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 Eryn Hiscock!
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 have a good ear. A lot of times, the undersong of language is where my ideas begin, especially when writing poetry.
On the downside, I suffer from too many ideas, so it’s always a struggle for me not to bog down my narratives with too many digressions, descriptions, and plot meanderings in my fiction (and poetry, for that matter) and the work translates as confusing for readers.
In the novel I’m currently working on, I’ve dealt with this issue by adding footnotes where I put all this additional detail I find so essential to include—and as much as I resisted adding them (I personally hate footnotes in fiction, and here I am using them!), once I began using them, they helped keep the narrative clean and flowing so I was able to move forward with the story—and that’s one of my writing mottos: “always keep moving forward”.
I hope to drop the footnotes entirely eventually, but think I’m still hanging onto them for now as a place to stow those last little darlings I can’t quite murder yet. (Yet!)
We’ll see what makes the final cut, I suppose. To be determined!
What are your thoughts on the book industry today, or more importantly, about the book community?
The book industry has changed. Self-publishing is an option many authors embrace these days, with many businesses cropping up now and geared to facilitating that market.
I’ve simply been too busy writing my book to take part in any community so I can’t really answer re the book community, but I am unsure how I will sell my novel once it’s ready, and hope to secure a publisher or agent who will largely handle the business side of things because I really just want to write. Not sure if that’s possible in this day and age. If I want representation, I need to write something someone will want to sell, is my thinking, and stand behind the work like I do.
“Be undeniable.” That’s what I always work toward with the writing so I might secure that representation which will free me up, (hopefully!), to produce further work.
Do you feel it is getting harder or easier to make it as an independent author these days?
I’m not sure what “making it” looks like for other authors, but I know what it looks like for me: I want to write a good book that I’ll still feel good about reading years later. I don’t want to regret (as a writer) whatever I’ve produced or be ashamed.
Money’s nice—although for me the main achievement is craftsmanship, seeing my vision come alive on the page, and knowing as a reader (and writer) myself, that I’ve played out whatever idea to the best of my ability—always with the hope it translates well for an audience—but that’s for the market to determine and thus out of my hands. So, I worry only about the business of writing itself and do my best with that.
Tell us about your work. What story are you most proud of?
In a nutshell, I’d say characters in my stories often try to make things not die—to somehow live on. That’s their recurring quest: to somehow eradicate death so loved ones live forever and they never have to say goodbye.
I like my story ‘Giving Up The Ghost’. It’s far from perfect as a piece of writing—and I wish I could have thought up a stronger ending—but I worked on it a long time and researched holography as best I could. In the end, with all the effort put in, the story came out pretty much how I wanted in terms of emotions conveyed. It’s decently-written, too: clean, meaningful, touching—well I think so, anyway. I, personally, still tear up at the end every time I read it.
What are your upcoming works and plans for the future?
I’m all about the novel lately and really focusing on that in the immediate future, although plans for when the novel’s complete (by end of 2025, major editing should be complete with only finessing of the manuscript left) are starting to pile up in my mind and I’m taking notes for several projects to tackle in the future.
One future project is to complete a speculative novella of material I’d first drafted back in 2011; another is a short story (more literary fiction, not science or speculative fiction in this particular case), and a creative non-fiction piece about gorillas, (my favorite animal). These are all lining up for when my novel’s finished.
The writer/playwright Arthur Miller wrote something that’s always resonated with me as a writer—(I believe this comes from Miller’s wonderful autobiography Timebends: A Life), where Miller states he simply writes, does his best, then metaphorically releases his work to the waves to disseminate itself how it will—I share same that mindset regarding my own creations: simply write, do one’s best, and don’t worry about outcomes.
KANDISHA PRESS 
Where can I purchase/read Eryn’s work? Nice interview !!
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