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 Nora B. Peevy
Nora B. Peevy is a cat trapped in a human’s body. Please send help or tuna. She is an Olympic champion sleeper and toils away for JournalStone/Trepidatio Publishing as a submission reader, a reviewer for Hellnotes, the co-founder and co-editor of Tiny Tales of Terror Quarterly and is reading scripts for The H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival for the second year. Her quirky work is published in Eighth Tower Press, Weird Fiction Quarterly, The Wicked Library Podcast, Sudden Fictions Podcast, and other places. She has stories coming out in five collections this year, her first novel, and her first novelette. As an avid photographer, Nora is also found on Getty Images. Holding a Bachelor of Arts in English with a Concentration in Creative Writing, you can find her on Facebook (as Onyx Brightwing) begging to escape her human body or get tuna. She naps in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
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?
I grew up in a house where both my parents read, and my mother used to read constantly to me. I can remember the day I got my library card distinctly. My “Aha!” moment was in the third grade with my creative writing teacher, Mrs. Krahn. She’s since passed, but she knew before she died, I had been published as a poet and was very proud of me. In the third grade we had to write a story. I chose to write an adventure about my beloved stuffed Dog, who is now 48 years old, and my brother’s Bunny. My story was picked to go to The National Teacher’s Conference. I got to record it on audio tape, and I had never won anything. I was so proud. I still have that tape somewhere, though I haven’t listened to it in years. I really should get it preserved for posterity’s sake. Hahaha.
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?
My two strength are character development and ability to use humor in horror. When I look back at my progression since 1998, I think my characters are more of a colorful woven tapestry than they used to be. I use humor in everyday life to cope. I’ve been through a lot of gnarly surgeries and if I couldn’t laugh, I don’t think I would have recovered. Humor works in horror very well to set your audience up for something unexpected.
If I need to improve a particular skill, I go to the first place I naturally would go – books. I look things up and read, read, read.
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?
My thoughts on the book community … Well, I wish I were able to write a bunch of short stories like Ray Bradbury to pay my bills, but that’s not the case anymore. As far as the book community it is a prominent place for networking and building each up other up, but I’m going to say something that people don’t want to hear. Sometimes it’s not how great you write, but who you know. It’s a name game. It shouldn’t be, but it is. And that part I don’t like about the book community because it does make it harder for Indie authors to get published if they are just starting out. A lot of people think it’s harder to sell your books, but I look at it this way, if you are only in it to sell books, you are not a writer, you’re a businessperson. Writing is about a fire in your soul. You burn to tell your stories and they need to spill out on the page because you can’t allow them to fester in your brain. There are people reading today. It’s just that the format has changed. If you grew up in a reading household like I did, you would teach your children to read, even if it’s just on an iPad, etc. People will still read. There will always be people that read and people that don’t.
Tell us about your work. What story are you most proud of?
Right now, I’m most proud of three. One is a story for the fortieth anniversary of William Gibson’s Neuromancer discussing the dangers and benefits of AI. I don’t write cyberpunk or sci-fi much and it was a challenge. I think it turned out pretty well. Another is the completion of my first novel, Cannibal Turtles! I never finish the novels I start, so this is a big milestone for me. And the last one is my novelette coming out on May 1st, For the Sake of Brigid. That one is special because it is the first work that has only my name on the cover.
What are your upcoming works and plans for the future?
All three of the projects I mentioned above are upcoming works. Fingers crossed my first short story collection comes out in the next year as well. I’m working on getting together a blog on DreamHost, so I am easier to find, and I have five stories coming out in anthologies later this year. I also am working on a new mixed short story collection, and another called Sapphic Divinity, which is a collection of stories about different goddesses from around the world. I am writing a flash fiction collection as well based on twenty pieces of famous artwork featuring animals and I would like to start selling my photography this year too and doing more illustrating.
KANDISHA PRESS 
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