One of the most common questions authors face is a deceptively difficult one to answer: “Where do you get your ideas?” Yet, the answers to that common question can be almost as interesting as the resulting story. Welcome to You’re My Inspiration, a new column dedicated to discovering what inspires a particular author and their work. Whether it be a lifelong love of mythical creatures, a fascinating bit of history, or a trip to a new and exciting place, You’re My Inspiration is all about those special and sometimes dark things that spark ideas and result in great stories.
This week, we’re doing something a little bit different. June is Pride month, and StoryBundle has curated fiction from 11 different LGBTQ+ authors, including this week’s guests, Craig Laurance Gidney and Nicole Kimberling. Why feature both authors in one post? A few reasons: first and foremost, this StoryBundle won’t last forever: it expires July 1st! So don’t forget to click here to learn more about Craig and Nicole’s fiction, as well as learning more about 9 additional authors and their titles!
But the other reason is that while inspiration can come from anywhere, what happens if the inspiration comes from the same place? You’d think that would lead to very similar stories, but not so: Craig and Nicole are here to tell you how a single source of inspiration can lead to very different stories indeed….
Dream Logic
Craig: Delirium’s Mistress was the first novel of Tanith’s that I read and the first page blew my mind. Delirium’s Mistress is the final novel in her Arabian Nights-inspired epic fantasy series Tales from the Flat Earth, and the gateway to my Tanith Lee addiction. In the first scene, there is gorgeous imagery, ominous wit, and homoerotic sensuality and it blew my then 18-year old mind. Was any of this allowed in fiction? I instantly became a superfan, searching high and low for her 90 novels and over 300 short stories.
Lee had many modes of writing, from the elegiac to the madcap. She wrote Monty Python-esque young adult, decadent prose poems, and tightly plotted thrillers. It’s her Gothic fantasy work that appeals to me the most. Reading Lee works in this modality is like eating an exquisitely rich dessert, like a crème brulee. Sharp shards of caramelized sugar that holds a velvet, delicately-flavored custard.
I had the pleasure of befriending Lee when she released her Esther and Judas Garber fiction. The work, collected in Fatal Women, 34, and Disturbed By Her Song, was channeled to Lee by two spirits — a French Jewish lesbian and her gay half-brother, who lived in modern Egypt. (Tanith also recognized how bizarre this sounded and revealed the process with great self-deprecation). The stories and novels have a fever-dream quality to them, full of gay love and opiated prose.
My novel A Spectral Hue shows its Tanith Lee influence through the lush surreal imagery and dream-logic plot. The novel is about a small mostly African American town on Maryland’s Eastern Shore that is haunted by a spirit that inspires an artistic movement. The color imagery and one of the characters is completely Lee-influenced.
Nicole: Growing up in the ’70s on a farm in Western Nebraska, I didn’t have a lot of access to indulgent ideas. Indulgence is just not a thing there. Even the landscape is worried about putting on airs by growing too many trees. And that, I think, is one of the reasons I latched on to Tanith Lee’s wild, romantic dream worlds — I’m talking specifically about her gothy sci-fi tragic romances, Sabella, or The Blood Stone and The Silver Metal Lover, as well as the mind-blowing contemplation of youthful hedonism Don’t Bite the Sun and Drinking Sapphire Wine.
Indulgence, artificiality, and the urge to find one’s own identity in order to live an authentic life are at the center of all these stories. In Sabella, we follow the titular character as she works to understand her true, predatory nature as a bloodsucker on Nova Mars. She’s a killer, but if that’s her nature, is that really wrong?
The Silver Metal Lover features the spoilt Jane’s obsession with a lute-playing sex robot. But the details we discover about Jane — that she was ordered from a genetic catalog by her mother — shows that she, too, has been manufactured to accessorize someone else’s life. So why shouldn’t she love what amounts to a household appliance?
Don’t Bite the Sun’s gender-switching, body-swapping suicidally reckless protagonist lives in a hyper-indulgent work-free forced utopia that resembles, more than anything, what would happen if real life were like eternal gameplay, except Lee wrote it before gameplay was a thing. Other readers have called this story a contemplation of happiness, but for me the book poses the more specific question, “Of what value is entertainment when there is no struggle to give life substance?”
Of course I didn’t think of these stories this way back when I read them. I only sympathized with the unlikable characters learning to cope with differentness and a feeling of displacement in society and becoming, through the course of the narrative, better people. Because that’s what I was doing myself as I was growing up.
My contribution to the 2020 Pride StoryBundle, Grilled Cheese and Goblins, is very much inspired by these stories where one human being comes to recognize that the rules of dominant society don’t necessarily have to be his rules, nor their morality his limitation. My protagonist, Special Agent Keith Curry, Supernatural Food Inspector, starts off a company man but life and love inspire him to go beyond comfortable existence to find out who not only who he is but who he can become. And, in the spirit of Lee, I tried to push everything just one step farther than I felt was safe, relying on my subconscious to guide me past banality into the unashamedly weird.
Craig Laurance Gidney writes both contemporary and genre fiction. He is the author of the collections Sea, Swallow Me & Other Stories (Lethe Press, 2008), Skin Deep Magic (Rebel Satori Press, 2014), and the Young Adult novel Bereft (Tiny Satchel Press, 2013) and A Spectral Hue (Word Horde, 2019). Three of his books have been finalists for the Lambda Literary Award. He lives in Washington, DC.
Nicole Kimberling is a novelist and the senior editor at Blind Eye Books. Her first novel, Turnskin, won the Lambda Literary Award. Other works include the Bellingham Mystery Series, set in the Washington town where she resides with her wife of thirty years as well as an ongoing cooking column for Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. She is also the creator and writer of “Lauren Proves Magic is Real!” a serial fiction podcast, which explores the day-to-day case files of Special Agent Keith Curry, supernatural food inspector.
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