From Krylyr:

1) Your webzine, Coyote Wild, lauched earlier this year. It's featured some amazing stories from people like Elizabeth Bear, Sherwood Smith, Jennifer Pelland, Yoon Ha Lee, Emily Mah, B. Gordon, and my personal favorite: Chris Azure. What made you decide to start up a magazine and were/are you intimidated by other online markets?

Honestly, it was sort of one of those drunken late-night bright ideas. "Hey! Let's start an e-zine!"

I read a lot of the online markets, and love the idea of electronic publishing, in terms of what it can do to enhance storytelling, poetry, and nonfiction. As I get more comfortable with the coding, I'm hoping to be able to do more experimenting with the format, as well, to explore some of the possibilities of a digital medium.

I'm not intimidated by the other online markets, mostly because I don't see us being in competition with each other. Coyote Wild isn't a David, looking to bring down Goliath (Or Strange Horizons, or Abyss and Apex, or IGMS, or Helix, or . . .) And we're not really playing in the same ballpark, in terms of payscale or clicks, for that matter.

I love that really good stories can be free, and authors can still get paid. It seems intimately close to the tradition of singing for one's supper, I suppose -- and everyone wins. If you read a story you really love for free, and then see a book with that writer's name on it, you're more likely to buy the book.

My goals for the first year were pretty simple: Publish on time, increase readership with every issue, pay writers for their words. So far, so good.

2) How has being the senior editor at Coyote Wild changed you as a writer?

I have a new appreciation for what loses the reader inside the first paragraph, and what makes a story compelling enough that you keep reading even if you're not lovin' the prose or the premise. I understand gotta better than I ever did. Understanding it, unfortunately, isn't quite the same as applying it . . .

3) This year, you're going back to Viable Paradise as staff. If you were at Viable Paradise as an instructor, what course would you teach?

Wow. That's an awfully hard one.

The best fit, I think, would be something about diction and tone in revisions, and bringing our words into a frame where they all pull the direction the story goes, instead of letting them have their way with us.

4) Which writer do you feel like has had the most influence on you? Is it the same one who you'd most like to be associated with? (If there's a particular editor you'd like to be associated with, you can do that, too.)

A ton of writers have had an enormous influence on me. Ursula Le Guin. Connie Willis. Stephen King. Samuel Clemens. Virginia Woolf. I could sort of go on at length, actually.

As to who I'd most like to be associated with? Hmm. I don't know, honestly. That's another really hard question. This is going to sound sort of hokey, I'm afraid -- but I think I most want to be associated with my fellow-VPXers. There are some amazing writers in our class, and I very much look forward to a day ten or fifteen years from now when we're still running into each other at cons, and signing books, or talking about each others stories we just read.

I have enormous respect and appreciation for editors. Ellen Datlow, TNH and PNH, Gardner Dozois...

5) The movie of your life is being made, complete with your dream cast. Who plays you, and four of your closest friends (and/or VP alums)?

Bwahahhahah! Let's make a VPX movie, instead. Okay, cast list (hardly cutting edge, because I'm at least ten years behind in my movie-watching habits):

TNH:



Jim Macdonald:


Laura Mixon:



Hawkins:


John Hawkes-Reed:


Bart:


I'm utterly and completely drawing a blank when it comes to casting myself, though. Ideas?

I'll leave it to you guys to cast the rest. I've got deadlines. *g*

First lines aren't really my strength, necessarily--I mentioned as much to Garunya, in his comments.

This was fun, though--and it's even more fun to follow them around to the various journals where people are playing, to get a sense of different styles. Some of 'em are friends-locked. I, umm, don't actually know how to do that since I've not had occasion to, yet. So mine aren't!


Mason Crowder sat in a straight-backed chair, precisely in the center of his basement.

For starters, she'd never been to Mexico. Molly thought about that a lot, delivering pizzas late at night in the Subaru hatchback she'd been driving since high school.

Donner Macklin rubbed a clear circle in the grimy window pane, and peered into the dim room beyond.

One of the best things about Erin was that she always woke first when I was dreaming.

Lucy Jordan drove up to the cottage in late February. She turned into the driveway, killed the engine, then just sat there clutching the wheel and trying not to cry.

Other people playing-- Bogwitch64 - Orogeny - and I'm sure I've missed many many others, once you start following links back.