The 7Q Interview: BP Gregory
AUTHOR BIO
Hailing from sober corporate beginnings, author and avid reader BP Gregory has been an archaeology student and a dilettante of biology, psychology, and apocalypse prepping. She is the author of five novels including the recently released frozen post-apocalyptic horror Flora & Jim, about a father who’ll do anything to keep his daughter alive.
QUESTIONS
#1. Looking back, what’s one fiction book that you feel truly made an impact on your writing? Do you still gravitate towards that author?
#1. Oh wow. That’ll involve casting my mind all the way back to my share housing days. I’d just moved in with Dave18 and we were negotiating that tender honeymoon period where the booze flows freely, and at two in the morning you’re trying real hard to decide if the housemate on the other side of the wall is an axe murderer.
Well one night over gin and candlelight, no less, he goes to his room and reverently retrieves his tattered barely-held-together copy of Mark Z Danielewski’s House of Leaves. This thing came into my hands having done hard yards: Dave18 received it via some kind of underground network. You had to turn the pages gingerly lest they escape, and they exhaled booze, sweat, anxiety.
I already had an interest in how psychology impacts environment ever since the fabulously crashing weather of Wuthering Heights. House of Leaves really took it to the next level, turning the psyche of environment around to warp the user. I realized I’d never understood the gravity of inhabit before.
Later an architect nodded wisely as I explained this all to him, and told me he’d had clients design houses that, once built, resisted habitation. No matter how luxurious the proud new homeowner always fled within a year.
I do still gravitate toward Danielewski and read each of his new releases, but I haven’t connected with many of his other works in the same way. I suspect he’s evolving along a different path to where I’m heading, and his novels will ensnare people very different to me.
#2. How do you feel about the use of sub-genres in the industry? How do you describe your work overall?
#2. I guess it really comes down to whether they’re being used for good or evil. Sub-genre can be an invaluable tool for connecting a reader with the right book.
For example I love horror, and sci-fi, Lovecraftian lore, eerie mysteries, and haunted houses. At each of the stops along the way I can find a novel to read, but if we drill right down to a creepy old building with mysterious technology and cultists, bam!, you’ve got Peter Clines’ 14 and it’s going to knock my socks off.
What I don’t like to see is genre used to pigeonhole and belittle somebody’s work. Oh, so-and-so writes bizarro body horror, like that somehow reflects on the author instead of the critic for being an elitist jerk. Most fiction invariably transgresses boundaries anyhow, and we only really pin down one primary genre for marketing purposes.
Overall I describe my work as scifi and horror because that’s the easiest; but a lot of people looking for traditional scifi or traditional horror go away disappointed. What I really do is dissect characters, peeling them apart under extreme conditions to see what makes them tick.
There’s rarely a happy ending that sends the reader off pumped. Instead I use the ending the story was always leading to, the ending that was inevitable because people are people.
#3. What about your writing process do you think is unique or quirky? What’s the worst writing advice you’ve ever received?
#3. Not much, if I’m being honest. I have a bank of ideas waiting to go; I pick the most exciting, plot the wazoo out of it on a big piece of brown paper, pick up a pen and start writing. There’s a lot of redrafting, a lot of screwed up paper hurled across the room. It’s hardly unique or glamorous, more like I’m brute-forcing my way to where I want to go using a mix of words and puns.
And I’m afraid I’ve struck out on the second part of the question, too. Nobody’s ever really given me writing advice, not directly. I’m sure I’d listen politely if they did.
#4. How does music and media factor into your writing? Do you feel it plays as much an inspirational role as literature?
#4. Music doesn’t factor much at all. There are specific times I’ll listen to music; but if I’m concentrating it becomes too busy, a distraction. I’m prone to doing that annoying thing where I start writing down words I’m hearing, instead of the ones that belong in the sentence.
Media, however: I’m going to take a broad interpretation of “media” and assume it can include video games. I’m a big fan of storytelling in games, and some such as the Mass Effect and Dead Space series, Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, Fallout 3, Dear Esther, etc. have had as profound an emotional impact on me as reading a good book. They can be used to tackle big themes in unusual ways.
#5. As an author, how much do you engage in social media? Do you feel it is more for your own entertainment, or for marketing and networking?
#5. Hopefully a healthy amount! It can be easy to get sucked into social media for those sips of validation. Overuse is particularly insidious to an author because of the way it reprograms our habits: tasks requiring long banal periods of deep concentration, like finishing a novel, drop off the menu. So much easier to keep pecking at that button, cooing at the bright lights.
BTW dear reader, if this sounds chillingly familiar don’t beat yourself up—addiction is exactly what social media is designed to do. A certain level of self-policing is important for mental stability.
That said, connecting online can also be wonderful. Fortunately for me entertainment, marketing and networking intercept in a community of like-minded writers, reviewers, and readers.
I’m happy if somebody becomes curious about my stories, and I’m mad keen to find out what everybody is reading and loving. Social media puts me on the frontline to hear what my favourite authors are working on. Who’s the next indie sensation I need to wrap my brain around?
We just don’t get exposure to a big enough spectrum of work via the traditional channels. The experimental and bizarre, the cutting edge, the unpopular-but-magnificent, the not-fun-but-important books are invisible. And few would argue that reading as broadly as possibly is critical to development as an author, a reader, even as a person.
#6. Where do you see the future of horror fiction heading? In turn, what changes would you love to see, either socially or technologically?
#6. Horror has always been a handy barometer for what deeply disturbs a society. Given current social fracturing I can envisage future fears: cold war style paranoia, that deep fear of the other that gave us The Thing will likely see a revival; as will Wicker Man type folk horror, given how badly politics and religion have failed people in favour of the rich and powerful. Body and cyberpunk horror may wane as technology expands the limits of self, making the extraordinary into the everyday.
On a personal level I’d love to see a Renaissance of sophisticated narrative driven VR horror. It’s a bit gimmicky at the moment but done well virtual reality puts you inside somebody’s life; that engagement of empathy can really drive home the personal tragedy that makes horror so poignant.
Of course I’m super-biased as my husband and I are working on a VR horror game at the moment called Home in Time for Dinner, about two children and their daschund lost in a storm water drain. I see a lot of potential in the medium, and look forward to seeing where it goes.
#7. What can you tell us about any forthcoming projects? What titles would you like to promote now?
#7. With my last novel Flora & Jim having turned out so grim (in a frozen haunted wasteland, who knew?) I’ve taken a bit of a u turn back toward humour with The Newru Trail. It’s a detective murder-mystery set in a world where houses eat memories. There are conspiracies, squids, cults, a kickass female lead, and of course horror; and while I’m still in early drafting you can read a sneak peek at https://www.bpgregory.com/the-newru-trail
I’m currently promoting Flora & Jim which came out in October 2018. A lot of post-apocalyptic stories are a kind of romp, and while that’s fun I wanted to explore what kind of person you would really have to be to survive following an environmental disaster. If we don’t arrest the decline of our planet, what kind of world are we making for ourselves?
To dip your toe in the water with a sample, or dive in with your favourite buy links visit https://www.bpgregory.com/novel-flora-and-jim
AUTHOR PIC
