 For Pride in Horror Month, I had the pleasure of interviewing author J. Danielle Dorn. Check out our conversation about their novel, Devil’s Call; anger as inspiration; and more. Sonora: How long have you been writing? J: Professionally, since 2016. Creative writing has been a hobby of mine since grade school, and I wrote a lot of research papers and essays for my psychology degree. I also participated in more National Novel Writing Months than I'd care to remember. But I didn't start getting paid to do it until my novel was picked up by Inkshares. Sonora: Tell us about your novel, Devil's Call. What was it like to write it? What was it like shopping the novel around once you were finished? J: I don't remember which of my friends sent me the link to Inkshares back in 2015, but it struck me as a Kickstarter for writers and I thought it might be fun to give it a whack. I had not been published in any capacity prior to going, "You know, I never write westerns. Or straight protagonists. Or involve pregnancy. Let's take this 'write what you know' thing and throw it out the window." The premise came first, and I decided on an epistolary format as a means of driving the story forward. In its original incarnation, the protagonist is in labor with her first child, whose father was killed at the beginning of the story, and she's preparing to face off against the [spoilers redacted] responsible for killing him. She's explaining to the baby, "When you're old enough to read, this is why your grandmother had to raise you." Explaining what it was like to write it would probably be a whole book on its own. I quit my job as a machine operator at the Genesee Brewery to move to Utah to help a friend of mine when she returned to work after having a baby, decided it would be fun to write something that's entirely against type for me, committed to it, and drank my way to a mostly-finished draft. I created a project page on Inkshares, uploaded the chapters as I finished them, got sucked into a self-destructive vortex that ended with me stepping out into traffic with the intent to end my life, and was admitted to inpatient rehab in April (I think?) 2016. I don't remember how long after my discharge from inpatient it was, but I know it was before my intensive outpatient program started when I got a call from Inkshares' then-VP of business development concerning the project. It was a little over one year between Inkshares acquiring the project and the novel's publication. There was no shopping involved, unless the literary equivalent of dumping it in a cardboard box on the side of the road counts. Sonora: Do you have any advice for writers looking to submit their work to an agent or publisher? J: Read as much as you can in the genre you're interested in publishing in. If you aren't literate, then you aren't going to be aware of what the current publishing trends are, and you won't know what agents are hungry for. Agents know what will sell, and you have to look at submissions like a sales pitch. If it's feasible, enroll in local workshops to learn the actual craft of writing as well as to get feedback from other readers. There are organizations that offer online courses and financial assistance. Seek out new opportunities to improve your skill. For every rejection, a rewrite. Don't get attached to your own words. Even the most talented writer on the planet needs an editor. Sonora: How was your experience writing and publishing Devil's Call different from writing and publishing your short stories? J: Publishing Devil's Call was like having teeth pulled, on account of when it occurred in relation to my addiction and subsequent recovery from it. I couldn't juggle my priorities, and the fact that I relapsed and became homeless and so on definitely impacted sales and my ability to go to signings or do interviews. My short stories come about the same way as Devil's Call did, i.e. out of fucking nowhere, but the difference is I'm in a much better place now than I was five years ago. I write for me first and then I rewrite for the market. Or I answer a specific call for submissions. Short stories are meant to be read in one sitting, and if I can write each act of the short story in one sitting as well, then I feel pretty good about myself. There's very little input from the editors, whereas the novel that was published in 2017 is very different from what I threw up on the website in 2016. Sonora: What inspires you? J: Anger. All the kick-ass authors I've met as a result of my serendipitous belly-flop into the world of writing. The shitty things humans do to each other, and our capacity to make those shitty things into compost. Monster Zero Ultra. Sonora: As a queer, non-binary writer, how do you feel about the horror community's treatment of LGBTQIA authors? What does the horror community do well, and where can they improve their efforts? J: Honestly, I don't feel great about it. It wasn't until what seems like the last five years or so that I began to see calls for submission that were explicit in their desire to publish a diverse range of voices, but I still feel as though I need to keep the fact that I'm a lesbian on the downlow. I definitely put off disclosing that I experience gender dysphoria and prefer they/them pronouns as long as I could. There have been several editors who've pulled together fantastic anthologies, and I'm amazed by the range of podcasts that feature original fiction or discourse on the horror genre and are produced and hosted by members of the LGBT community. Queer horror creators have been busting their asses the last few years, and the results have been amazing. This interview is taking place at what we're all hoping is the apex of the COVID-19 pandemic. I think we need to see what the industry as a whole looks like once the dust has settled before I can start pointing to specific areas that could benefit from improvement. Sonora: Do you think there needs to be more of an effort to draw attention to works by non-binary/gender-fluid authors? J: I made the decision to publish using my first initial and my middle name rather than just my first name because "Jamie Dorn" sounds like it belongs to a handsome Irish fellow who may or may not have a spectacular beard. That's not who I am. I'm a chronically depressed lesbian from Rochester, New York. My first decision was to broadcast that I'm not male as part of My Brand™ and it kind of sucks that if I hadn't done that, I'm 99% sure the assumption would have been that I was. But being presented as a female author chapped me a bit, and it took me forever to realize it's because I experience gender dysphoria because I'm non-binary. It would be great if we could live in a world where a person's ethnicity or sexual orientation or gender didn't matter, but we don't. Those things are deeply ingrained in our society, which exploits the poor and the disenfranchised, and as much as I want my response to be "My genitals and my pronouns have nothing to do with my work," that's bullshit. So my answer is "Yes, and also..." Sonora: Who are some of your favorite authors? What are some of your favorite books? J: To avoid turning this into a J. Danielle Dorn TEDx Talk, I'll keep it to queer horror authors and novels. Some of my favorite authors are Carmen Maria Machado, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Emily Carroll, Sarah Waters, and Hailey Piper. Some of my favorite books are The Luminous Dead by Caitlin Starling, My Lesbian Experience With Loneliness by Kabi Nagata, The Haunting of Hill House (obv.), White is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi, and Animals Eat Each Other by Elle Nash. P.S. Moby-Dick is one of the gayest novels ever written. Sonora: What are you working on right now? J: My Dark Elf Necromancer in Elder Scrolls Online is kicking a supreme amount of ass now that I'm quarantined. The Amulet of Kings shall be mine. But also a novel about lesbian space pirates. It's a cosmic horror romance tentatively titled LESBIAN SPACE PIRATES. Thank you for putting up with me, you're breathtaking. Sonora: Thank you! You’re a delight. <3 About J. Danielle Dorn: J. Danielle Dorn is a military brat and former mental health paraprofessional from Rochester, New York. Kirkus Reviews named their debut novel, Devil’s Call, a ‘Must-Read Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Book’ in 2017. Their short fiction has been published by Madness Heart Press, Ink Heist, Tough Crime, and Witch Craft Magazine. They currently live with their adopted cat and a self-perpetuating pile of to-be-read books. About Sonora Taylor  Sonora Taylor is the author of Without Condition, The Crow's Gift and Other Tales, Please Give, and Wither and Other Stories. Her short story, "Hearts are Just 'Likes,'" was published in Camden Park Press's Quoth the Raven, an anthology of stories and poems that put a contemporary twist on the works of Edgar Allan Poe. Taylor's short stories frequently appear in The Sirens Call. Her work has also appeared in Frozen Wavelets, Mercurial Stories, Tales to Terrify, and the Ladies of Horror fiction podcast. Her third short story collection, Little Paranoias, is now available on Amazon. She lives in Arlington, Virginia, with her husband. Visit her online at sonorawrites.com.  "The Revenant with witches." --James Demonaco, screenwriter and director of The Purge series On a dark night in the summer of 1859, three men enter the home of Dr. Matthew Callahan and shoot him dead in front of his pregnant wife. Unbeknownst to them, Li Lian, his wife, hails from a long line of women gifted in ways that scare most folks--the witches of the MacPherson clan--and her need for vengeance is as vast and unforgiving as the Great Plains themselves. Written to the child she carries, Devil's Call traces Li Lian's quest, from the Nebraska Territory, to Louisiana, to the frozen Badlands, to bring to justice the monster responsible for shooting her husband in the back. This long-rifled witch will stop at nothing--and risk everything--in her showdown with evil.  Abby Gillman has discovered that with growing up, there comes a lot of blood. But nothing prepares her for the trail of blood she sees in the hallway after class - or the ghost she finds crammed inside an abandoned locker. No one believes Abby, of course. She’s only seeing things. As much as Abby wants to be believed, what she wants more is to know why she can suddenly see the dead. Unfortunately, they won’t tell her. In fact, none of them will speak to her. At all. Abby leaves for her annual summer visit to her uncle’s house with tons of questions. The visit will give her answers the ghosts won’t - but she may not like what she finds out.   the heart and soul of horror promotionComments are closed.
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