My Favorite Things with Sara Wolf

They might not be raindrops on roses or whiskers on kittens, but that doesn’t mean that we love them any less. Welcome back to My Favorite Things, the weekly column where we grab someone in speculative circles to gab about the greatest in geek. This week, we sit down with New York Times bestselling author, Sara Wolf! Sara is the author of the Lovely Vicious series, as well as Bring Me Their Hearts, out from Entangled Teen on June 6th!

What does Sara love when she’s not creating a new set of characters to torture? Spoiler alert: British baking, an author with some serious writing chops, a vampiric Netflix adaptation, a Lovecraftian nightmare of a game, and a music video about ghosts. Intrigued? Read on for more!

Hey guys! I’m super excited to be here, because talking about the stuff I like is a great way to never get me to shut up, ever. My family knows better than to set me off, so at this point I’ll take any willing audience. Thank you guys a ton for offering yourselves up as sacrifices. 😀

I don’t know what it is about us Millennials, but it feels like everyone I talk to my age has depression or anxiety or some combination of the two. Me included! Maybe it’s the student loans, maybe it’s the job market, maybe it’s the way everyone is harping on us to have more kids and spend more money (seriously, guys?). There’s a ton of healthy (and medically correct!) ways to deal with that stuff, but my favorite by far is bingeing on tv shows, video games, and of course, BOOKS! Thank you, modern technology, for providing me a thousand options with which to distract myself so dang thoroughly.

So I’m here to share some of the stuff I’ve delved into recently that makes me both indescribably happy and indescribably unproductive. If I could slap a quality rating sticker on each of these it’d be an A+, and if I could slap warning stickers on them all for being highly addictive, I’d be slapping all day.

The Great British Baking Show: This is my one non-speculative thing I’m going to gush about, because I just needed to gush about it to SOMEBODY. It’s going to sound really weird coming from a girl who loves to write dark, angsty, bloody stories, but sometimes even Dracula needs a decompressing show to prop his weird, stinky, undead feet up to. For me it’s The Great British Baking Show, which I mainlined in about a week, tops, while working on revisions for Bring Me Their Hearts. This show, guys. I know I’m so late to the party it’s pretty much ended by now, but watching Mary Berry get excited over pastries is pretty much my idea of heaven. She’s so adorable, and the entire show is very sweet. Did you know the hosts Sue Perkins and Mel Giedroyc will purposefully go to any contestant that’s crying or breaking down and swear up and down so the footage is unusable? How cute and considerate is that? (SPOILER AHEAD! Turn back at your own peril!) My favorite season has to be when Nadia won — I was in tears the last three episodes watching her just absolutely crush the competition, and her final cake was so gorgeous I gasped when it came on screen. I like to bake, but I’m nowhere as good as any of these contestants, and I know baking is a super tricky science more than anything, and you can really see that tenet come through on the show — sometimes things work out when the contestants think all hope is lost; sometimes when they feel confident it goes sideways. Baking is a great big sciencey mystery of chemicals and heat and I adore it, and it’s somehow therapeutic to watch other people mess up without a mess to clean up!

N.K. Jemisin: If you haven’t heard of the Broken Earth trilogy by N.K. Jemisin, I suggest you get on it. It’s an incredible sci-fi/fantasy book about family, what it means to be an outsider, and the power of human cooperation. It stars with the first book, The Fifth Season. I’m starting the third book shortly, and I usually reserve recommending things until I finish trilogies to make sure they end well, but this series is just that good. It’s got taut, super emotional writing without getting flowery about it, and I hugely respect the writing chops and sheer ability it takes to do that. The story centers around a woman who’s lost her child, and it’s so compelling it was physically hard for me to tear myself away to do chores and feed myself, even. I rarely get so sucked into books like that these days, which makes Broken Earth really special for me. It’s not a happy book by any means, but its down-to-earth approach to the concepts of life and happiness in general is very refreshing and real. I’ve also heard incredibly good things about the Inheritance Trilogy, so I’m starting that next with utter frenzied anticipation. If you read one sci-fi author this year, make it N.K. Jemisin.

Castlevania: I had a lot more time for anime in my younger years, but nowadays I indulge in a series only once in a while. Netflix recently published the vampire series Castlevania, which is an anime adaption of a series of video games titled after the same name. Castlevania the game usually features a hero ascending a castle full of ghosts and goblins and demons with the goal of killing Dracula in mind. In the anime, we follow Alucard, who is the son of Dracula and a human woman, and a man named Trevor Belmont, who belongs to the disgraced vampire hunter clan the Belmonts, as they come together with the goal of killing, who else? Dracula. It’s a beautifully rendered anime with fluid animation and Alucard is, of course, super dreamy and enjoyable to watch. It also has a surprisingly strong message of the exact cost of human ignorance, which I really appreciated. The fight scene between Trevor and Alucard at the end is awesomely memorable, and I love knowing we’ve got another season ahead of us. If you like vampires, vampire hunting, cool action scenes, beautifully animated anime, or all of the above, I seriously recommend it.

Bloodborne: One of my favorite darker video games that came out semi-recently is Bloodborne. It’s a bloody, arcane journey heavily influenced by H.P. Lovecraft’s style of “eldritch horrors.” The citizens of a town are caught in an eternal, unnamed “Hunt.” Every time your character dies you wake up in an abandoned house called a “Hunter’s Dream,” and the NPCs won’t stop talking about something called “the old blood,” which apparently drove everyone mad but was required to drive off some sort of plague, and then turned into a plague itself? Most of the lore is fleshed out in a read-between-the-lines way, which I adore, and I’ve tried to emulate in books many times before. But as it turns out, explaining things is usually more satisfying for the reader. 😉 The themes and influences of Bloodborne’s “old gods” really bled through in my writing Bring Me Their Hearts, and several people pointed that out to me while reading it before it went to print. Bloodborne is super punishing gameplay-wise, but I played it pretty much solely for the world, not the challenge. As dark and twisted and mad as it was, I enjoyed every bit of it.

“Acid Rain” by Lorn: This is definitely one of — if not the number one — favorite music video of mine ever. The music is gorgeous, to be sure, but it’s the video that really takes it over the top. It’s told from the perspective of a cheerleader who staggers into a diner bleeding and bruised, and she meets up with her other fellow cheerleaders in a similar condition, and they dance their way through the diner brutally and in slow-motion, with big, powerful steps. The end of the music video reveals they’ve been dead all along from a car crash just outside of the diner, so it’s speculative in the sense the dance we just saw was their ghosts moving over to the afterlife, in one last rhythmic hurrah. I loved watching this video for the first, fifth, and millionth time, but it really shines for me in the dance moves; every single one thought out and deliberately sinister and vast, just like a dancing ghost might make with its last gasp of life on earth.

Sara Wolf is a twenty-something author who adores baking, screaming at her cats, and screaming at herself while she types hilarious things. When she was a kid, she was too busy eating dirt to write her first terrible book. Twenty years later, she picked up a keyboard and started mashing her fists on it and created the monster known as the Lovely Vicious series. She lives in San Diego with two cats, a crippling-yet-refreshing sense of self-doubt, and not enough fruit tarts ever.

Author Photo by Terrence P. Jones