This interview was conducted in November 2016 via email.

Kerstin Hall: “The Tunnel” is your second story to be published by sub-Q, the first being “Sleepless.” How did the creative process differ?

Natalia Theodoridou: “Sleepless” happened in response to Tory’s invitation to write something for sub-Q. It was the first time I attempted anything interactive, so the process was rather exploratory and guided by the possibilities offered up by the technology. Both stories benefited from great editorial feedback, and I am grateful to sub-Q‘s editors for the time they take to refine the fiction they make available to the world. However, when I started writing “The Tunnel,” I was much more conscious of what I wanted to achieve, so the writing was more deliberate and controlled. Fortunately the tools available have also evolved since “Sleepless,” so there was still some fun to be had with the code.

Kerstin: Your academic background is in Media and Cultural Studies. Two questions: Should we call you Dr. Theodoridou, and how have your studies influenced your fiction?

Natalia: I have undergone the slow and rewarding torture that is the doctoral process, so you are free to call me Dr. Theodoridou if you must, but I’d much rather you called me Natalia (pronounced Na-ta-LEE-ah). Just don’t call me Mrs.

Joking aside, I’ve studied for a long time, and I’ve studied several things (I started with theatre and religion before moving on to Media and Cultural Studies), so my studies do regularly pop up in my fiction. That said, I think it’s not so much the subjects that have influenced my writing (although the occasional religious or theatrical theme does crop up), but the principles and critical approaches of cultural studies that have shaped my take on fiction. My studies have definitely determined the way I approach language, history, truth, or the fluidity of personhood, for example.

Kerstin: You are extensively published, with recent credits including Apex, Shimmer, Escape Pod and many, many others. How are you able to consistently make sales, and can you provide any tips for writers just starting out?

Natalia: I am not the kind of person that would presume to give advice, but here’s what I tend to do: I spend a lot of time researching and mulling over ideas. This includes reading and studying the publications I want my work to appear in. I have a network of writers I talk to and trust and ask for feedback from. I believe that writing, like thinking, is largely dialogic. I also submit a lot, and I get a lot of rejections. OK, so here’s one piece of advice (learned the hard way): don’t let the rejections get to you.

Kerstin: Given your success thus far, what is the next goal in your writing career?

Natalia: I intend to try my hand at longer things—a novella, a short story collection, that sort of thing. Probably not a novel, though, unless it’s a fix-up. I love fragmentation, and neat narratives make me suspicious. Perhaps that’s my shortcoming.

Kerstin: Which story are you most proud of?

Natalia: I try to do better with each new story (the meaning of “better” being totally arbitrary here), so my favourite thing tends to be the last thing I wrote. I have a bunch of forthcoming stories that I am particularly fond of. I do have soft spots for older stories as well, though: “The Ravens’ Sister” in KROnline, for example, is one I still love a lot. “The Singing Soldier” in Shimmer is another.

Kerstin: You write in both English and Greek. How do you choose which stories are written in which language?

Natalia: Unfortunately, the truth is that I rarely write in Greek anymore. I do have a few stories forthcoming in Greek, but these are translations done by some wonderful Greek writers rather than myself. I still get the occasional urge to write something in Greek; when that happens, it’s usually a turn of phrase that can only exist in Greek that dictates the choice, or the texture of the language itself.

Kerstin: “The Tunnel” might be described as a journey through depression, but it does not allow for the happy—or even hopeful—ending that a reader might expect. Could you discuss why you wrote the piece this way?

Natalia: This story is semi-autobiographical in the sense that it carries a lot of elements that are true for me; for instance, my partner and I did make that journey by train across Europe around the time we started trying to have a child. This is when the idea for this story came about. Not being able to have a baby can be heavy stuff for some people, and from where I am right now it felt dishonest to pretend that there is a happy ending to this story, or even a resolution, at least from Katrina’s point of view. There probably is; I just haven’t found it yet.

Kerstin: Why did you choose to make interactive fiction out of this particular narrative?

Natalia: My initial desire was to give the reader the opportunity to read the same story from multiple points of view, partly so that they could find that release from the bleakness of Katrina’s tunnel. I quickly found out that I couldn’t tell the story from other POVs though; Katrina’s darkness sucked everyone in. My take on the narrative was too personal, and I was too entangled in it to empathize with anyone other than Katrina. This is how the metatext came about, and how the interactivity became more about exploring one point of view from multiple, including self-reflexive, angles, rather than delving into other characters.

Kerstin: What is the best thing you have read recently?

Natalia: I’ll start sounding like a broken record, because I’m sure I’ve said this elsewhere already, but everyone should go read Vajra Chandrasekera’s “Applied Cenotaphics in the Long, Long Longitudes” in Strange Horizons. It’s just excellent.

Kerstin: Pizza or curry?

Natalia: Curry, always.

The post Author Interview: Natalia Theodoridou appeared first on sub-Q Magazine.

Veve is the author of this week’s story, “Which Passover Plague Are You?”

This interview was conducted via email in October 2016.

Veve Jaffa

Kerstin Hall: So you are ordinarily based in Germany, but then you were in Cape Town last week, and now you are in Tel Aviv? How is the whirlwind international travel going?

Veve Jaffa: Though I do warmly consider Berlin a fluffy little Germanic nest of sorts, my window seat 30,000 ft above whatever city is next in my international tour is the closest I get to a home these days. I’m afraid I’m of one of these real-life ‘digital nomads’ you may have heard about on the internet. Nearly every week is a new destination and with it, the opportunity to introduce my work to a new audience.

Kerstin: You mentioned to me that you were setting up an exhibit in Tel Aviv. What are you exhibiting?

Veve: Well, it’s actually “Which Passover Plague Are You?”! You see, since the game’s release in July, I’ve been trying out its potential as an interactive theatrical experience and I must say, so far so good! It’s a rollicking good time, mostly because the audience never knows what to expect and to be honest, neither do I.

Since there’s very little of this particular kind of thing out in the wild—is it theatre? Is it a game? Is it an honest-to-goodness religious experience?—each play-through is unique, depending on the setting and culture and tone of the place. Suffice it to say, the only thing that stays the same is my heavenly get-up (did I mention I play the role of the big guy himself?) which you can see in all its glory here, at the game’s first live performance in Berlin.

Kerstin: What projects are you working on, IF or otherwise?

Veve: My workflow as a game developer tends to focus my energy on one large project while I create smaller, scalable projects within 3 month periods. For the last year, I’ve been working as Creative Director at independent games studio Peardrum on a number of awesome projects. including my directorial debut, 16-bit, 16mm adventure game, Shoot to Kill.

Since June I’ve been working on Nakam, a VR series following little-known tales of uprising and revenge from oppressed communities throughout history. Each chapter takes place in a different geographic location and time in history and has been an absolute adventure to create. The most harrowing but certainly rewarding experience was putting together a crew of urban explorers to visit a former SS bakery in Germany. The experience was as haunting as you’d imagine, especially since it’s been abandoned for 70 years, but in doing so I realized how necessary to the creative process visiting and interacting with these physical spaces has been. When we release the game next year, I hope players will be able to feel that extra attention to detail and textural tangibility.

Kerstin: “Which Passover Plague Are You?” is a little crazy and a lot of fun. Where did the idea originate?

Veve: The idea came from a desire to see more Jewish stories inspiring contemporary media, and creating one that could be both accessible and enjoyable regardless of familiarity with Jewish history and culture. That’s where the ‘cosmic quiz’ format comes in. Based on those cheesy Cosmo quizzes attempting to answer such pressing questions as ‘Are you Good Girl Hot or Bad Girl Hot?’, I incorporated a healthy dose of contemporary pop culture and cinema into the story to balance the narrative with instructions like, “Choose your plague’s ultimate ensemble.”

I’m also very interested in the verging-on-obsessive mysticism that has pervaded much of history’s perception of Judaism, so I knew I wanted to incorporate a mystical mathematical element to the game in the form of a Gematria puzzle. Like Darren Aronofsky’s Pi or the Coen Brother’s work (specifically A Serious Man), I wanted to give players the opportunity to clamber deep into the rabbit hole of Jewish numerology should they choose. The game takes place across the expanse of the universe, so I wanted to make it feel like a big world even in a small game.

Kerstin: This may be a dangerous question, but the piece invites it. Where do you personally stand with regards to religion, and (how) does this influence your art?

Veve: Trust me, the content gets a lot more dangerous when I’m standing in front of a room of unsuspecting humans sporting an impressively voluminous beard and claiming I’m the omnipotent creator of the universe.

I was raised by an Orthodox Jewish mother and a formerly Christian father who converted to quite literally keep the peace. I often felt stifled by rules and judged by my community, and coming out as queer and transgender as an adolescent didn’t help matters. Judgment and exclusion from my community led to a pretty standard teenage rebellion where I rejected all things religious and spiritual and sought connections with people that would treat me with love and respect regardless of my identity. I was lucky in finding amazing communities of queer and trans Jews—people I could healthily process my feelings of exclusion with, and slowly find ways to reconnect with Judaism and incorporate its rich history and tradition into my life on my terms.

Passover is a remarkable tradition that calls for an intentional gathering to both acknowledge the oppression that the Jewish people have endured throughout history and celebrate our freedom from bondage today. Its spirit is one that deeply resonates with my own lived experiences, and so it only seemed natural to serve as a canvas to work through my relationship with the holiday and my newfound identity as a Jew. I suppose most people would seek spiritual counsel in the form of a therapist or a religious leader, but I make games. I made a game where a half-Arab queer Jew could stand at the front of the room and say, “I’m God,” and it’s accepted as the gospel truth. Surely that’s radical, but I don’t believe for a second it’s disrespectful. I built an unapologetically Jewish space to safely critique and explore my roots and I just hope it can serve a similar purpose for other people who have felt excluded or forgotten in their own communities. I plan to keep playing this game at every Passover seder to come and I couldn’t be happier that I created my own holiday tradition.

Kerstin: What do you do for fun?

Veve: Does my job of making games count as fun? When I manage to take time off, I’m likely to be found near the sea, snorkeling, surfing, or simply happily subsisting on sunshine. Other favourite pastimes include playing basketball, collaging, and plant-tending—especially succulents and mint.

Kerstin: Give me one unusual factoid about yourself.

Veve: I don’t sleep.

Kerstin: Describe yourself as a developer.

Veve: If you handed Jean Vigo and Vincent Van Gogh a Vive and left them alone for a month, I like to imagine the results wouldn’t stray too far from my playful little experiments. My dev toolkit includes a Bell and Howell 70C, a crowbar, and a lot of movie-ready makeup—not exactly what first comes to mind when you think ‘game developer.’

Kerstin: If readers want to read more of your work, what would you recommend as a starting point?

Veve: “Which Passover Plague Are You?” is the only IF I’ve released thus far, but narrative design is a crucial element in all of my games. Shoot to Kill for instance, uses a branching narrative mechanic that I originally designed using Twine, leading players to multiple paths based on their choices. My forthcoming games are all narrative-based as well and the best way to keep up to date on what I’m releasing is to follow me on Twitter where I regularly post updates on development, as well as my itch.io page where I post nearly all of my newly released games and transmedia projects.

Kerstin: What would you say to an author of traditional fiction who was considering trying out IF for the first time?

Veve: Take risks and be patient with yourself. Learning new things takes time, and luckily we live in an era where tutorials and resources for making IF are readily available and accessible.

Kerstin: What are your goals for the future?

Veve:

• Release all these games or die trying
•  Not actually die
• Be the first person to conduct a purely chromatic conversation with a bioluminescent animal
• Eat all the tahina.

Kerstin: When you were six years old, what did you want most in the world? What do you want right now?

Veve: When I was six I wanted more than anything to be a squid. Now that I’ve achieved that goal, I mostly want to continue being as cool as I was when I was six.

Kerstin: Interplanetary travel or time travel? Substantiate.

Veve: I’d rather embark on a vast interplanetary adventure than travel time in a discrete location in the universe. Luckily in ‘Which Passover Plague Are You?’ I can do both.

The post Author Interview: Veve Jaffa appeared first on sub-Q Magazine.

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Marie is the author of this week’s story, “Space Princess Coronation.”

This interview was conducted by email in July 2016.

Kerstin Hall: One of my first assumptions was that “Space Princess Coronation” was coded in Twine 2. But you did the whole thing in HTML? That sounds hard.

Marie Vibbert: I started writing HTML when there was no way to do it other than in a text-only interface. I’m one of those Unix nerds who thinks learning all the commands in vi is more practical than downloading [Microsoft] Word. The funny thing is, I was originally going to use Twine, but ran into time constraints while learning the program. So I switched to just typing it out as straight HTML.

Kerstin: Had you written any interactive fiction before “Space Princess Coronation”?

Marie: This is my first! I loved those ‘pick-a-path’ books when I was a kid, but it was learning of the existence of sub-Q that inspired me to try my hand at it.

Kerstin: Are you tempted to move into the Twine interface? In fact, are you tempted to write any more interactive fiction at all?

Marie: I am working on a project in Twine right now, actually, titled “So You Want to Take Over The World?” It’s much more ambitious. I’m very excited that I can write JavaScript functions into it!  I’m also toying with interactive poetry.

Kerstin: Your bio mentions “Cajun Sushi Hamsters.” What can you tell me about that?

Marie: Once upon a time, in a dark age known as the 1980s, George Lucas visited a horror upon humanity known as the Howard the Duck movie.  Howard the Duck takes place in my home town of Cleveland, Ohio (though the film was made in Hawaii—marking the only time in history someone looked at Hawaii and said, ‘Gee, this is just like the Midwest.’)  In the movie, there is a scene in a Cajun Sushi restaurant—just one long sad gag.  The Cleveland Science Fiction Writer’s Workshop was looking for a catchier name and someone suggested “Cajun Sushi Hamsters.’  No, I don’t know where the hamster part comes from.

Kerstin: As I have Internet-stalked you, I have gone through your blog, which features a multitude of adorable little illustrations.

Marie: I’ve always been a huge comic fan and dreamed of writing a comic strip. I drew and wrote a strip for my high school paper, and even got a few strips in the local community paper growing up. I’ve never been much of an artist, but I love doodling. The Space Princess and her Protocol Droid are two of my favorite doodles and I’m super happy with how they look against the awesome backgrounds you created!

Kerstin: You attended the Clarion Writer’s Workshop in 2013. How was that experience and in which ways did it shape your writing?

Marie: I cannot overstate the impact of Clarion. It was an intense, life-changing experience. People had told me it would be, but I thought that was, well, exaggeration. People say going to see Springsteen is life-changing! But this… it forced me to really look at my work, at short fiction itself, and see the bare bones of what works and what doesn’t and why.

Not to mention giving up six weeks of your life and a significant amount of money really invests you in your writing career. I can’t let that go to waste!

Kerstin: What are your current writing preoccupations or themes?

Marie: I’m working on a story about collective bargaining and memory-transfer. I have a novel about a girl biker gang in outer space. If there are spaceships and robots or blue-collar people, I’m into it.

Kerstin: What are you most proud of?

Marie: My story “Keep Talking,” which blends a single father trying to communicate with his autistic daughter and humanity trying to decipher a message from outer space, won Apex Magazine’s best short story of 2014, but what really makes me proud are parents of autistic children thanking me for telling their story.

Kerstin: Space Princess is probably one of the most lighthearted pieces sub-Q has hosted. Is this a departure from your usual style?

Marie: I seem to have two modes: lighthearted and dark. I enjoy writing funny stories. At Clarion, my first two stories were comedies, and then for the rest of the six weeks I presented ever-darkening dark stories that made people say, “Well! Another light-hearted romp from Marie!”

Kerstin: Where did the inspiration for Space Princess come from?

Marie: I owe the whole thing to the [Global] Game Jam. It’s an annual event where you have a weekend to write a video game. My husband and I have teamed up for this twice now, and it’s a great couples’ activity! This year’s theme was “Ritual,” and we decided to go with a coronation. Brian suggested that I write the game’s outline as a text adventure. I budgeted eight hours to get the story done while Brian created 3D models and we argued over what Space Princess looks like. The game itself was not a huge success, but at the end of the weekend, I had this small text adventure!

Kerstin: Give me one unusual factoid about yourself.

Marie: At the age of 35, with no athletic ability to speak of, I tried out and made Cleveland’s women’s tackle football team, the Cleveland Fusion—now ranked #5 nationwide in the largest women’s league ever!

Kerstin: Describe yourself as a writer.

Marie: I’m not the best, but I work hard. Between procrastination breaks.

Kerstin: What are your goals for the future?

Marie: I have a lot. I’d like to publish one of the novels I’ve written. I’d like to sell a story to Clarkesworld. (There’s a bet on the line.)

I want to be cool enough that someone else writes fanfic about my stories.

Kerstin: When you were six years old, what did you want most in the world? What do you want right now?

Marie: I wanted to live in New York City and be a Business Lady with high heels and pin-striped miniskirts.

Shortly after that, I became obsessed with writing and would carry my stories in a shopping bag I pretended was a briefcase.

These days I just want to write. There are so many stories inside me and not enough time to get them down!

Kerstin: Dragons or mermaids?

Marie: Channing Tatum Merman.

Kerstin: If you had the power to time travel, what would be your first stop?

Marie: I’d like to think it would be something less self-serving, but… no. I’d go to Dijon in 1470. For the fashion.  (I was a medieval re-enactor for a while and did heavy research on Burgundian costume. It’s all about the hats.)

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