Will McIntosh 2010 Interview
Will McIntosh was nominated for his short story “Bridesicle”.
“Bridesicle," published in Asimov’s January 2009, concerns a woman, Mira, who awakes in the future from cryogenic suspension and has to convince a male suitor to completely revive her. What inspired this story?
I conduct research on Internet dating, and met my wife through an Internet dating site (even though she works just 200 yards away), so this sort of pragmatic dating, where strangers interview each other before deciding whether to move on to coffee, is fascinating to me. I also have a severe phobia of anesthesia, of being unconscious and unable to wake of my own accord. “Bridesicle” is a mix of this fascination and fear.
Because of the story’s set up, Mira has little visual awareness of what’s going on around her. I was impressed with how you overcame the difficulty of being able to describe the lack of setting. How difficult was this?
I was afraid the story would come across as too “white room” to be of interest to readers, but as I wrote I realized that there was something eerily appealing about a character who has a very limited visual field. The claustrophobic nature of it, the looming faces, turned out to be fun to work with.
Of all your short fiction, do you have a favorite and why?
Besides “Bridesicle” I’d have to say “One Paper Airplane Graffito Notebook,” which was published in Strange Horizons. It’s the sort of short story I like to read--kind of quirky, lyrical. I’m usually unsuccessful when I attempt to write that sort of story, so that one is especially close to my heart. “Soft Apocalypse” is also up there, because it was the closest I’ve come to getting down on the page what I had envisioned before I began writing.
You attended Clarion 2003. What was the most important thing you brought away from the workshop?
Clarion was like a switch being turned on for me. I learned so many things, and I still carry flashbulb memories of at least a dozen “aha” moments from those six weeks. I guess the most important thing I brought away was the understanding that, for me, the most effective aspects of a story are the characters’ thoughts and reactions, not the external action, and I shouldn’t skimp on that internality. Until then I’d assumed that too much internality would bog stories down. In another sense the most important thing I brought away was the feeling of community. Until Clarion I didn’t know any other writers. Going to Clarion gave me this wonderful sense of being among people who spoke my language, who loved what I loved, and that really lit a fire under me.
By day, you’re a psychology professor. I’m sure this has helped you greatly when creating characters. What can you tell us about that?
It probably does help me when creating characters, but I’m not really aware of it. I’m usually trying to think of someone I know, or some celebrity, to fashion characters after. Part of that may be that I’m a social psychologist rather than a clinical psychologist, so I don’t have much training in plumbing the depths of the human psyche. I know a lot about how shopping malls are designed to compel people to spend money, and how men are aroused by the color red. Consciously, the benefit I draw from being a psychology professor is mining the interesting research findings I come across. For example, recently I read that most bullying in schools isn’t carried out by stereotypical bullies--it’s carried out by the popular kids as a strategy to gain and maintain popularity. That seems like a cool idea to work with. I wrote a story called “New Spectacles” after reading a student’s thesis on how you can tell when people are lying, and it got me wondering what it would be like to know for certain when people are lying. I wish I knew more about the hard sciences to draw on, and I envy writers who do, but I try to make use of what I do know.
What is it about the field of SF that excites you most?
I think I was hard-wired from birth to love anything and everything science fiction. There’s something wonderful about living with one foot in imagined futures. I love that in a science fiction story the sky’s the limit--anything can happen, you might encounter any sort of creature and you won’t even know the rules of the world until you’ve read a ways in.
Which writers have had the greatest influence on you?
Jim Kelly, Kelly Link, and Walter John Williams, not only as writers but as mentors. Jonathan Lethem, Nick Hornby, Michael Bishop, Stephen King, M. Rickert, Ray Bradbury.
What’s ahead for you? What are you working on now?
I recently finished my first two novels (I finished them in the same month, after bouncing back and forth between them through various stages of revision). One is based on my short story “Soft Apocalypse,” which was published in Interzone and shortlisted for both the British Science Fiction Association award and the British Fantasy Society award for short story in 2005. The other is a slipstream baseball novel. I’m seeking an agent at the moment.
A nominee for both the Nebula and Hugo awards this year, Will McIntosh’s work has appeared in Asimov’s (where he won the 2010 Reader’s Award for short story); Science Fiction: Best of the Year 2008 and 2009; Strange Horizons; Unplugged: The Year’s Best Online Fiction 2009, and many other venues. In 2005 his story “Soft Apocalypse” was nominated for both the British Science Fiction Association and the British Fantasy Society awards for best short story. His story “Followed,” which was published in the anthology The Living Dead, is currently being produced as a short film. A New Yorker transplanted to the rural south, Will is a psychology professor at Georgia Southern University, where he studies Internet dating, and how people’s TV, music, and movie choices are affected by recession and terrorist threat. He became the father of twins in 2008.
Marshall Payne has worked as a touring musician, music producer, sound technician, a salesman, and a waiter. He has written over 100 short stories and his fiction has or will appear in Aeon Speculative Fiction, Brutarian, Talebones, Hub Magazine, Fictitious Force, to name a few. He has a website at http://marshallpayne.com/ and a blog at http://marshallpayne1.livejournal.com/.
