This week's guest is Autumn Christian.
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AC: My latest book is Girl Like a Bomb, out from CLASH books. All of my other books had a dark color scheme, Girl Like a Bomb is a pink cotton-candy colored book floating in a flossy heaven. It's my first non-horror book. There is about 30x more sex scenes in Girl Like a Bomb than my previous books. It has a protagonist devoid of most of my natural anxieties. Good things happen. I wrote it at a time when I was sick of being an angry baby, content with destroying virtual worlds, when I wanted to expand the mythology of my own writing.
Do you have any creative endeavors other than writing fiction (art, music, knitting)?
AC: I like to cook. It's like creative math, and everything exists in reality, where actions makes sense. Then when you're finished, you have an actual product to consume.
I used to design and write for video games. I used to do a little bit of fire poi (Swinging balls of fire around basically), and I'm getting back into martial arts, although I don't know if that's considered creative. I've usually avoided doing any other creative things, because I feel like it saps my energy away from my writing. I like to channel everything into one singular purpose.
What was your greatest Halloween costume?
AC: I was Marla Singer from Fight Club. Everyone said I already dressed like that.
If you could survive on one food for the rest of your life with no health repercussions, what would it be?AC: Pizza. It is the perfect combination of fat, carbs, and protein and flavors designed to taste delicious. It is the food that soaks up the flavors of the world around it. It is infinite in its ingredient combinations, although in general I go for the pepperoni.
If you could be reincarnated as a sentient but inanimate object, what would you like to be?
AC: A supercomputer. For obvious reasons.
What is your writing environment like? (Are you out in public or in seclusion? Is there noise? Is there coffee? Do you type on a laptop or write longhand on lined notebook paper?)
AC: I actually have my own office, after many years of writing on the corner of an inflatable mattress, or in various coffee shops knocking elbows with people, or on the floor hunched over a laptop, trying not to tip over the tea balanced against my knees. I enjoy the noise of music, or the sound of rain. Sometimes I'll have a movie running on one of the monitors because there's something calming about movement in the periphery.
I write on my laptop hooked up to a secondary monitor with a mechanical keyboard. I'll occasionally go outside and write on a notebook but it is furiously slow, although often less distracting. I can feel the pulse of my brain as the words rattle around but I can't get them down fast enough, but also I don't get distracted by Twitter.
What's the most disgusting thing about the human body?
AC: That if you listen closely you can hear the salty blood inside you sloshing around, and you realize that you're about 70% water and you're basically a bunch of fluid protected by a thin layer of skin like a balloon.
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