As somebody who is still in the midst of getting to grips with a second language, and feels that no matter how much I learn I am always never more than an hour or so away from the next slack-jawed and wide eyed moment when I realise I have no idea what somebody has just said to me, I am always impressed when I find a writer who can fluently and effortlessly tell their stories in their chosen second language. Therefore today I am very pleased to introduce you to Cora Buhlert. She was born and bred in North Germany, where she
still lives today – after time spent in London, Singapore, Rotterdam and
Mississippi. Cora holds an MA degree in English from the University of Bremen
and is currently working towards her PhD. Cora has been writing, since she was
a teenager, and has published stories, articles and poetry in various
international magazines. When she is not writing, she works as a translator and
teacher.
Welcome Cora, it's great to have you joining us today. Tell
us a little bit about your latest book?
How
did you come up with the title?
Titling
short story collections is always a bit of a challenge, because the title
should reflect the theme that unites the collected stories. In this case, all
stories all stories involved people (three passengers, a flight attendant and a
pilot) going mad aboard a plane, so I came up with Flights of Madness.
When
and why did you begin writing?
I have
been making up and telling stories for as long as I can remember. Eventually I
started writing them down. I think my first attempts at writing stories were
Enid Blyton pastiches penned sometime around fourth grade. But I did not start writing in earnest until I was about fourteen and
did not get serious about writing until university.
Do
you write in the same genre you like to read?
Sort of,
because I both read and write in multiple genres. That said, the bulk of my
reading these days is fantasy and science fiction, whereas the majority of my
stories published to date are historical fiction. And I mainly read novels
these days, but the bulk of what I write are short stories and novelettes.
However, I wouldn't normally write in a genre I didn't like to read. There's
one exception, my story Outlaw Love. I specifically wrote it as a
challenge to see if I could write a western, since westerns are a genre I don't
particularly care for. Outlaw Love is my bestselling e-book to date, go
figure.
Do
you have a specific writing style?
Not
really. I mix it up from project to project, switching between past and present
tense, funny and serious as well as first and third person narration with a bit
of omniscient thrown in for good measure. However, my prose is relatively
straightforward and I've never been what you'd call a lyrical writer. I once
tried to imitate a certain kind of very overblown lyrical writing that was
popular in the fantasy genre for a while. I managed to stay serious for maybe
half a page, then my natural voice came through and the story started sounding
like a parody of the kind of writing I tried to imitate. The result is utterly
un-publishable, even as an indie. For
while the story is hilarious, if you've read the kind of overblown writing
found in some corners of the fantasy genre (corners usually populated by people
without a sense of humor), it is an utter mess if you don't get the references.
So I guess this one will stay in the drawer for the time being.
How
do you deal with writer’s block?
I always
have multiple projects on the go, often in multiple stages of completion. So if
I get blocked on one project, I simply switch to another and continue to write
or edit it. When I don't feel like writing new words at all, I translate my
existing stories into German. I write in English, but I am German and work as a
professional tech translator in my day job, so translating my own stories is
really a no brainer.
What
inspires you to write? Where do you find
your influences?
Influences
are all around us. You only have to look closely. For example, two of the five
stories in Flights of Madness resulted from a writing exercise at a
creative writing workshop I took at university. I found them on an old Zip disk
and liked them enough to rework them. Another story in the collection was
inspired by two random words from an online dictionary I used as writing
prompts. Yet another story was inspired by sitting across the aisle from a very
drunk, very smelly and very rude man on a flight to the UK. The final story was
written, because I suddenly realised that I had stories about passengers and
pilots going mad, but nothing about a flight attendant, even though their job
should be enough to drive anyone mad. One of the incidents in that story, an
incident involving icky stains on the toilet, is based almost verbatim on something
that happened at the school where I teach English.
What
are your current projects?
First of
all, I'm planning to translate more of my stories into German in 2013. In
January 2013, I'll also be releasing a suspense novelette called Insomnia
about a man who finds himself unable to sleep and gradually succumbs to
paranoia… or does he?
On the
writing front, I'm working on a series of science fiction novellas telling the
story of a great galactic revolution from the POVs of various people involved
on all sides.
I also
have a few more backlist short stories to republish and more historical
novelettes in the works.
What
are your challenges in writing? What elements do you find difficult?
I'm not
very good at writing description. My first drafts often read like radio plays –
a lot of dialogue and some bare bones description when I think of it. I always
have to go back and add in the description in the second draft.
Are
there any downsides to being a writer?
Working in
isolation can be tough, particularly in the beginning when all you have is an
idea and the overwhelming desire to tell a story, but very little actual
writing skills. That's why workshops, writing groups and beta readers are so
important for the beginning writer.
If
you could choose one writer to be your mentor, who would it be?
That's a
difficult question. I actually did have a mentor, a poet and essayist who was
my creative writing teacher at university. And he was a very good mentor and
teacher, too. If I had the choice, I'd pick a mentor who was as good at the
mentoring thing as my old creative writing teacher, but who actually got genre
fiction, cause mine never did, though he did try.
Maybe I'd
pick one of the pulp writers from the early 20th century, because I have always been enormously impressed
by their speed and work ethic and by the way they could effortlessly switch
between different genres.
Favourite
book?
I have too
many to pick just one. A few of my favourites are The End of Eternity by
Isaac Asimov, V. by Thomas Pynchon, Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman, The
Anubis Gates by Tim Powers, etc…
Do
you have any advice for other writers?
Read a lot,
write a lot and – to quote Galaxy Quest – never give up and never
surrender.
How
tough was it to find a publisher/agent/decision to self publish?
I had a
bunch of traditional short story sales and non-fiction pieces under my belt,
when I started self-publishing, so I was not completely unpublished. But I
never had an agent and my first complete novel (coming to an e-book store near
you soon) got rejected by the only editor I ever sent it to.
How
do you perceive the world of self publishing?
In general,
I'm happy about the possibilities that self-publishing has opened up for me and
particularly about the control it has given me over every aspect of my work. My
old backlist stories that were just clogging up my harddrive suddenly have a
value beyond an entry in my bibliography again and are finding new readers and
making me money. Besides, in the old days, I used to discard a lot of story
ideas outright, because there was no market for that sort of thing. Now I give
every idea a chance to develop. And if there is no existing market, then I'll
simply make my own.
Moreover,
the community of so-called indie writers is great and full of talented and
incredibly helpful people. There are times when I get a bit annoyed, e.g. when
self published writers are caught to have done stupid or unethical things (e.g.
the regular writer/reviewer blow-ups or the paying for reviews scandal),
because they make us all look bad. Also I tend to get frustrated by the
trendchasing and extreme moneymaking focus of certain self-published writers or
the way that some indie writers turn into the genre police and insist on proper
adherence to genre conventions more than the traditional publishing world ever
did. I'm not at all against making money and writing for entertainment, our own
and that of others. But if getting rich is all you want, there are easier
careers to choose than writing.
Cora's Amazon author page
can be found here.
Since then I have seen a steady stream of sales, most notably in the first few days. Then this morning, something else happened. Amazon emailed me. Subject: Escaping Life. My first thought was 'Oh God, what have I messed up?' But I soon realised that it was a list of recommendations, and Escaping Life was the first book on the list. They wondered if I might be interested in my own book. You bet your life I am!
