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.
2015 author pic
The lovely Amanda Wrangles chats about her tale in today’s And Then interview.
What inspired “Come Now, Traveller”?
Almost all my short stories to date have been in the crime genre, so the challenge of writing something outside that area really appealed to me. A lot of my work centres around the sea – I’ve lived and worked by (and in!) the ocean for many years, and it definitely calls to me creatively. Admittedly, I did set out to write something romantic (again, the challenge) with no murder or mayhem, but of course the story had other ideas. The main protagonist is a sea-faring ship – The Davee Trader – and has been with me for a long time, filling up notebooks, just waiting for the right opportunity to use her.
What appealed to you about this project?
The freedom to pretty much go for it and finally give The Davee Trader some air.
What advantages does a long-short form offer?
My story is one of the shorter tales in this collection, but at eight thousand words, it’s still considered long. No tough maximum word count is pretty liberating, it means not having to shave everything down to bones. At the same time though, I adore the discipline of short form, so this is the best of both worlds.
The future of short fiction is …
More. I think short fiction is becoming more mainstream. Our brains are becoming wired to reading snippets online, so I think – and hope – more readers are discovering the beauty of a well-crafted short.
What’s next for you? 
After two of my mentors (the equally fabulous Marianne de Pierres and Alison Goodman) read “Come Now, Traveller”, they both hit me with a bunch of questions: What happened before? What happens next? From there, I’ve been working on a series of interlinked short stories all set in the same Davee Trader world. I’m also about halfway through a science fiction novel, which again has its toes in the ocean, but in a much darker place than “Come Now, Traveller”.
Amanda Wrangles likes to grow food and bake cupcakes and write stories about murder, monsters and steampunk ships. She was the first prize winner of the 2009 Scarlet Stiletto Award and her short crime fiction is published in ‘The Second Cut – Award Winning Thrillers’ by Sisters in Crime and The Crime Factory’s ‘Hard Labour’. Her first novel, a fantastical – and rather sexy – comedy, ‘Arrabella Candellarbra & the Questy Thing to End All Questy Things’ was co-written with Kylie Fox under the pseudonym A.K. Wrox and is published by Clan Destine Press. She is currently working on a SFF novel and a series of nautical steampunk short stories. The mother of three boys, her home is filled with skateboards, smelly knee-pads, dogs and books.