A Point of Pride 2024: An Interview with John Linwood Grant

What inspired you to start writing?

I’ve always written, mostly for my own amusement, since I was a small child. To me, it was something you just ‘did’ - invented stories and fancies – and I sometimes found it odd that others didn’t. My own breakthrough moment was when I stopped drafting endless convoluted novels and went directly into writing short stories, novelettes, and novellas, most of which sold immediately. So I kept doing that.

A Point of Pride 2024: An Interview With Zachariah Jones

What has writing horror taught you about the world and yourself?

My first published works are paranormal horror mysteries that delve into the world of the occult and various other things. It has been wonderful to learn even more about our world’s history and, though I had already assumed, how many things within the horror genre are based on old beliefs and myths that were once rooted in a true story. Every story has a root in some experience at one point in time.

A Point of Pride 2024: An Interview with Lindsay King-Miller

What inspired you to start writing?

I’ve loved writing for so long I can’t remember starting! I was writing short stories at least as far back as second grade, maybe earlier. I’ve always been a voracious reader, and whenever I read something that I really love, I have to try to figure out how to do it myself.

A Point of Pride 2024: An Interview With Henry Corrigan

Who are some LGBTQ horror authors you recommend our audience check out?

I always recommend that people start with the classics. Oscar Wilde created one of the greatest psychological horror stories in The Picture of Dorian Gray. The gay subtext that is baked into Dorian’s relationships with the men of the book, their own self-hatred, and inability to admit their love, jealousy, and obsession for Dorian leads to terrible fates for the female characters. William J. Martin (formerly Poppy Z Brite) has written some of the best, most luscious stories I’ve ever read.

VIRTUAL: FLIPPING THE LID ON MENTAL ILLNESS IN HORROR StokerCon 2024 Panel Report

By Lee Murray Trigger Warning: This article addresses mental illness.  For this panel, held in the virtual space, I had the honour to be joined by panellists L.E. (Lauren Elise) Daniels, Lauren McMenemy, John Palisano, and Angela Yuriko Smith to discuss tools and techniques for addressing mental illness in horror, including fresh approaches for depictions that are authentic and affective. The discussion was guided by the tenets of the HWA Mental Health Initiative Charter. For information, the charter appears on the dedicated webpage on the HWA website, via a link at the end of this article, and is also printed…

A Point of Pride 2024: An Interview with Sofia Ajram

What inspired you to start writing?

My pre-teen years were limned to AOL chat room roleplays and Livejournal blogging. Role-playing has a kink connotation to it (unless you worked in retail, by which, it’s the hellish exercise you’re coached with to practice customer service scenarios), but before websites like FanFiction.net or AO3 were popularized, roleplaying was the sort of way you’d collaboratively generate stories.

A Point of Pride 2024: An Interview With Sirius

Who are some of your favorite LGBTQ characters in horror?

Most of my favorites are the ones I have written because they are the types of characters that I want to see and don’t really find anywhere else yet. Aside from my own though, it may be considered ‘typical’ of me, but I really like the characters from "The Vampire Chronicles" by Anne Rice. They are all so complex and morally gray, and all so damn charismatic.

A Point of Pride 2024: An Interview with Rory Michaelson

What inspired you to start writing?

Writing came to me in my teens because none of the mainstream media I had access to included people like me, so I started making up my own stories. That makes it sound like an inspiring turn of events but really it was section 28 in the UK (prohibition of “promotion of homosexuality”) which was a horror story in itself that did significant harm to many people, and one we’re currently seeing repeated.

A Point of Pride 2024: An Interview With Robert Stahl

What was it about the horror genre that drew you to it?

It’s often about the beauty of the prose, but also It’s all about that adrenaline rush, yeah? I love that horror makes me feel something. You know, that “on the edge of your seat” feeling, with your heart pumping, the hair on your arm standing on end and your palms getting all clammy. Being scared is thrilling. It lets you know you’re alive.

A Point of Pride 2024: An Interview with Rob Costello

What inspired you to start writing?

I’m an only child. When I grew up, I spent a lot of time on my own making up stories. With my legos and stuffed animals, I would while away entire weekends in perfect bliss concocting elaborate dark fantasy worlds involving aliens, ghosts, and monsters. (Godzilla was a particular favorite.) Eventually, the toys disappeared, but the stories stuck around.

A Point of Pride 2024: An Interview With Ria Hill

How do you feel the LGBTQ community has been represented thus far in the genre and what hopes do you have for representation in the genre going forward?

So in a lot of ways, there have been massive improvements in the last couple of decades. Where before we had Buffalo Bill and other such characters whose queerness is portrayed as a sort of villainy, now we’re getting a wild array of queer characters (often created by queer authors!) and this is wonderful news.

A Point of Pride 2024: An Interview with Pixie Bruner

What inspired you to start writing?

It’s a cliché, but some of my first friends were books and book characters. It’s still true. I was always creating stories and narratives in my head. Plus, they kept giving me crayons and pencils as a little kid and wanted me to use them. I was inspired by the power of words to take me places, to evoke emotions, to escape reality. I wanted to share my inner worlds and stories.

A Point of Pride 2024: An Interview With Petra Kuppers

How do you feel the LGBTQ community has been represented thus far in the genre and what hopes do you have for representation in the genre going forward?

I just want to see a lot more writing where the trans, queer, or disabled character is the detective–not the monster. Or if they are the monster–make it a super delicious, seductive, world-devouring one.

NUTS & BOLTS: Interview with Publisher, Editor, and Mentor Joe Mynhardt

Publishing great horror authors proved more rewarding than he’d imagined,

so Crystal Lake Entertainment founder and CEO Joe Mynhardt took it a step further. He’s expanded what started as a small press into “a platform for launching careers.” In that spirit, Crystal Lake’s recent two-volume Shadows and Ink writing guide serves as a comprehensive education course for aspiring horror authors. In this month’s edition of Nuts & Bolts, Joe has agreed to share some advice on what beginning writers should know. 

A Point of Pride 2024: An Interview with Nora B. Peevy

What inspired you to start writing?

I was a quiet child and came from a family of readers. I was also a child who had really bad asthma and allergies at a time when medicine hadn’t advanced enough to be enough of some help for five-year-old little me, which is when I started to entertain myself when I was in bed sick by writing my own stories and drawing illustrations for them.

Point of Pride 2024: An Interview With N. J. Gallegos

What inspired you to start writing?

Working in the ER during the COVID pandemic was difficult, seeing all the suffering and death. My spirit was broken. I was so burned out/anxious/depressed and needed something to work towards to put a spark back in me. While cleaning our basement, I came across a bucket list I wrote in college. On that list? Write a novel. I decided to go for it.

A Point of Pride 2024: An Interview with M. Kate Allen

What inspired you to start writing?

I began writing in a diary at age ten. Exploring my thoughts at length without the pressure of interacting with someone else appealed to me. Writing gave me a safe medium for exploring my thoughts and interests. In eighth grade, I wrote fiction in English class and found it intensely absorbing.

Point of Pride 2024: An Interview With Leanbh Pearson

What inspired you to start writing?

I was someone who always wrote fiction and poetry from an early age as an emotional outlet. I was always ‘different’ as a child and bullied. So, the very act of transporting my mind into another story, character, and events was - and still is - a way to deal with emotions at the end of each day. It is escapism as its heart and telling a story that is uniquely mine.

A Point of Pride: An Interview with Laramie Dean

What inspired you to start writing?

I’ve always wanted to be a writer, from the moment I first learned to read. After I realized I could (and then did, all the time, voraciously), I decided I wanted to write my own stories. I started reading Stephen King at an obscenely young age—it was the 80s; I think there are lots more kids like me who cut our fangs on It and The Tommyknockers—and when he sent me an autographed copy of the Cycle of the Werewolf/Silver Bullet screenplay when I was eight, that was it. I had to be a writer.

Point of Pride 2024: An Interview With Jill Baguchinsky

What has writing horror taught you about the world and yourself?

About myself? I really like scaring people, heh. I’ve had a few people tell me my work gave them nightmares, and I’m probably prouder of that than I should be. About the world? The world is full of scary things, but it’s possible to get through those things, to process them, to move past them. Sometimes it takes a lot of creativity, and maybe a dark sense of humor, but it can be done.