Dragon Soul Press took the time to interview Gray Stanback, an author featured in To Hunt and To Hold, A Death in the Night, Trickster, and Glitch.
- Introduce yourself.
- My name is Gray Stanback. I’m 30 years old and I’ve lived in North Carolina for most of that time. I’ve been writing, more or less, since I was in first grade, though it’s only been recently that I’ve had anything published.
- What prompted you to begin writing?
- There wasn’t really any one event that got me into writing. If you wanted to take it all the way back to the beginning, though, you could say it was in preschool, when I would often ask my parents to tell me stories. Of course, I had my own ideas about how I wanted those stories to go, but since I was only five years old I could not exactly write them down. But as I got older, I transferred my attention to writing stories of my own, and that drove me to eventually begin pursuing the hobby of writing. The real catalyst that made me realize a writer was what I wanted to be happened when I was in third grade, when I had gotten a LEGO model airplane as a gift. Some part of me decided that the airplane and its pilot mini-figure deserved a story, and in a short time I had written a ten-page story about him.
- Do you have a favorite story or poem you’ve written? What’s it about?
- My current personal favorite of the stories I have written so far is a short story I have published with another small-press published titled How Doth The Little Crocodile. It’s a sci-fi/horror story about colonists in an underwater settlement in the ocean of an alien planet, and it deals with the theme of autism, a condition I myself have.
- How many projects do you have planned over the next few years? Tell us about one.
- I have well over a dozen short stories planned out over the next several years, in addition to at least four novels in various stages of completion. Of these currently in-progress novels, my favorite is called Secrets of the Xenoscope. This is one of those novels that’s hard to describe, because as far as I know, there’s nothing else like it in existence. The best way I can summarize it is as a cross between The Shining and Jurassic Park— a haunted-house story involving undead dinosaurs. I’ve always been a bit obsessed with dinosaurs, ever since I was a kid, and I wanted to tell a new kind of story about them that didn’t just feel like a ripoff of Michael Crichton or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
- What is your writing process like?
- I’ve always been a very visual person, and when I write a story, I usually start with a picture– either one I’ve found or one I’ve drawn myself. I often don’t have the whole story plotted out when I draw the picture, but when I look at it, the story usually falls into place afterwards. It’s like doing a jigsaw puzzle; once you see the picture on the box, you start putting the pieces together, and you just keep building off it.
- Where do you draw inspiration from?
- It’s easier to say where I don’t draw inspiration from. My stories have drawn inspiration from other novels, movies, and even comic books and video games. I try to mix and match my influences so I don’t come off as copying any one work or creator. Hence why I’m writing, for example, a haunted-house horror novel involving dinosaurs– a combination that to my knowledge has never been done before.
- Who is your favorite author / what is your favorite book?
- My favorite author right now– in terms of novels, anyway– is Stephen King. In particular I love his Dark Tower series, which I consider to be the greatest fantasy series ever written by anyone. While I wouldn’t be so arrogant as to call myself the next Stephen King, his work has definitely influenced mine in its subject matter and even its writing structure.
- What is one goal you have for your writing future?
- My biggest goal as a writer in the near future is to have one of my stories published by one of the major publishing companies instead of a small-press publisher. I’ve already had a number of stories picked up by small publishers such as Dragon Soul, but my ultimate goal is to one day write the kind of book I can go to the bookstore and buy or check out from the library.
- What do you hope readers enjoy most from your work?
- What I hope readers enjoy most about my work is the amount of worldbuilding that I put into them. Since I write mainly in the science-fiction and fantasy genres, most of my stories take place in “constructed” settings, and the detail I put into making those settings is incredible. That includes everything from the background characters to the descriptions of the magic, the technology, the creatures, and the mythology that figure into the plot. Sometimes, in fact, I get so carried away with worldbuilding that I end up spending more time on it than I do actually planning out the story!
- Where can readers learn more about you?
- On my Facebook page and the official site of my Redbubble art.
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