I’ve always loved her work, and I’ve read almost everything she’s written. She makes her characters really hurt, and she can almost always pull tears out of me. She is such an emotional, evocative writer. What (or who) are your most significant female fantasy influences? Are there any creators whom you dream of working with someday?Ĭarol Berg is a huge influence to me. I have to completely close myself off from the world around me. So, I generally start out with an idea, some general theme I want to play with, and then I put on some music (must be instrumental, no words… like Two Steps from Hell) and plug in my headphones. Outlines suck the marrow from my bones and make my soul shrivel up like a raisin. Tell us a little bit about your writing method! When you’re not trawling through dungeons, how do you like to work? (In silence, with music, or serenaded by the damned souls of a thousand dead shrimps? Do you prefer to type or to hand-write? Are you an architect or a gardener? A plotter or a pantser? D’you write in your underwear, or in a deep-sea diver’s suit?) I like the idea of taking off someone’s head like you’d cut off a hunk of cheese. I’d probably be chaotic evil, and I’d use a garrote.

What character class are you, and what’s your weapon of choice? Okay, time to escalate things: reality warps and you suddenly find yourself leading a D&D-style party through a monster-infested dungeon. Highly recommend to anyone who is interested in that sort of thing. It really delved into the lasting legacy of colonialism, how it changed their society, and Burma’s various more recent military leaderships, how things have improved, and then how things got worse and it really painted a picture of modern day life in Burma.

I just finished a book called The Hidden History of Burma: Race, Capitalism, and the Crises of Democracy in the 21 st Century by Thant Myint-U, which might make you yawn when you read that title, but it was honestly one of the most fascinating books I’ve read in a long while. Let’s start small: tell us about a great book you’ve read recently! She has been running the speculative fiction review blog Bookworm Blues for eight years. In her ideal world, she’d do nothing but drink lots of tea and read from a never-ending pile of speculative fiction books. She is an editor, author, a semi-pro nature photographer, world traveler, three-time cancer survivor with hEDS, and mom to two rambunctious kids. She blames her active imagination for the hobbies that threaten to consume her life. At a young age, she found her reading niche in the fantastic genre of Speculative Fiction. Sarah has been a compulsive reader her whole life.

Seraphina's Lament by Sarah Chorn