Monday, November 19, 2018

Sword and Sorceress 33 Author Interviews: Deirdre M. Murphy


Enter a wondrous universe…the latest volume of Sword and Sorceress, featuring stories from new and seasoned authors. Herein you will find tales of fantasy with strong female characters, with some version of either martial skill or magic. Not all the protagonists will be human, and sometimes the magic will take highly original forms, but the emotional satisfaction in each story and in the anthology as a whole, remains true to the original vision. The release date will be November 2, 2018.




Deborah J. Ross: Tell us a little about yourself.  How did you come to be a writer?
Deirdre M. Murphy: When I was a kid, I felt like books were my best friends.  They brought me a lot of joy and led, in the end, to me being less lonely in real life and finding human friends who understood me.  I wanted to be one of the storytellers, to give those gifts forward, in part, and to, in a sense, play with the storytellers I’d admired for so long, whether or not I got to meet them in person.

DJR: What inspired your story in Sword and Sorceress 33?
DMM: A panel at a science fiction convention.  We were discussing monsters as metaphor, and there was one pretty obvious metaphor that hadn’t been used much, which combined with the thought that dysfunctional behaviors are often functional behaviors done wrong, or occasionally the function is just misunderstood.

DJR: What authors have most influenced your writing?  What about them do you find inspiring?
DMM: This question is too big for a short interview!  I love stories that surprise me, that make me think, that give me a window into a different world or into understanding people who are unlike me in some fundamental way. 


DJR: How does your writing process work?
DMM: I’m a night writer, mostly.  There’s something about the mystery of the darkness, and the quiet that happens when most people around me are dreaming that just works for me.  As to the stories themselves, sometimes I get a flash of imagery, or a character, or a situation and just sit down and write as fast as my fingers will go.  That’s delightful, when it happens, but a lot of the time it’s like anything worthwhile, there’s parts that are fun, parts that are fascinating and challenging, and parts that you just have to slog though.

DJR: What have you written recently? What lies ahead?
DMM: I’m currently working on a cozy mystery with sea monsters.  If that becomes popular, I’ll doubtless do more about the same characters. I’m fond of them.
If the cozy mystery doesn’t catch, I have some catkin characters in an alternate Chicago, who don’t know they have a city to save.  Yet.  I’m fond of them too, though I have fewer words invested in them so far.
I also have edits waiting for a YA novel about a girl and her snow-unicorns.  But right now, I’m having fun with my amateur sleuth just happening to be underfoot when the professionals have told her to leave the investigation to them.

DJR: Where else can readers find you?
DMM: I have a Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/Wyld_Dandelyon.  I put at least one “something new” there every week.  Sometimes it’s a photograph I took and an accompanying haiku, and other times it’s more elaborate.  I’ve put ficlets and character studies there for supporters, and I have some chapters of my Quirky Writer’s Guide to Courting Inspiration and Foiling Writer’s Block up there.   There’s a number of posts that are visible to the public, and some just for my supporters.  I am also Wyld_Dandelyon on Dreamwidth and twitter.

DJR: What advice would you give an aspiring writer?
DMM: Write.  Live.  Write some more.  Live some more.  Read.  Laugh.  Revise.  Send some random kindness and beauty out into the world.  Live deep and wide.  Keep writing.

Deirdre M. Murphy is a writer, poet, artist, and singer-songwriter whose first professionally published story appeared in Marion Zimmer Bradley's FANTASY Magazine.Since then her work has appeared in various venues including Crossed Genres; Trafficking in Magic, Magicking in Traffic; and Tails of the Pack. She is one of the primary creators of Torn World, with stories, art, and award-winning poetry set in an original science fantasy world at www.tornworld.net.

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