Beneath the Sugar Sky' is an homage to the portal fantasies of my childhood: it is the portal running in reverse.
Seanan McGuire
I do a lot of urban fantasy, which is modern-day cities, but you've got magic, you've got fairies running around, or cryptozoological creatures running around, and I'm pulling very heavily on my background as a folklore major and having done some animation work and all of that, and I'm pulling from the modern fairy tale narrative.
One of the things I love best about Marvel is the 'What If?' factor; being able to just say, 'Today we're going to explore a world where Magneto and Emma never gave back the X-Men. Or a world where Mary Jane shares Peter's powers.' So being able to do that is just super exciting.
Fans are people, and people sometimes get mad at air. I know I do. So I have people huff at me because I'm not doing what they want, but I also have people get mad because I use profanity, or because I exist in material space, or because I was at Disneyland when they thought I should be writing.
Like all children, I spent a lot of time looking for idols.
Out of all of the Spider-People, including Peter Parker, Gwen Stacy has the most over-developed sense of responsibility.
Indexing' is a police procedural about protecting the world from memetic incursions - which is to say, fairy tales.
Sadly, all good things must come to an end, and 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' wound up teaching me another, accidental lesson: that sometimes you're so excited to keep going down the road you're on, you drive right past your destination.
Process does matter; you need a process. What it is is up to no one but you. But if you can't sit down, write once upon a time, and go through however many hundred thousand words to get to happily ever after, you're never going to get anywhere.
I made friends - close, lifelong friends - through my love of 'Buffy.'
People have been known to joke that my lifelong love of portal fantasies was born, at least in part, from the fact that stepping into my private spaces is a little like stepping through a portal into another world.
In the long run, I think I like 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' better as a television series, because it had so much more time and room and space to grow.
Sparrow Hill Road' is a stand-alone book that ties into the InCryptid universe, not the launching point for a whole new series.
I am a zombie fan, but all of the zombie stories I've enjoyed started when the dead rose and ended three days later with everybody looking exhausted. I was thinking, 'What happens in 20 years?'
I believe that humans are pretty awesome but we are not capable of understanding what heaven would look like while we're alive because whatever is out there is so much bigger than we are.
I am a cisgender woman who has always had a lot of female friends. While many of us have traits in common, none of us will ever be exactly the same. So it's enormously important to me that my female characters be people, and be allowed to be whatever they need to be.
'Seanan McGuire' is my real name; if I'm being silly and third-person about it, she's a frequently cranky, foul-mouthed Disney Princess on vacation in the real world, where she studies diseases, cuddles reptiles, watches lots of horror movies, and goes to as many corn fields as possible.
When I was first writing 'Feed' - which was the first book I published as Mira - I talked about it very openly on my blog, on Twitter, that I was writing this book, and it wasn't until after it was sold that I said 'Mira Grant' wrote this book. And the reason there was really purely marketing-based.
If 'Buffy' the movie was the true love of my childhood, 'Buffy' the series quickly became the true love of my teenage years. It was everything I'd ever wanted in a show and more. 'Buffy' quickly became an obsession, and, shortly thereafter, became my gateway into an incredible, insane, indescribably wonderful new world: shared media fandom.
I wrote a song called 'Pretty Little Dead Girl.'
James Reed is inspired, if he is inspired by anyone specific, by P.T. Barnum. He's set up to be the ultimate American showman. His whole job is to sell you shadows. But he's not a nice person, he's not a good guy.
When I was getting ready for the release of 'Deadline,' when it was coming out soon, I decided that the appropriate way to get people excited about the book would be to write a novella in 30 pieces and publish a piece on my blog every day for a month... during a convention, a week-and-a-half-long trip to New York, and a doll traders' expo.
'Filk' is the folk music of the science fiction and fantasy community - you get parodies, you get traditional music that's had the words slightly modified, and you'll also get just original works that have been written about science fiction and fantasy works, or with science fiction and fantasy themes.
The first thing that matters: I am a child of the eighties. I grew up in a neon wonderland of talking horses, compassionate bears, hair that didn't move in a stiff wind, and the constant threat of nuclear war.
I was that kid with the glasses and the hungry expression who haunted every library book sale and used bookstore in town: the one who always has a book in one hand and is reaching for the next book with the other. There's one in every town.
I found 'Bordertown' when I was standing on the border between childhood and my teens, and it carried me past that transition. In the process, it helped to create the next step of its own evolution: the modern urban fantasy owes a lot more to 'Bordertown' than many people will ever know.
Watching 'Doctor Who' in the United States meant I was always behind the times - PBS didn't get new episodes until two years after they ran, and I was aware of the show's cancellation before the characters themselves knew, at least in my corner of the world.
I eventually grew into a pre-teen Marilyn Munster, that being the only option I could find that allowed for a) blonde hair, b) a fondness for frilly pink things and wearing ribbons in your hair, and c) hanging out with monsters.
By the time 'Buffy' finished its Bay Area theatrical run - including a two-month stint at the dollar theater - I had seen the movie well over three dozen times. I was in love.
I'm always depressed when a book ends, because those are my friends for however long the book takes to write. Since I spend so many hours with these fictional people, I sometimes see them more than my real friends. And then they're gone, and we'll never be together like that again.
'Mira Grant' is actually my pseudonym. And 'Seanan' is pronounced 'SHAWN-in.'
I write everywhere. I've written books while I was on planes, at Disney World, and in multiple countries of which I am not a native. It can be a struggle to make word count sometimes, but I will persevere!
'Feed' is about zombies and politics and blogging. It's about how George Romero actually saved the world! It's 'Night Of The Living Dead' meets 'The West Wing.'
There is a list of things I'm not allowed to discuss at the dinner table! I am extraordinarily passionate about the Black Death, which is not something most people are into.
I have an aunt who believed strongly that teaching kids that Shakespeare is 'hard' is wrong, so she handed me 'Hamlet' when I was in kindergarten to see what would happen. What happened was I did a book report on 'Hamlet' and caused quite a lot of trouble!
A lot of people have read the Mira Grant books who are not urban fantasy readers, and they would never have picked up a book with an urban fantasist's name on the cover, but then they go on to read my urban fantasy and like it.
I grew up in an apartment that would have made a trailer look really decadent and nice. Pretty much the only dependable thing I had was books.
I surround myself with fantastical things because it makes it a little easier to write fantastical stories.
I can go on for hours about how 'Doctor Who' is a portal fantasy writ across the stars, how the companions are falling down the rabbit hole over and over again forever, tumbling head over heels into mystery. Hours.
If life after death really does exist, everyone probably gets what they expect to get, because that's the only thing I can think of that would be fair.
I made the choice not to have children, so I can spend my days just writing; there are no kids demanding my time.
Most of my early work was done on typewriter. And the only way to iterate drafts was to re-type it.
It's absolutely a dream job to get to write for Gwen Stacy.
I think part of the pressure put on 'strong female characters' comes from the fact that there is so often 'the team girl,' who must be all things to all people. Part of avoiding that is having as many female characters as I can, and allowing them to thrive in their own right, not inside a framework they didn't ask for and don't want.
It's very important to me that people get to see themselves in stories. When someone tells me they've never seen themselves, I have a new goal.
I love the filk community. It's the single most welcoming part of fandom that I've ever encountered, and filk saved my life a lot of times when I was a teenager.
