Interview
Hot Mess Vampires, Strange Names, and B-Movie Plots
An Interview with SFF Author Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam
“Balance isn’t something I consider when writing; it either happens or doesn’t happen. But focusing on emotion is important: taking the emotions I’ve dealt with in my domestic life and transferring it onto the characters in their world that’s gone a bit wonky.”
Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam is the author of over 90 short stories, with work in Popular Science, LeVar Burton Reads, Lightspeed, and many more publications. Her work has been nominated for the Nebula Award and translated into six languages. This year will see the release of her first novella, Glorious Fiends (September 13th), and first short story collection, Where You Linger (out now from Vernacular Books). Learn more about her and her work at bonniejostufflebeam.com.
INTERSTELLAR FLIGHT PRESS: I’m sure one of the first questions people wonder about you is: Is that your real last name? Where does such a perfect SFF writer surname come from?
BONNIE JO STUFFLEBEAM: It’s the name I was born with! My parents tell me it’s German, and some guy I dated who spoke German told me it might have meant, “stump leg” or “one who hides behind stumps,” and I honestly don’t know which I like better.
If anyone wants to write reviews of my work and make a funny remark about my name, I do collect those on the bio page of my website.
IFP: Your stories are often noted for their deft balance of the familiar and fantastic. How do you go about blending these elements, or finding the common thread between them?
BJS: I’m drawn to the fantastic, so it’s natural for me to wonder as I cook breakfast, for example, what it would be like if the pancakes imbued the eater with the power to talk to bread or some other nonsense. So, balance isn’t something I consider when writing; it either happens or doesn’t happen. But focusing on emotion is important: taking the emotions I’ve dealt with in my domestic life and transferring it onto the characters in their world that’s gone a bit wonky.
IFP: What influences and inspires your work currently? Have these influences and inspirations changed over time?
BJS: Right now, horror films are a huge influence, but that’s only been the case for about four years now — because I couldn’t watch them before! When I first started writing, I was influenced a lot by other people’s words: stories I read, song lyrics I heard. These days, I’m influenced more by thought experiments brought on by conversations with my partner or in the presence of friends. At some point, I got tired of writing more serious stories — and of writing at all — and decided to follow the fun, so humor and outrageous scenarios, like B-movie plots, have started to form a larger percentage of my influences.
IFP: Can you tell us a bit about your upcoming short story collection, Where You Linger and novella, Glorious Fiends?
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BJS: The theme for this collection — my first! — arose simply: it’s all my stories that are set in the fictional town of Riddle, Texas. Many of the characters reappear, and the fantastic in the world of Riddle is floaty and strange. But most of these stories are actually older, and as I started to collect them, I realized that the theme of hanging on the past, and the literal and figurative ghosts of our old lives, is a strong presence. The order of the stories was easy to pin down, too: it starts with stories that involve humanity’s distant past — dinosaur skeletons walking the earth with us — and moved through time, until the final three stories, which use sci-fi tropes over fantasy ones. The final two stories, which take place in the future, are the newest, written over the last two years.
The novella is pure fun. I wanted to tell another story about the characters I created for a novelette that appeared in the anthology Evil in Technicolor: a girl gang of classic monsters. Roxanne is a hot mess vampire whose love of women, both sexual and gastronomical, causes a lot of trouble within her trio of BFFs: Mx. Hyde and Medusa. In the novelette, Mx. Hyde and Medusa died, while Roxanne selfishly ran off, and in the novella, I explore her resurrection of her friends and how her selfishness plays out when a devil-type character demands that they give him additional souls to replace the souls of Mx. Hyde and Medusa.
I actually don’t find working on novellas much different than shorts: they’re longer, but it didn’t feel that way, because the content was fun and needed a larger space in which to be told. But novels? That’s a whole other story, and those are such a different beast than shorts.
IFP: When not writing speculative fiction, you work as a Narrative Designer of romance games. What similarities and differences do you find between these media and genres? Is your creative process different between fiction and narrative design?
BJS: The games I work on are interactive fiction, so I write scripts that include narration and dialogue, and there are a lot of similarities. With narrative design, though, I have to describe less because art will do a lot of that work, so the prose is super lean. As for differences in genre, the main one is that romance involves the Happily-Ever-After or Happy-For-Now, and then the horror I work on usually ends with one survivor whose life is forevermore fucked up. So, the tones are different — but the spicy sex is the same!
IFP: What do you do in your free time when not writing?
BJS: I’m a fierce protector of my free time, so I take weekends off and don’t usually stay late to write, not even if I didn’t get to work on my own stuff that day. My mental health is precarious, so I have to prioritize that over all else. But the answer to what I do with that free time? Is somewhat boring. I work out; right now, I’m lifting weights for my fitness. I have a weekly board game night with my friends. I have a lot of family functions, as my sister and her kids live in the same town, as do my in-laws. And, of course, I read and buy way too many books. Right now, I also stay up too late playing Wingspan on the Switch — and I take a lot of walks while playing Pokémon Go.
IFP: If you can share, what are you working on next?
BJS: I’m writing a horror novel, which is in the final stages of revision before being sent to publishers. It’s got a fun infusion of humor and romance, so it’s been a delight to work on!
I’m also in the process of editing several short stories, but with time being limited, all my processes are slow as hell.
About the Author
Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam’s fiction and poetry has appeared in over 90 publications such as Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, Lightspeed, and LeVar Burton Reads, as well as in six languages. By night, she has been a finalist for the Nebula Award. By day, she works as a Narrative Designer writing romance games for the mobile app Chapters. She lives in Texas with her partner and a mysterious number of cats.
Interstellar Flight Magazine publishes essays on what’s new in the world of speculative genres. In the words of Ursula K. Le Guin, we need “writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope.” Visit our Patreon to join our fan community on Discord. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.
