Thursday's Interview - Pamela Kinney

Today's interview is with Pamela Kinney, another eclectic writer. I met her at EPICon in Williamsburg this year and enjoyed learning about her various journeys in the fictional world.


I write horror, urban fantasy, Y.A. (writing on a YA paranormal now), science fiction, fantasy, poetry, and nonfiction ghost books.


2. Did you choose your genre or did it choose you?
I write what I like to read.


3. Is there any genre you'd like to try? Or is there one you wouldn't?
Maybe mystery one day. I have no interest to do literary fiction.



4. What fiction do you read for pleasure?

Horror, urban fantasy, Y.A., science fiction, fantasy, poetry, paranormal romance, historical romance, romance, and nonfiction ghost books.

5. Tell me a bit about yourself and how long you've been writing,
I have been making up stories since I was eight years old, but was first published when I was 17, for three poems, “The Horse,” “Leopard,” and “Sands of Time” in Hyacinths and Biscuits Poetry magazine. I was paid for them, which was cool to a teenager. Several months later the magazine published another three poems of mine.


6. Which of your characters is your favorite?
Of my fiction? Gosh, most of those are short stories, though I do have an urban fantasy now to start querying agents on. I think in the U.F. it would be Larry, the demon shaped like a large eyeball (size of a poodle). He gives new meaning in there’s now eye drops in Hell. Of my short stories in Spectre Nightmares and Visitations, it would be the werewolf in ‘Werewolf for Hire” and the alien ‘redneck’ in “Redneck.” Actually, I like all the characters in my short stories. It’s like asking a mother to pick a favorite child.


7. Are there villains in your books and how were they created?
There is in my unpublished urban fantasy—mainly, demons, and an angel gone bad. In my horror stories, there are a lot of scary “villains” in my tales.


8. What are you working on now?
A Young Adult paranormal/urban fantasy, plus the last edits and getting it altogether, my last and fourth nonfiction ghost book, Haunted Richmond II, to be sent off to Schiffer Publishing by beginning of April 2011.


9. What's your latest release and how did the idea arrive?
Spectre Nightmares and Visitations. I had some stories that been published in magazines, anthologies, and online zines and the rights to them mine again, plus loads of new stories. So when my editor at Under the Moon asked for something from me, Pamela K. Kinney, and not my pseudonym, Sapphire Phelan, I sent her the collection.

In July 2011, I will have a new nonfiction ghost book released, Haunted Historic Triangle: Williamsburg, Yorktown, Jamestown, and Other Haunted Locations published by Schiffer Publishing (www.schifferbooks.com).


10. Tell me about your latest book and how it came about. Enclose the opening of the book around 400 words.

Since Spectre Nightmares and Visitations is it, giving you not the first page, which is about it, but the poem, “Been Warned” and the first short story, “Werewolf for Hire.”





Been Warned


Darkness roamed
like a threadbare black cat—
Bad luck for the luckless.
No moon lighting my path,
Stars neither,
Only the whisper
of a cool autumn breeze.
I hurried home,
but slipped on damp rocks.
Caught myself
just in
time; pushed on.
Roots snaked out
hooked my ankle,
Damn it!
tripped me,
knocked the breath out.
Scrabbled to my knees. . .
What the hell. . .
A rancid odor on the night air,
Like something dead
for a long, long time.
They’d warned me
back at the bar.
Told me to beware,
Other innocents on
other nights,
stolen away:
never seen again.
No evidence,
no bodies.
They say whatever,
whoever
behind those other nights,
still waited for
another victim.
No one in the village
ever left
the safety of indoors,
when night slithered in.
Except, one foolish hiker
who didn’t believe,
not in urban legends.
At least . . .
not until now.





Werewolf for Hire
It was after sunset and the unemployment office was still open. A tall young man with long brown hair walked in. He went up to an empty window where on the other side an unemployment clerk stood, looking bored. The clerk looked up when he heard the footsteps stop and smiled automatically.
“How may I help you?”
“I need a job,” the young man said.
“Well, that’s what we’re here for. Your qualifications?”
“Well... I’m five-hundred years old. I like to howl at the full moon, eat little children–they’re sweeter-tasting than adults–dance in graveyards, and, in general... be the werewolf I am!”
“Yeah-right! Sir, your teeth look a little sharp. I really think you need to see a dentist.”
“Oh, for those good old days! That’s when I used to go to parties at the mausoleum, dance with other werewolves and she-ghouls, and have a howling good time.”
“Sir, you seem to be getting hairy. I think you need a shave.”
The young man sighed and shrugged his shoulders.
“I really need a job. It’s hard to be scary these days. It used to be that I would just howl, and people would get the shivers. But nowadays if I howl all I ever get is an old shoe thrown at me.”
“Sir, you’re getting a tail–I think.”
“I’m a has-been, a–”
“I do believe I see a full moon rising,” the clerk broke in with a frown etched on his face, “and by my watch it’s also time to close. Let me get another appointment for you.”
The loup-garou, whose shape seemed to be changing, and long silky hair sprouting over his face and body, stared out a nearby window. The sky had deepened into shadows of the night, an unrelenting shade of black. The only light that bathed the scene came from the round yellow moon that risen high in the sky. The shape shifter’s face longitudinally metamorphosed into a wolfish snout. He turned back to the clerk writing on an appointment card and who seem unaware of what was transpiring.
“Sir, I think it’s time for you to leave, but here’s an appointment time for you to come–”
“Grrrrrrrrrrrr–”
“Ahhhhhhhhh!”
* * *
The unemployment clerk patted his bulging belly and picked his teeth with a toothpick. He completely changed into a large black wolf that loped away, leaving the building. The doors closed shut behind him, locking securely for the night.

Pamela K. Kinney
http://FantasticDreams.50megs.com
http://PamelaKKinney.blogspot.com
http://www.facebook.com/people/Pamela-K-Kinney/100000470673866



Be prepared to take a journey into Pamela K. Kinney's fantastic dreams of horror, science fiction and fantasy, plus the ghosts and legends of two nonfiction ghost books, Haunted Richmond, Virginia and Haunted Virginia: Legends, Myths and True Tales.