I am an author, award winning editor, award nominated RPG writer and small press publisher who should probably sleep more than she does. I’ve been a full time freelance writer for 3.5 years and have never worked harder in my life. I can’t decide if I want to be Neil Gaiman and Stephen King’s unholy literary love child or a clone of anthologist editor Ellen Datlow. I’m married, have three cats and over one thousand books. In general, I consider myself a wordslinger and an optimist—which you kind of have to be in the publishing industry.
How long have you been writing/editing and how did you get to this point in your career?
I have been writing since the early 1990s and have been a professional author and editor since the year 2000. To get to this point in my career, I took a leap of faith in November 2006, quit my tech job and spent a year “just writing.” During that year, I met up with a freelance tech writer who got me an “in” at a big corporation who uses freelance tech writers all the time. I learned how to do that on the fly while I wrote more than 330,000 words of fiction that year—half of which was published in the following year.
The editing came later when I had the idea for my award winning anthology Grant Pass (Aug 2009, Morrigan Books). Turns out I had a knack for editing as well as writing and many projects came along for the ride. Now, I split my time between all of my loves: writing, editing, and publishing. I’m a bit like a Swiss Army knife in the publishing industry.
You have a new anthology out, Close Encounters of the Urban Kind. Tell me what inspired you to put this together?
In June 2010, I have a horror collection, called In a Gilded Light, coming out from Dark Quest Books. It is a collection of horror and supernatural vignettes. One of those vignettes is called Snipe Hunting. I had a “what if” thought wondering what would happen if someone sent a city boy on a hunt for a snipe… and he found one… and it turned out to be an alien? It got me to thinking about how urban legends would change if there was an alien encounter component to the story. I chatted with the idea with Apex Publications owner, Jason Sizemore, and he liked what he heard.
I have a keen interest in dark fiction. Tell me how you would classify this collection and what’s dark about it?
I don’t think you have any worries with Close Encounters of the Urban Kind being dark fiction. It very clearly is. There’s a lot of scary urban legends investigated with an even darker element of the alien encounter. While I do have a couple of nicer stories in the anthology, that is just to bring the reader up towards the light a little before I plunge them back down into the dark. There is a high body count, several stories that I wouldn’t read at night and, did I mention the alien clowns? Seriously. Evil alien clown.
You are exploring urban legends in this in addition to alien encounters. Give us a hint as to some of the more popular urban legends you explored.
The biggest thing I wanted to bring forth was that when urban legends or aliens are concerned, there is no safe haven. The most popular urban legends in the book are the ones that deal with people being chased in their car of having something evil in the car with them: the ax murderer in the backseat, the gang initiation, the mysterious black SUV chasing you, being kidnapped in your car and running over something living. People spend a lot of time in their cars and feel very safe there. I liked the idea of removing the car as a safe haven. Other urban legends involved strangers in the house or breaking into the house— again destroying the safe haven.
Was this a particularly difficult anthology to edit?
Honestly, no. It wasn’t. Not once I figured out two things about the overall arcing themes of the anthology. First, every story had to be about or start with an encounter. There are no prior relationships between the human encountering the alien in the setting of the urban legend. Then, as most urban legends grow from mere encounters to full stories of why the ax murderer was in the backseat, I turned reading the anthology into a journey. The beginning stories have no explanation at all. The middle ones have some explanations. The ending stories give a lot of detail on why things are happening.
The hardest part about editing this anthology was rejecting certain stories—not because they weren’t good—but because they did not fit the encounter theme of the anthology. I sent a couple of those stories up the line to Jason who published them in the April 2010 companion issue of Apex Magazine.
This blog is called Random Musings, so give me a random quote from the book – something you’re particularly fond of.
This quote comes from Jennifer Pelland’s story, The Invitation, and it has stuck with me ever since I read it.
"Everything comes from something, Daniel. Urban legends come from folklore and myths that were once born in truth." She stabbed at her floral flannelled chest, her expression pleading. "I've merely made the connections. Why can't it be everyone else who is wrong?"
Sometimes, the craziest people among us are the ones that know what’s really going on.
What can we expect from you next?
Quite a lot actually. This is a big publication year for me.
May 2010 – Shanghai Vampocalypse – Published by Savage Mojo, this is an RPG book using the Savage Worlds rules. The year is 2048 and high tech Shanghai is about to meet a supernatural monster of its own creation. If one vampire is a monster, eight million is an apocalypse.
May 2010 – The Little Finance Book That Could – Published by Lean Marketing Press, this is an autobiographical book on what I did to get out of debt and stay out of debt. It has my ten rules for getting out of debt and five principles of financial responsibility.
June 2010 – In a Gilded Light: 105 Tales of the Macabre – Published by Dark Quest Books, this is a horror collection of stories from me where I take common events and twist them into something dark and horrible. There is a high body count and most of the people I kill off are my friends. Every reviewer has admitted to nightmares or uneasy sleep after reading this collection.
September 2010 – Beauty Has Her Way – Published by Dark Quest Books, this is my next anthology. It is about women across the ages using all of their assets to get what they want. This is not a heroine’s book unless she knows how to do bad in the name of good. Beauty will have her way…even if she has to get down and dirty to do it.
Where can we find you on the internet? Blog? Twitter? Web site? Book trailer?
I live online. 100% of my work is due to the internet. You can find my portal at www.jenniferbrozek.com. I blog over at Livejournal and I twitter under the name JenniferBrozek. Finally, I am on Facebook as an individual and I have a fan page. Feel free to add me to your FB, LJ, Twitter feeds.
Any final comments or thoughts you’d like to convey that you haven’t covered?
I am a big supporter of small presses. Every company I mentioned is a small press and I publish my small press magazine, The Edge of Propinquity. I would like to encourage everyone to support their small presses, the people who work there and the authors they publish. Our supporters and our readers really are a deciding factor in whether or not we eat, pay bills and can afford to go to conventions. Please think of your small presses when you go looking for something new to read. We do appreciate it.
Jennifer, you do, indeed, have a busy publishing year ahead of you and I agree about small presses. Everyone should support them. Thank you very much for taking the time to answer these questions, I really appreciate it, and I certainly hope I can have you back for future works! I want to know what else you plan on dreaming up!
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