Dragon Soul Press had the opportunity to interview Dr. Laura Q. Jimenez, an author featured in Imperial Devices and Rogue Waves.

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1. Introduce yourself.
   • Dr. Laura Q. Jimenez has always been fascinated by how the world works. As a child,
     she collected books on our solar system, dinosaurs, plants–anything she could get her
     hands on, really. She also collected frogs, shiny rocks, and bird feathers. Her mother was
     not too pleased about the outside coming inside, and encouraged more sanitary habits.
     Laura lived inside her head, dreaming up explanations to the phenomena around her,
     scenarios to explore, and wondrous worlds to visit. One day, she started writing them
     down, and has never really stopped.
     
     Now she’s a tenured professor of kinesiology at a small state institution in the heartland
     of Virginia. She teaches and conducts research on the way humans work and function by
     day, and writes fantastical novels, short stories, and poetry at every other time. Her work
     is guided by curiosity, by asking big questions that don’t have easy answers.
     
     She writes primarily science fiction, fantasy, and horror. Her short fiction has appeared in
     a Dragon Soul Press anthology, and her dieselpunk-fairytale Piper was the editor’s top
     choice for that year. Her poetry has also appeared in the Horror Writers of
     America Poetry Showcase.
     
     She’s one of those rare breeds who is not afraid to speak in front of crowds, as her
     scientific career has seen her lecture and present to groups ranging from 10 to 100 people,
     on topics including habits of well-being, mental health, and physical performance, among
     others. She is a member of the Board of Directors for James River Writers and a
     Municipal Liaison for the Richmond chapter of NaNoWriMo, and is always looking for
     opportunities to get involved in her community.
2. What prompted you to begin writing?
   • I’m not sure at what point I seriously started to think about being a writer. As a kid, my
     favorite thing in the world was to get lost in daydreams. I’d disappear into my own head,
     sometimes for days at a time, and only re-emerge when that particular adventure ran its
     course. At some point in my pre-teen years, I worried that I would forget the wild and
     wondrous tales I dreamt up, so I started writing them down and never stopped. It
     probably wasn’t until a few years later, in high school, that the idea of being someone
     who writes professionally occurred to me.
3. Do you have a favorite story or poem you’ve written? What’s it about?
   • My favorite poem of mine is probably “Tragic Storm,” a pantoum-style poem that was
     published in the Horror Writers of America Poetry showcase almost a decade ago. [A
     pantoum is a poem of any length, composed of four-line stanzas in which the second and
     fourth lines of each stanza serve as the first and third lines of the next stanza. The last line
     of a pantoum is often the same as the first.]
     
     In the poem, a young woman runs through a rose-hedge maze, fleeing from an un-named
     threat, during a thunderstorm. At the center of the maze, she finds an abandoned well and
     the eye of the storm. Then, after a moment of calm, the woman finds her doom in a bright
     flash of lightning, and the red of bright roses in the first line becomes the startling shade
     of blood in the last.
4. How many projects do you have planned over the next few years? Tell us about one.
   • I suffer from the very common condition of SHINY-syndrome. Bright new story ideas
     are always pestering my brain with appealing novelty, especially once a project I’ve been
     working on for a bit loses some of its initial excitement. So at any given moment, I
     probably have half a dozen works in progress.
     
     Currently, I’m in the middle of revising an urban fantasy that centers on a not-so-young
     woman who is slowly cracking like a porcelain doll but instead of blood, the split skin
     reveals solid gold underneath. All she knows is that she’s experiencing a sudden thirst for
     violence, that a smiling demon keeps crossing her path, and that she might be falling in
     love with the girl next door. Now she must race against time to figure out what is
     happening to her and how to stop it before she crumbles into so many shiny shards.
5. What is your writing process like?
   • My process almost always starts with a fun what-if scenario, or a strange dream that
     won’t leave me alone, like a hungry worm in the brain. I typically spend a few weeks to a
     few months daydreaming and mentally fleshing out the idea, long before I ever set
     fingers to keys (I do not write by hand. Even I can’t read this chicken scratch). Once I
     feel I have a solid enough grasp on the story, I tend to create a first draft very, very
     quickly. To the tune of a NaNoWriMo-esque sprint that can last anywhere from 30 days
     to 4 months. Once I reach the end, I usually need a serious break from the project and
     tend to work on other things or just recharge. Most likely I’m taking a month or three off
     from the book at that point. When I return, I read the whole thing straight through, at least
     once, and start aggressively taking notes on what needs to be changed, reworked, or
     fixed. Revision is a slow and meticulous process for me and by far takes me the most
     time. It’s not my favorite, so it tends to drag for me. I’ll add or change scenes, dive into
     clunky dialog, improve world-building, before finally tinkering with the prose to make it
     sing.
     
     That’s for novels, anyway. Short stories like the kind that have appeared in Dragon Soul
     Press Anthologies still work the same way, but on a highly compressed time-scale. I tend
     to daydream for perhaps only a week or so, draft the entire thing in another week, and
     edit over the coming month.
     
     You’ll notice that there is no mention of outlines in this answer. I do some planning,
     though it mostly happens as I draft, most often in a slipshod way, like leaving bread
     crumb notes for my future self.
     
     Gummy bears help.
6. Where do you draw inspiration from?
   • This is like when readers ask writers where our ideas come from. It’s a difficult question
     to answer without sounding trite or dismissive, but I will do my best to be at least honest,
     even if I can’t prevent sounding trite.
     
     Inspiration is everywhere, in the way a flashlight beam reflects off the eyes of a wolf, or
     the delicious frisson of a new song with a heavy beat. Intrusive shower thoughts. A
     snippet of an out-of-context overheard conversation. The delightful ramblings of a
     toddler.
     
     Most of us might smile or chuckle at the surprise of a moment. Writers fall down the
     rabbit hole of possibility, then jot it all on a nearby CVS receipt.
     
     Which means the only difference between playing around and art (just like with science),
     is writing it down.
7. Who is your favorite author/What is your favorite book?
   • This is one of those questions that I’m fairly certain every author and reader gets all the
     time. And on a good day, I might even be able to provide a decent answer. But every time
     I get this question, my brain does that thing where all of a sudden I can’t remember the
     names of a single author or book that has ever existed in the history of Goodreads. There
     are just about an infinite number of stories out there, how on earth do you choose?
     There are authors and books that have influenced me greatly, who have probably shaped
     the writer I am today. Chuck Wendig’s Miriam Black books. Peter S. Beagle’s The Last
     Unicorn. Just about everything Stephen King, especially The Dark Tower. N. K.
     Jemisin’s everything, though especially the Broken Earth trilogy. Neil Gaiman’s entire
     bibliography, especially Sandman and Neverwhere. Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles.
     More recently, Tamsyn Muir’s Locked Tomb trilogy (Lesbian Necromancers In Space, I
     mean, come on!).
     
     I could go on for the next three months and not name everything I love that is both old
     news by now and/or being currently published. My weird and dark heart loves weird and
     dark stories. The weirder and darker, the better.
8. What is one goal you have for your writing future?
   • I have had some decent success publishing poetry and short stories, but I have yet to
     break into the longform market. My goal for the future is to complete several of the
     various (shiny) novel-length projects I have cooking and get those out into the world in
     front of their destined audience, whether the traditional or indy route. I have found a
     wonderful, supportive, and knowledgeable group of fellow writers across various genres
     who have been just so amazing in offering to beta-read and otherwise share their insight
     into the market and publishing industry, and with friends like that in our corner, truly
     nothing is off limits or out of reach.
     
     If you haven’t found a critique group yet, or even just a group of friends willing to be
     honest with you as well as lift you up, I cannot recommend it highly enough. Look into
     your local writing community for your birds of a feather. And then, as you perhaps get to
     read my books, I’ll get to read yours, too.
9. What do you hope readers enjoy most from your work?
   • Whenever I put a story out into the world, what I want most for my readers is to feel
     something as they enjoy the story. Sure, I want you to like my work, but even if you’re
     not entirely happy with it, so long as you felt something, I’m satisfied. Whether that
     something is joy, sadness, disgust, anger, or a cringing second-hand embarrassment as
     you perhaps remember a moment from your own life almost as awkward as what I just
     made you read, is truly the highest praise I could ask for. I once had a reader leave me a
     comment that they were so upset at a scene I’d written, they had to put the book down
     and go to bed for the night. It’s been years and I’m still riding that high.
10. Where can readers learn more about you?
    • On my website, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and Amazon.