Interview with dark fic sci-fi thriller author Lachi

Today’s special guest is dark fiction author Lachi. We’re chatting about her new sci-fi horror thriller, Death Tango.

During her virtual book tour, Lachi will be giving away a $25 Amazon or Barnes and Noble (winner’s choice) gift card to a lucky randomly drawn winner. To be entered for a chance to win, use the form below. To increase your chances of winning, feel free to visit her other tour stops and enter there, too!

Bio:
Lachi is a recording artist, touring performer and award-winning cultural activist living in New York City. Lachi advocates for identity pride and Disability Culture in the music, entertainment and corporate space, as Founder/President of RAMPD Recording Artists and Music Professionals with Disabilities), as an active Grammys Board Governor and having twice hosted disability topics on PBS. In her free time Lachi writes sci-fi and fantasy novels with diverse, headstrong characters, focusing heavily on atonal world-building, quip-ridden character development and relatable villains.

Welcome, Lachi. Please tell us about your current release:
Published by RIZE Press, Death Tango is a horror-tinged Sci Fi set in a utopian twenty-third-century New York City, where corporations have replaced governments, AI dictates culture, and citizens are free to people-watch any other citizen they choose through an app. We follow four mis-matched coeds as they attempt to solve the murder of an eccentric parascientist. Only someone or some /thing/ able to navigate outside the highest levels of crowd-sourced surveillance could get away with murder in this town. If the team can’t work quickly to solve the case, New York will be devoured by a dark plague the eccentric had been working on prior to his death, a plague which, overtime, appears to be developing sentience.

Excerpt from Death Tango:
I fall.

I keep my eyes open, desperately hoping for something to grab, but all I see are a mix of gray sky, red rock face and my flailing arms. I hear my bones smash against the jagged teeth of Mount Venom and scream one long uninterrupted exhale, silenced only by the jarring collision of the back of my skull against the cold, hard pavement.

I don’t feel the fracture. I only hear it between my ears. Pop.

I lie at the foot of Mount Venom, looking up at dark clouds, a metallic taste oozing over my tongue, a harsh pain working its way down my neck. A thick puddle coalesces under my head as onlookers gather.

My vision snaps away instantly with a blink. Surrounding echoes fade slowly as the internal sound of my curtailed heartbeats takes over. Suddenly I feel cold and heavy. I am motionless, no longer taking in oxygen.

After an onslaught of euphoria, I feel my brain flatten. I hear its slight gummy movements of deflation against my last few heartbeats. And somewhere between no longer feeling the ground beneath me and no longer feeling the air around me, I realize I am dead.

I perceive only a black vastness about me. Like an autumn leaf I float in the Cartesian circle that is the keen awareness of my nonexistence. A mix of bliss and terror. I try to hold on to something physical, something I can understand. “You are safe. You are safe,” I repeat, exercising the remnants of my inner monologue.

Then I begin to see things.

What exciting project are you working on next?
As a novelist, I’d be interested in developing Death Tango into a series. As a recording artist, I aim to record an album celebrating the different, the weird, and the fringe in all of us, and to hopefully build out a full tour.

When did you first consider yourself a writer?
Growing up legally blind, I was always quite an outcast. I turned to writing songs and poetry as a way to express myself and my experiences as early as elementary school.

What do you do other than write and how do you find time to write?
Other than writing, I am a recording artist and touring public speaker full time. I also founded and help run our organization RAMPD.org (Recording Artists and Music Professionals with Disabilities), am an active GRAMMYs Board Governor, among other music industry boards, am a model for adaptive clothing and am a passionate cultural activist with a focus on identity pride and Disability Culture. When do I have time to write? That’s a really good question.

What would you say is your interesting writing quirk?
I love immersive multi-POV character development with deep-seeded internal monologue, quippy dialogue and complex interpersonal relationships. I also love to cast largely diverse characters with disabilities or neurodivergence as a natural part of who they are. It’s Friday the 13th, so I’ll definitely have to mention that I didn’t realize I had a knack and eventual love for horror elements until I bounced at the way including them in my writing made feel.

As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
I literally wanted to be a singer and a writer who toured the world empowering people to live their dreams.

Links:
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