Realmantic Moments Interview
This interview and story excerpt were originally published by Lila Munro at Realmantic Moments. Her site is down, but I found the interview in her August 2011 archive in the Wayback Machine. I cleaned up the formatting a bit and put it here for archival purposes.- Has [y]our muse always known what genre you would eventually be published in?
- No, my muse started out in science fiction, then she strayed.
- Do you read your sub-genre consistently or do you prefer another?
- I still prefer to read science fiction, but I enjoy writing fantasy and romance. I tend to be much pickier about what I read in non-scifi genres and less willing to take chances on some unknown author.
- If you weren’t writing, what would your fantasy occupation be?
- Kept woman. (You did say fantasy.)
- Do you live near, or have you ever visited, the locations you use as settings in your works?
- I write about Boston sometimes, and sometimes about real places I've only googled, but most of my settings are imaginary. It's much easier than fact-checking, which is a real time sink for me.
- Where do you see brick and mortar book stores in five years?
- For rent.
- Do you put any stock in reviews or is reader feedback more important to you and why?
- I've gotten good reviews and not much reader feedback either way, so I prefer reviews by default.
- Where do you write? Home office, local Starbucks?
- Usually at home, unless I'm really cracking down--then at the library.
- Do you have mood music you write to? What are you top five picks?
- No, I end up tuning out everything when I'm writing (or reading), so I don't bother to put it on.
- Bubble baths or long, hot steamy showers?
- Bubble baths!
- Beach or mountains?
- Both.
- Chocolate, vanilla, or swirl cones?
- Vanilla
- Four wheel drives or sports cars?
- 4x4
[bio]
M. C. DeMarco lives near Boston, Massachusetts, where she writes speculative fiction after hours. She attended the Odyssey Fantasy Writing Workshop in 2004 and won the NESFA 2005 Science Fiction & Fantasy Short Story Contest. Her short stories have appeared in the Strange New Worlds 8, Strange New Worlds 10, and Paramourtal anthologies.
Current: "Sympathy From the Devil," in Paramourtal.
Upcoming: "Squirrels for Kali," in Magicking in Traffic.
"Paramour: a lover. Paramortal: a supernatural being. Together, they are Paramourtal, a collection of ten powerful paranormal romance stories. Suspenseful, heartwarming and scary as hell, they’ll grip your heart and haunt you for days."
Sympathy From the Devil by M.C. DeMarco
A short excerpt
Ariel couldn’t bear to watch. She put her head in her hands, covering her eyes. “Why couldn’t you resist temptation tonight?”
A gruff but strangely familiar voice replied, “He has to give in some night or other. Why not tonight?”
Ariel peeked through her fingers. Across the table from her sat a demon, who must have materialized while she wasn’t watching. Short horns poked out of his shaggy black hair. He grinned, showing his fangs but also an echo of a smile she’d once known.
“Forcas?”
“Long time no see, Ariel. What’s it been—a century? Two?”
“A thousand years,” she admitted.
“How time flies.”
She could hear his tail flicking back and forth like a whip beneath the round table, a stark contrast to his flat tone. Ariel forced herself to concentrate on her job. Sometimes you ran into a fallen angel at work. You just had to stake out your territory, not rehash the War in Heaven.
“Matt is still mine,” she told Forcas. “Get out of here.”
He nodded toward the redhead. “And Jenny is mine, so I’m staying.” A dark beer materialized in his hand, and he drained half of it in one gulp. Ariel glanced at the mortal couple. “She doesn’t look far gone enough to have her own guardian devil.”
“She’s freshly fallen. Your fellow there is her one-way ticket to the place where the worm dies not and the fire is not quenched.” Forcas took a swig of beer and belched steam, as if quenching his own inner fires.
Ariel absorbed the information. “She’s married?”
“Unhappily. Mr. Gagnon is out of town this week.”
Ariel let go of the edge of the table and sat up straight and righteous. “I suppose you people arranged that too.”
“Not at all. Jenny’s issues go all the way back to her deadbeat father. She replaced him with yet another ass, and now he’s out of town, so—”
“You’re tempting her to abandon her family.” Ariel sighed. As if the vagaries of life were not enough to lead mortals to sin.
“Perish the thought.” Forcas sat up straighter on his barstool, puffed up with devilish pride. “They don’t have kids, and she’s sinning just fine on her own. I’m just here to observe.”
Contact: ʇǝu˙oɔɹɐɯǝpɔɯ@pɔɯ
Purchase links:
