Today’s special guest is novelist Dana Cameron, award-winning author of the FANGBORN series and the EMMA FIELDING series. Today’s interview is about contribution to The Pixel Project’s anthology, Giving the Devil His Due: A Charity Anthology.
The Pixel Project is a complete virtual, volunteer-led global 501(c)3 nonprofit organization whose mission is to raise awareness, funds, and volunteer power for the cause to end violence against women through campaigns, initiatives, projects, and programs at the intersection of social media, new technologies, and popular culture/the Arts.
Bio:
Dana Cameron writes across many genres, but especially crime and speculative fiction. Her work, inspired by her career in archaeology, has won multiple Anthony, Agatha, and Macavity Awards, and has been nominated for the Edgar Award. Dana’s Emma Fielding archaeology mysteries were optioned by Muse Entertainment and appear on the Hallmark Movie & Mystery Channel. When she isn’t traveling or visiting museums, she’s weaving, spinning, or yelling at the TV about plot holes and historical inaccuracies.
Welcome, Dana. Please tell us about your current release.
Thanks for having me, Lisa! I was so pleased to be asked to write a story for Giving the Devil His Due, which is The Pixel Project’s first charity anthology. The Pixel Project fights violence against women and girls around the world, by raising awareness and creating resources. The collection’s stories are about how male abusers get their comeuppance in…uncanny ways. It was an honor to be included with so many brilliant writers!
Can you tell us a little more about what Giving the Devil His Due about?
Giving the Devil His Due showcases stories where The Twilight Zone meets Promising Young Woman as men who abuse and murder women meet their comeuppance in uncanny ways. Edited by Rebecca Brewer, the anthology features sixteen major names and rising stars in Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Horror including Angela Yuriko Smith, Christina Henry, Dana Cameron, Errick Nunnally, Hillary Monahan, Jason Sanford, Kaaron Warren, Kelley Armstrong, Kenesha Williams, Leanna Renee Hieber, Lee Murray, Linda D. Addison, Nicholas Kaufmann, Nisi Shawl, Peter Tieryas, and Stephen Graham Jones.
The book includes resources for victims and survivors of VAW worldwide, making it a valuable tool for getting life-saving information to domestic violence victims still under their abuser’s control or rape survivors who are too ashamed to ask for help.
100% of the net proceeds from the sales of the anthology will go towards supporting The Pixel Project’s anti-violence against women work.
Please tell us about your story.
My story is “The Kindly Sea” and it’s set in the world of academia, a place I naively imagined would be free from sexism and abuse when I was younger. I was inspired by asking the question “how would you give the Devil his due?” and I realized that it wasn’t merely physical retaliation that I’d wish upon abusers. I gave the story a bit of a “Twilight Zone” twist, so the reader is never really certain if something supernatural has happened or if the protagonist has empowered herself to help others.
Excerpt from “The Kindly Sea”:
It wasn’t nearly as dark beneath the waves as Lucy expected. She was no longer angry or afraid, just…tired.
She saw the lights: glittering, neon jewels suspended in a sinuous and glassy body. Kindly, alien eyes regarded her and sucker-covered arms waved gently, hovering in the water. Lucy realized that the Sea had taken the form of this creature to speak with her…
“What do you want?”
Lucy felt the ancient intelligence of the Sea, and knew this question somehow mattered. It was not to be answered frivolously. She thought of the doubt she’d felt, the humiliation of being frozen in a moment, the way her adult self had abandoned her to panic in her encounters with him. The feeling of violation and the self-recrimination for not having stopped it. After a long heartbeat, then two, she answered. “I want him to feel what I’ve felt. To know what it feels like.”
“It is done.” The Sea handed her a small shell, a token of their promise.
Lucy took it without thinking. “Like that? How will I know—?”
“You are the author of this wish. You will see it work.” With a gesture that was either farewell or a dismissal, the Sea turned and scuttled along the sandy bottom, its translucent arms and bulbous mantle vanishing instantly into the black.”
What is your next writing project?
Exit Interview is an espionage thriller that I’ve been working on for a while. I’ve written several stories with the “a/k/a Jayne” character (for Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and in Killing Malmon), and while Jayne and I have profoundly different views on how to handle problems (her solutions are usually violent), it’s really a lot of fun. I love writing action sequences, and it is a big change to do research on hand-to-hand combat, shaped charges, and spying. If all goes as planned, it will be published in the autumn of 2022, by DCLE Publishing LLC.
When did you first consider yourself a writer?
That’s a tough one. Although I’d done a lot of academic writing as an archaeologist, the idea that I was a writer (of fiction) took a while. Even after the first and second Emma Fielding archaeology mysteries were published, I struggled with the notion. I mean, a very 20th-century trope of a writer is someone starving in a garret in Paris or someone who is defining taste and letters in a fabulous New York lifestyle, and no, neither of those were anything like my life. I finally decided that I was a writer when most of my workday was focused on fiction and most of my public events were focused on crime fiction or speculative fiction and not academia.
Do you write full-time? If so, what’s your work day like? If not, what do you do other than write and how do you find time to write?
I do write full-time now, because my husband provides the financial support for us both. When I have a project, I get up, and get to work on email and social media after breakfast, and then start either writing or editing my current WIP. After lunch, I get back to work, and try to go for a walk around 4pm or so, if the weather is good. I try to keep it to weekdays, but if I’m under a deadline, the weekdays lengthen, walks (and possibly showers) go out the window, and weekends are encroached upon. I listen to music and make several playlists for each story or book or set of characters.
What would you say is your interesting writing quirk?
I write out of chronological order, without an outline. I really think that the principal difference between being an organic writer and being an outliner is when you impose the structure on your narrative. But I “see” the scenes of a story as a film and write them down, and then figure out where the characters there came from, what they want, and what they’re going to do next.
As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
Remember when I mentioned 20th-century tropes before? I wanted to be a writer from the time I started reading, but got it into my head that I’d have to have “experiences” (like running with the bulls, getting into bar fights, or going to war, and that didn’t sound like any fun at all to me. The Hemingway-esque image of a writer really permeated popular culture when I was young! I decided to be an archaeologist, for many of the same reasons writing appealed to me: I could study history, learn languages, travel, and put pieces of puzzles together. Then, many years later, my boss and I had a run-in with an armed site looter on an archaeological project, and suddenly, the adventure I’d been trying to avoid presented me with a story idea. I ended up having two dream careers, just not as I had planned.
Anything additional you want to share with the readers?
Yes! Pandora’s Orphans: A Fangborn Collection was published in July 2021 and is on sale now! The Fangborn are vampires, werewolves, and oracles who are secretly devoted to protecting humans from evil. The short stories were published in other urban fantasy collections, magazines, and as standalones from 2008 to the present, and I wanted to bring them all together in one place. I wrote an all-new adventure to include in the collection as an added bonus for my long-time readers.
Links:
Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | The Pixel Project | Amazon – Giving the Devil His Due | Giving the Devil His Due homepage | Sexual Assault Awareness Month | The blog tour FAQ page | Amazon – Pandora’s Orphans
Thanks for being here today.
Thanks for having me!
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