In July 2013, I served as the “editor-in-residence” for the Codex Writing Group, which meant basically I was asking a month-long AMA (“Ask Me Anything”) interview. With Codex’s permission, I’m re-posting the Q&As here on my blog. The questions were all provided by members of Codex.

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What gives you the creeps in fiction?

I’m going to again cheat and copy this answer from an interview I did, which I think gets to the heart of your question:

For horror, the best way to grab the reader, I think, is to make them feel something visceral. It’s a tough trick to pull off, and a lot of horror fiction–even great horror fiction–doesn’t quite manage it, but when it does, man do you know you’ve got something special. I’m not easily frightened or disturbed by fiction–be it prose or film–so whenever I come across something that truly unsettles me, I immediately take notice. Otherwise, what I look for just boils down to the basic tenets of good storytelling: deft prose, engaging characters, originality… I want to be surprised and delighted by an author’s turn of phrase, or by the plot turns a story takes, or–in a case where the events are all but inevitable–that feeling of satisfaction of a story coming to a conclusion in the only way that it can.

Also, from another interview, I discussed what scares me in real life:

Other than death itself, the threat of dementia and the like robbing me of who and what I am is probably the thing that scares me most in life. When I first started working at F&SF, I had moved up to New Jersey from Florida and went to live with my grandparents, who both had gotten to the point where they couldn’t really take care of themselves anymore. My grandmother had a litany of ailments–she was mostly blind, mostly deaf, fairly crippled by arthritis and other various symptoms of old age. My grandfather, though, despite smoking a couple packs of unfiltered cigarettes a day since the age of thirteen, was pretty much healthy as a horse–except for that fact that he had Alzheimer’s. He’d kind of shamble through the day, mostly unaware of what was going on, but every now and then you’d see this glimmer of awareness in his eyes, or in something he said. But mostly he just sat and smoked cigarettes and drank coffee–all day, nonstop, probably because he couldn’t remember how recently he’d had either. Being a person who thinks a lot about zombies, I couldn’t help but think of how Romero’s zombies always seemed to just remember that one thing in life they had been most passionate about and so, in Dawn of the Dead, for instance, they flock to the mall, because that’s what our consumer culture had embedded as important in their minds. And so, as unkind as it might seem, I couldn’t help but see this parallel with my grandfather who had become very much like a zombie himself, reanimated by nicotine and caffeine. 

So–yeah. That. That’s mostly what scares me. I guess that’s kind of a longwinded way of saying that I’m afraid of getting old and dying, but I thought maybe if I explained my firsthand experience with it, it would seem a less whiney and more valid dread. Though now that I’m married and have a family, I have the additional fear of losing them or having them lose me. The latter is, at least, a good thing in a way since it helps motivate me to take better care of myself.

And other than basic genre differences and what those entail, what do you look for in Nightmare slush that you wouldn’t in Lightspeed slush?

It’s mostly just about how dark a story is. Since Nightmare is for not just horror but also dark fantasy, how dark a story is is usually the deciding factor where something would be a better fit. I’ve had a number of stories that were submitted to Magazine A, but I thought fit better at Magazine B and vice versa. Sometimes it’s just a gut feeling. One of the reasons I wanted to launch Nightmare is because I was getting more good dark fiction than I could conceivably use in Lightspeed if Lightspeed were to remain a general SF/F magazine without some specific dark focus.

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From October 1 – October 31, I’ll be running a Kickstarter campaign for a new project called HELP FUND MY ROBOT ARMY!!!, an anthology of improbable, futuristic, magical, & alternate-world crowdfunding projects. Please check it out, consider backing it, and, if you’re so inclined, spread the word!