GREETINGS, BOOKWORMS! I’m Aisha Kandisha, Head Librarian at Kandisha Press. Join me in the dusty stacks of the library I will never leave again as I chat with some of my favorite Women in Horror. Today we feature author Amanda Headlee!
With a love of scary stories and folklore, Amanda Headlee spent her entire life crafting works of dark fiction. She has a fascination with the emotion of fear and believes it is the first emotion humans feel at the moment they are born. Most of her work focuses on dark fiction associated with folklore and cosmic horror. The fear of humanity’s insignificance in the vastness of the universe intrigues her.
By day, Amanda is a program manager; by night, she is a wandering wonderer. When she isn’t writing or working, she can be found logging insane miles on one of her many bikes or hiking the Appalachian Mountains.
Amanda wrote of lore, family dysfunction, and cannibalism in her debut novel, Till We Become Monsters. Her cosmic horror short story collection of psychological chaos and demonic hijinks, Madness and Greatness Can Share the Same Face, will be released in September 2024.
What made you want to become an author? Did you have an “Aha!” moment when you knew you were born to write? Or perhaps a beloved book inspired you?
No one defining moment in my life triggered the “I’m going to be a writer” idea. Writing has always burned deep inside me because I found joy in writing as a child. Throughout my younger years and up through college, I had my heart set on becoming a scientist—specifically, a marine biologist. My favorite aspect of lab work was writing the lab reports and recapping the research and results. When I realized that my life wouldn’t pan out as a scientist, I focused on technical writing and enjoyed a bit of a career there. While I only held the title of a Technical Writer for a few years, I always found ways to bake technical writing into any role I’ve held.
Yet, as much as I enjoyed technical writing, sometimes it was too ‘right-brained.’ When I became burned out with the techy side, I’d write fiction to break the monotony of technical jargon, rules, and regulations.
In time, I enjoyed fiction writing much more than technical writing, as fiction allowed my creativity to break free and allowed me to be myself. I could write what I wanted versus generation whatever work I had been assigned.
Long answer short: writing has always been a part of me, and becoming an author grew organically over the years.
What do you believe are your strengths in writing? And when you feel you need to improve on a particular writing skill, how do you go about it?
I’ve been told that I’m a visual writer and that my work gives readers a cinematic feel because they can see the story playing out in their heads. That gives me a lot of joy to hear as I write exactly how I see things in my head. The goal is to stir the same emotion in the reader that I feel writing the words they’ll eventually read. For the reader’s experience, I try to mix it up between telling them precisely what I want them to see and leaving things up to their imagination because the thoughts they come up with are, at times, more terrifying than anything I could have told them.
I am working on improving my pacing throughout a story so as not to make a story feel rushed and to space out the suspense. I’ve been doing a lot of research on pacing for different genres and observing the beats within musicals and plays. I’m trying to find what works best for me as a horror author to improve these skills.
What are your thoughts on the book industry today, or more importantly, about the book community? Do you feel it is getting harder or easier to make it as an independent author these days?
More people are being published today because of the increased number of small presses and the ability to self-publish, all of which make publishing more accessible. The increased focus on inclusivity and diversity provides more opportunities to have a voice. We live in a beautiful writing era with many new voices being printed and different stories being told.
What is challenging about the industry is being an independent author, where writing is one’s only career. Most of us will never be able to be full-time writers because we will need a job to be able to afford life. The tilting economy and ever-increasing market inflation makes living off book sales almost impossible. To be a full-time writer, you’ll need to become creative with different opportunities to create multiple income streams from your writing.
Tell us about your work. What story are you most proud of?
A lot of my work delves into psychological and cosmic horror. There is something so terrifying about the depths of one’s mind and the vastness of space… and as I write that, there are a lot of parallels there! The story I am most proud of today will be released in my upcoming short story collection, Madness and Greatness Can Share the Same Face. The story is titled “The Voiceless”. It’s a story about finding a voice against domestic abuse. The story took me many years to write, starting when I was not in a good place. I was very sad, scared, and angry. I’d occasionally pick at the story as I got through that horrible situation and worked on myself. “The Voiceless” evolved with me as I grew out of that dark place. I realized that I was starting to heal when the horrifically sad and empty ending organically evolved to a better-resolved conclusion, which may contain a bit of revenge.
What are your upcoming works and plans for the future?
My short story collection, Madness and Greatness Can Share the Same Face, releases in September 2024. I’m looking forward to sharing this with my readers, as it has been in the works for many years. Additionally, I just completed a Western serial killer novella and will return to focusing on a cosmic horror novel I started last year. There are a few other projects in the works that I will be able to announce later in the year. Stay tuned!
KANDISHA PRESS 