSF/DWB does great work. If you’re searching for place to share your charity cash, check out their site to learn about the countries where they’ve made a difference.

MSF/DWB was established by a group of French Doctors and their French name is always listed before their English name. That’s why I decided to make my two protagonists Francophone doctors from Montréal.

Fun Fact

The Needle’s Eye plays homage to my paternal grandparents (who were Francophone) and my maternal grandparents (who were blind).

Nanny and G Tommy mini My paternal grandmother Dorothy and her second partner Tommy were both Francophone (one from Quebec and the other from Northern Ontario). I have many fond memories of hearing them speak French whenever they didn’t want us grandkids to understand what they were talking about.

I still remember one time, right around my 10th birthday, when I heard them say a word that sounded like either “cadeau” (present) or “gateau” (cake).

I piped up and said, “Hey! You guys are talking about my birthday, aren’t you?”

They looked at each other in frustration and then laughed.

Rea and Ella Wedding mini My maternal grandparents (Rea and Ella Beacock) were both blind. They met at the Ontario School for the Blind (now called the W. Ross Macdonald School). At that time (late 1920s) the students were not permitted to fraternize since back then, two blind people were considered to be “incapable” of looking after children. They snuck around, as teenagers will do, and their clandestine tomfoolery blossomed into marriage.

Ella was an accomplished pianist. When she passed away, Rea established a memorial fund to help pay to have sheet music translated into Braille. While the fund has moved around, it’s currently housed at the Glenn Gould School, Royal Conservatory of Music, Toronto.

Read more about the Rea and Ella Beacock Memorial Fund (scroll down to page 6), another good place to share your charity cash.

ELEMENTS: A Collection of Speculative Fiction is available in Canada and the USA from EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing.

Setting “Mod Me Down” in New York City

“Mod Me Down”

Elements LJ size Below, dear reader, please find bonus content for Suzanne’s book: ELEMENTS: A Collection of Speculative Fiction.

This series of posts provides stories-behind-the-stories for each tale in ELEMENTS.

Sitting in the 17th slot in the Table of Contents is: Mod Me Down

Mod Me Down is a new story, published for the first time in ELEMENTS.

I wrote the original zero draft of this story for week two of Clarion South in January of 2005. Although the central idea of the story has remained, pretty much all of the story has been trashed, rewritten, then trashed and rewritten some more.

Here’s a tip, new writers out there…ideas are worth overhauling until you get them right.

Mod Me Down takes place in New York City, one of those quintessential locations in North American culture that has to be experienced firsthand. I’ve been lucky enough to visit NYC twice.

Duckie contemplates Liberty mini On my first visit to the big apple, my then-husband and I spent a whirlwind weekend in Manhattan. I’m a super-sightseer (and so is he) so we maximized our time and saw so many locations I can’t remember them all, but many of the scenes in Mod Me Down are drawn from that trip, including our afternoon in Battery Park.

Duckie at the NYC library mini My absolute favourite site was the reading room at the NYC Public Library.

Our kids were pretty young while we were travelling. One of our family traditions was to take pictures of a carefully selected family stuffy as evidence that Mom and Dad (and the stuffy) were having fun on our trip.

For the NYC trip, Duckie tagged along. In this photo evidence, Duckie contemplates the meaning of freedom by gazing at the Statue of Liberty from Battery Park and then lies on a table at the library, awed by the size and scope of the place.

Fun Fact

The first time I ever ate a knish was on my first trip to NYC. I loved them so much that I had to have Lucas eat a knish in Mod Me Down . While I’ve come across knishes in Toronto, I’ve never had one as good or as memorable as that first one in NYC. In Lucas’s words…

Outside, I ripped soft chunks of onion-and-spinach-flavored potato from a knish and shoved them in my mouth. The taste spoke of heaven and earth united.

The irony is that since that trip, I’ve developed a digestive disorder, and I can no longer eat spinach or onions. So no more of that flavor of knish for me. 🙁

But sitting here at my desk, thinking about that knish, my mouth is really watering. Man, I ‘d love to eat one right now.

ELEMENTS: A Collection of Speculative Fiction is available in Canada and the USA from EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing.

Hell’s About the Details

Elements LJ size Below, dear reader, please find bonus content for Suzanne’s book: ELEMENTS: A Collection of Speculative Fiction.

This series of posts provides stories-behind-the-stories for each tale in ELEMENTS.

Sitting in the 16th slot in the Table of Contents is: Hell’s Deadline

Albert Einstein said:

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

I definitely agree with Einstein on this one.

I’ve been caught in the spiral of obsessing over something over and over and not getting anywhere. We all have. So much so that the notion of endless repetition became the plot of the Bill Murray 1993 classic movie Groundhog Day.

I wanted to explore the frustration of endless repetition in a short story. Around the same time that I was noodling the plot, Book of Dead Things put out a call out for submissions.

Perfect timing!

Re-imagining Groundhog Day in HELL gave me the opportunity to write about Dead Things — dead people damned to hell — and the idea that eternal damnation involved reliving the moment of choice over and over again.

You know the choice I mean.

The choice that condemns your soul. That one decision that pushes your name from Santa’s good list to his naughty list.

To quote the protagonist, Debbie:

Hell’s all about the details.

Book of Dead Things launched at World Horror Convention in 2007, the year that Toronto hosted the con. So I was lucky enough to participate in the launch, where I read a short excerpt of Hell’s Deadline.

I stuck around after our launch and was fortunate to hear Ramsey Campbell followed by Joe R. Lansdale read their fiction. (Or maybe it was the other way around, I can’t recall.)

Even though I’d read their fiction before, their readings turned me into fans that day.

Fun Fact
In Hell’s Deadline Debbie walks along a wooded trail through…

…the pine stands. Towering poles grow straight toward the reddish sky, planted in endless rows.

Fact: Close to where I live, there’s a section of The Walter Bean Grand River Trail. I’ve spent countless hours biking, running, and walking along the trail.

One stretch winds past pine stands. And the trees really do grow in perfect rows.

Once the snow melts, I’ll bike the trail and take a photo to add here.

ELEMENTS: A Collection of Speculative Fiction is available in Canada and the USA from EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing.

Giving “The Tear Closet” a Second Chance

Elements LJ size Below, dear reader, please find bonus content for Suzanne’s book: ELEMENTS: A Collection of Speculative Fiction.

This series of posts provides stories-behind-the-stories for each tale in ELEMENTS.

Sitting in the 15th slot in the Table of Contents is: The Tear Closet

Of all of the stories in ELEMENTS, I would have to say that The Tear Closet speaks closest to my heart’s truth. It is also one of the stories that helped me to truly break out as a writer.

This story marked my first appearance in the Tesseracts anthologies, an annual series of Canadian speculative fiction published by EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing. And two writers that I truly respect — Nancy Kilpatrick and David Morrell — edited Tesseracts Thirteen. I’m grateful for their support for this story, as well as their ongoing kindnesses. Both Nancy and David read an Advance Reader Copy (ARC) of ELEMENTS and provided generous quotes for the book.

After I submitted to T13 and was waiting to hear back from the editors, my friend and fellow writer Louise Herring-Jones took David Morrell’s writing workshop, which was offered right before World Fantasy Convention (WFC) began in Calgary, Alberta in 2008.

Before I arrived at the con, Louise emailed me to say that David Morrell liked my story, but didn’t think the ending worked in its current state.

Once I arrived at WFC, I approached David Morrell and asked about the story. Over lunch we discussed Tear Closet and brainstormed possible endings.

I cannot thank David Morrell enough for (a) generously sharing his time to brainstorm the ending (b) giving the story a second chance and (c) being so supportive of my career since then.

Thanks also to Louise Herring-Jones for chatting me up with her instructor. She’s always been (and continues to be) an ardent supporter of my work!

Fun Fact
In the story, Mabel walks over a long bridge.

Bridges and Structures Morrison Hershfield Fact: the bridge in the story is the real-life Leaside Bridge in Toronto’s East York. The bridge has six lanes of traffic and passes over the Don River, the Don Valley, and the Don Valley Parkway, and this photo doesn’t really do it justice.

When I was a kid, we used to have to make the ten+ minute walk over this bridge to get to the shopping mall nearest to where we lived. We would often stop partway along and look down…way, way down…at the river and valley and cars below. And let me tell you, it’s a looong way down.

I’m also reasonably certain that the Leaside Bridge is the main reason why my mother and I are both afraid of heights.

As a kid, during the whole trip across I’d imagine all of the ways that the bridge could fail: earthquake, tidal wave, explosives, car crashes — growing up during an era when disaster movies about earthquakes and tidal waves were popular is probably partly to blame for this doom-agination.

I used to count to sixty in my head, trying to guess how many more minutes before I’d safely make it to land on the other side. And with my heart pumping in terror, I had to be careful not to trip and end up getting run over by a car racing along the bridge (which in retrospect was much more likely than the bridge collapsing from an earthquake).

ELEMENTS: A Collection of Speculative Fiction is available in Canada and the USA from EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing.

Meeting the Gray Lady

Elements LJ size Below, dear reader, please find bonus content for Suzanne’s book: ELEMENTS: A Collection of Speculative Fiction.

This series of posts provides stories-behind-the-stories for each tale in ELEMENTS.

Sitting in the 14th slot in the Table of Contents is: Gray Love

From 2000 to 2006, I was part-owner of a cottage on Lake Muskoka, about two hours north of Toronto.

Our cottage (which was actually more of a house) was situated on the same bay–Muskoka Bay–as the empty former residential facility for people with developmental challenges. This institution was run by the Ontario government from 1963 to 1994. The grounds were first developed in the 1890s as a tuberculosis treatment sanitorium.

The original sanitorium grounds were so extensive that they used to have a second lodge to accommodate visiting friends and family. The lodge land was purchased and developed by our neighbours, who built their home on the former lodge site. gazebo on Muskoka Lake The original gazebo for the lodge was on our property. Here’s a photo of the gazebo in the early 2000s.

I used to run along the county road that connects the sanitorium to the town of Gravenhurst, and I set Gray Love on that road. On one brutally hot and humid day, I saw a woman during my run. She looked totally gray and washed out. She didn’t speak or interact with me, she simply stayed across the road from me and smiled.

Maybe I was suffering from a mild case of heatstroke, but that woman looked really wrong to me. By the time I was back at the cottage, I’d convinced myself that I’d seen a ghost from the facility. And even though the Gray Lady in Gray Love isn’t a ghost, her creation was a direct result of my run that day.

Fun Fact

I read Gray Love for my first public reading. I remember feeling a combination of thrilled and terrified.

The reading took place near the end of my Clarion South 2005 trip to Brisbane, Australia. As a result, the majority of the audience members were my classmates, and I seem to recall that we were all pretty worn out by then. My audience first reading I was so keen to record the experience that I took this photo of my first audience!

Our week six tutor, Scott Westerfeld and his wife Justine Larbalestier each read their fiction at the same event. They’re both in the front row in the audience photo, along with classmate Ellen Klages and conveners Kate Eltham and Robert Hoge. Look for Robert’s book Ugly: My Memoir. I found it fascinating and inspiring.

ELEMENTS: A Collection of Speculative Fiction is available in Canada the USA from EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing.

Tattoo Research Goes a Long Way

Elements LJ size Below, dear reader, please find bonus content for Suzanne’s book: ELEMENTS: A Collection of Speculative Fiction.

This series of posts provides stories-behind-the-stories for each tale in ELEMENTS.

Sitting in the 13th slot in the Table of Contents is: Tattoo Ink

From January 2 to February 12 2005, I attended Clarion South in Brisbane, Australia. What an adventure! I certainly learned more about writing and editing in those six weeks than I had learned up until that point in my writing career.

One of my classmates, Shane Jiraiya Cummings and Angela Challis edited the innovative charity anthology Shadow Box. The project was described as, “a fusion of dark art and flash fiction lashed together with multimedia nastiness.” With 70 stories, creepy music, and twisted artwork, the anthology arrived on a CD and was well worth the money.

sboxcover I looked through my old emails and couldn’t recall the tight word-count guidelines for submissions, but I believe the maximum was 125 words.

Not very many words at all!

I was delighted to learn that Tattoo Ink would be included in the project.

On some level, I believe that my research into the tattoo arts not only inspired this tale, but also the rules for tattooing the population in Destiny Lives in the Tattoo’s Needle.

Fun Fact

I began blogging after my two-week writing workshop at the Center for the Study of Sciece Fiction in Kansas in the summer of 2004. Lucky for me, I was comfortable enough with blogging that I was able to blog during my Clarion South trip.

And although Clarion is one of those experiences you can only have once, my thoughts and insights will exist online as long as LiveJournal stays in business.

While some of the links might no longer be active, you can still read my Clarion South adventures on LiveJournal.

ELEMENTS: A Collection of Speculative Fiction is available in Canada and the USA from EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing.

The Inspiration for “Synch Me, Kiss Me, Drop”

Elements LJ size Below, dear reader, please find bonus content for Suzanne’s book: ELEMENTS: A Collection of Speculative Fiction.

This series of posts provides stories-behind-the-stories for each tale in ELEMENTS.

Sitting in the 12th slot in the Table of Contents is: Synch Me, Kiss Me, Drop

The music-snorting dance-club hopping story, Synch Me, Kiss Me, Drop was probably born during my university work-terms in the 80s, when I used to frequent clubs like RPM and The Copa in Toronto.

Synch Me is still available to read online at cw_68 Clarkesworld, and is also available as a podcast on their site.

Like “Destiny Lives in the Tattoo’s Needle”, Synch Me was a finalist for an Aurora Award (in 2013).

I love music. We’re talking a serious obsession here.

When I write, I listen to music. I’m much more productive with music playing. And on the days that I forget my headphones, I’m somewhat cranky by the end of a writing session at a cafe.

When I participate in NaNoWriMo I create a special playlist for that new novel. Whenever I go back to edit the novel, or submit queries to agents and/or editors, I usually play the tunes I selected for that novel’s creation.

I always drive with tunes in the car. And whenever I’m a passenger in someone else’s car, and I they won’t offer me the controls to song-selection…well let’s just say everyone is happier if Suzanne is allowed to play DJ.

I was destined to write a story inspired by music.

My two sons listen to two types of Electronic Dance Music (EDM): Dubstep and House music. They both attended The Veld music festival in 2012 and 2013.

And since EDM is tech-savvy, I was inspired to write a cyberpunk story where people can snort music directly into their minds like a drug.

The better clubs brought all the vibes together, so that every song you sampled was in perfect synch with the club mix on the speakers. When the drop hit, everyone jumped and screamed in coordinated rapture.

If not for my kids’ enthusiasm for EDM (as well as their explanation of “the drop”), I never would’ve written Synch Me.

Fun Fact

At one point in Synch Me, Alex is trying to decide which song to purchase.

Three tables were set with products in stacks like poker chips. The first was a sea of purple, tiny lower-case “i’s” stamped on every top-forty sample like a catalog from a so-called genius begging on a street corner for spare music. The second was a mish-mash of undergrounds like Skarface, Audexi, and Brachto.

In an earlier draft of the story, I’d written totally different names for the three underground artists. When my older son read it, he said, “Mom, the names for the bands kinda suck. How about I make up some names?”

He made up the artist names: Skarface, Audexi, and Brachto.

Thanks, Joseph!

ELEMENTS: A Collection of Speculative Fiction is available in Canada and the USA from EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing.