And Then interviews: Sarah Evans

Clan Destine Press is bringing out a new anthology And Then, and you can read interviews with the authors here over the next few weeks. There is also an Indiegogo campaign, to which y’all can contribute here.

Sarah Evans talks “Plumbing the Depths” and the killing heat of Australian Christmases.

What inspired your story/novelette?

“Plumbing the Depths” kicked off because of homesickness as I suffered yet another Christmas in a hot climate. Being an ex-pat, I was feeling nostalgic about white Christmases and winter in general. Memories surfaced of snow and ice and tobogganing and feeling really, really cold while I sweated in my non-airconditioned study… Actually, I often write about wintery things in the depths of summer. It must be therapy.

I was also brought up o a healthy diet of horror flicks and stories and had long fancied writing a tale about a vegetarian-turned-vampire (this was years before the Twilight phenomenon). I wrote a thousand or so words and then life got in the way, as it often does.

Fast forward to Lindy and her invitation for And Then, and I was back into chilly winter and blood suckers and this time determined to get the story finished.

What appealed to you about this project?

The challenge! Lindy threw down the gauntlet to write a rollicking adventure story. The scope was massive. How could one resist?

What advantages does a long-short form offer?

Novellas are a good length for me. Like short stories, they are very doable in a chaotic life. I’ve written several romance novellas for My Weekly over the years. These are now published as large print books in the library system.

A novella gives one enough room to explore and expand the characters and is short enough to try out ideas which may not be meaty enough for a novel. And they don’t need as much head space as a novel. Novels do tend to sabotage the brain cells and take over your life.

So when Lindy issued the invitation, I jumped at it. It was an ideal project to resurrect my vampire slayers and have a play. It was soooo much fun.

The future of short fiction is …

Healthy, extremely so. People lead busy lives and short fiction is accessible. It can be shoe-horned in between the essentials. There’s the added bonus that you can read a story in one hit which maintains its continuity AND you don’t feel (too) guilty for spending too much time in a fictitious realm.

What’s next for you?

After all this talk about short fiction, I won’t be doing it!

My plan is to get cracking on the sequel to my rom-com crime novel Operation Paradise. It’s been bubbling on the back burner for some months now and I do really need to get it done and dusted. People keep hounding me to find out what happens next. I need to get them off my back :).

Sarah Evans, an English ex-pat journalist and home-schooling mum, is the author of a lifestyle/recipe book Seasons and Seasonings in a Teapot, romance and crime novels, short stories and poetry. She writes for the UK women’s magazine market and her stories have been broadcast on ABC Radio and published in crime and romance anthologies. She also writes songs with her singer-songwriter daughter.

Sarah teaches creative writing, edits for a children’s book publisher and is the convenor of Bridgetown’s Words in the Valley, a grassroots readers and writers festival.

Last year CDP published Sarah’s debut crime novel Operation Paradise and three short story ebook collections, Killing Kindness (crime), Call of the Wild (fantasy) and New Blood (horror). Her novella Plumbing the Depths is included in the And Then adventure anthology.