Today’s Pride Month interview is with author, editor and book designer Matthew Bright:
Hi, Matt! I hope you’re staying safe and healthy during the current pandemic lockdowns. What are you doing to stay creatively motivated in these unusual times?
Initially: nothing! The first month or so of all this craziness I managed to write precisely zero, through a combination of gloom and a sudden boom in day-job work as a result of the virus. But the gay men's writing group I belong to made the switch to Zoom and so I clawed my way through a few thousand words as a result of deadline panic for one of their sessions, and something clicked—the few thousand words has turned into the first thirty thousand of a novel that I've been mulling on for years. I think it's very much happening despite the times though!
Since June is Pride Month, I have to ask: how has being gay influenced or informed your writing, editing, and design work?
I studied writing at university and although it was a great course, study killed my desire to read and write (especially genre, the love of which had been stamped out of me a bit) for about three or four years after I finished, and I ended up coming back to it through discovering the Wilde Stories collection of gay speculative fiction, and when I started writing I was writing gay characters because they were what I knew. And mercifully I've caught the edge of the boom: the opportunity to write stories that include queer characters and be able to be published in high-profile magazines is huge. But to be honest I didn't really realise until putting together my collection last year how often I end up explicitly using spec-fic to explore parts of queer experience and history.
As for editing and design: for much of this it has been about professional opportunity, and over the many projects I've worked on I've found my way to what amounts to an ideology—which is pretty much: erotica is as valid a form of literature as anything else and I'm equally proud of my editing work on erotica anthologies as I am on my spec-fic ones—but I will never design a book that is just a naked torso on the cover!
You wear a number of different creative hats. Let’s talk about your writing first. Your collection Stories to Sing in the Dark was released last year by Lethe Press. What’s your writing process like? Are you a plotter, a pantser, somewhere in between?
I'm a muller! I guess it's somewhere in between – I tend to have ideas in my head (and they can be a start-to-finish story) that will suddenly collide. Nearly every story I've written has come from two things that I had half-fleshed out suddenly striking off each other in the right way and realising together they now make a complete story. I don't always know quite how it'll all fit together when I start writing—so I guess I'm a pantser in that regard—but if I've managed to actually keep myself writing to the end of a story it's probably because I had some kind of idea of where I was going. (Whether I end up there is a whole different matter. I don't believe any writer actually ends up with what they thought they were going to write, it's the weirdness of writing that you can end up both disappointed and pleasantly surprised by your finished article at exactly the same time.)
I’m always a bit curious as to how authors decide the order of stories in a collection, especially when the stories were originally published over a span of years and the collection includes new work as well. What was that process like for this collection?
This is one of my favourite games! For both the collection and my anthologies before this I put insane amounts of thought into them (and post it notes to shuffle around help too.) Stories starts with 'The Library of Lost Things', a story that was originally published in Tor so it's both a practical decision (if you've heard of me, it's likely because of that story) and because it is an accessible story that completely sets out the stall for the kind of thing I write—a bit queer, a bit ironic, a bit meta, a bit sad and a bit hopeful. Also it has talking rats that only speak in forgotten words. You should always start with a story that is exactly on the nose of what the reader expects for a collection. Second most important to pick is the last story – in an anthology it's good to end on one that fits the theme to a tee but is also a barnstormer of a story; for my collection I actually went with No Sleep In Bethlehem because it's the longest story of the collection, practically a novella. I'll let readers decide if it’s a barnstormer, but I was pretty proud of it. And then for the rest, it's a case of balancing so you don't have similar stories back to back, so that if you have stories that are a change in tone or content (in stories that's my noir version of Wind in the Willows called 'Croak Toad' and a pulp romp set in Egypt called 'Antonia and Cleopatra'). A good collection makes sure the next story is always different, without being so different it gives you whiplash.
As alluded to previously though, it was strange putting together work from across so many years of writing, but more so in that I realised they had somehow become a unified piece of writing when I had only ever thought of them as individual things. (There was also one story in particular – “Nothing To Worry About” that was over ten years old and was essentially rewritten completely, though that's the only one I edited from its original form. It remains perhaps the oddest fit for the collection still.)
You’ve edited a number of anthologies centered on gay themes, and were nominated for a Lambda Literary Award for Gents. What’s your process like for bringing an anthology of other authors’ work together, from concept to final ToC?
Be very clear on what you want—that's been the key with anthologies: and don't be afraid to spell it out in the call for submissions! For both erotica anthologies I've edited I was clear that I wanted stories that had characters. Yes, there would be sex, but I wasn't interested in just a who-put-what-where-and-how-hard story—I wasn't interested in, pun intended, nothing more than a blow-by-blow. With Gents I also knew I wanted to make sure that the historical setting was more than just set-dressing; the history of queers through that period is bizarre and fascinating, so I was looking for things that showed those. I rejected quite a number of good stories on the basis that they could have been set at any time in any place.
You've also got to have variety with anthologies—with Gents and Threesome before it I made my final selections on the basis of having a mix of genres and tone – they both run the gamut from serious to frivolous, and that's intentional. You have to be prepared to cut good stories that are just too close to others. And if you're missing something—if there's a gap in the collection you need filling—go looking for it. Ask someone to write it. They usually say yes.
You’re also a book designer (Inkspiral Design). I’ve never interviewed a book designer before, so this may be too broad a question, but: what goes into designing a book? What’s that process like?
A shedload of luck and a lot of experimentation.
If I'm dealing with someone on a freelance basis for the first time what I normally do is ask them to show me five covers they like that are similar to what they want me to achieve. It's not copying—it's just that despite their many gifts I find most authors and publishers are hopeless at communicating something they want to be visual. That shortcuts a vast amount of work.
But when it's actually just me and my screen trying to figure something out, I start with a rough idea of what genre and market I want to hit, and then I experiment until I have something in front of me that I can imagine on a bookshelf; I start with either a colour scheme or a central image and build out. Most times, it works. Sometimes I end up binning the whole thing and having to start again.
Despite everything I've just said there though, my favourite pieces of work I've created have been the ones that just wildly ignore the rules of the genre and what would probably be considered marketable and produced something totally different. But I've only been able to do that thanks to having worked with a couple of publishers for years enough that they trust me to let me do that. I'm grateful for that.
What are you working on now and what do you have coming out soon?
For the first: a novel, though it's a long, long way from done. It's a little different from my usual—the story of a group of found-family queers starting as a coming-of-age tale with them as teenagers, then told in five more sections, each five years on from the last, and each a different genre. The last section is an apocalypse novel of a sort, so I'm trying not to think about writing that one at the moment.
And as for 'coming out soon'... tragically, nothing! The Lambda nomination for Stories To Sing In The Dark would have absolutely been the perfect time to ride the momentum and be submitting and publishing, but procrastination and the world got the better of me, unfortunately. I'll never learn!
And finally, where can people find you and your work online?
You can find me at matthew-bright.com or @mbrightwriter on twitter, and if you fancy a gander at my design work you can find that at inkspiraldesign.co.uk.
Matthew Bright is a writer, editor and designer who's never too sure what order those go in. His short fiction has appeared in Tor.com, Nightmare's Queers Destroy Horror, Lightspeed, Glittership, Harlot Magazine, Clockwork Iris, Queen Mob's Teahouse and others, and can be found collected in the Lambda Literary Award Finalist Stories To Sing In The Dark (Lethe Press, 2019). He is also the editor of several anthologies, including The Myriad Carnival, Threesome, Clockwork Cairo: Steampunk Tales of Egypt and Lambda Literary Award Finalist Gents. He also works as a book designer as Inkspiral Design.