Today’s Pride Month interview is with author SA Hunt:
Hi, Samara! I hope you’re staying safe and healthy during the current events. What are you doing to stay creatively motivated in these unusual times?
Self-care, self-care, self-care. Love, both for myself and from my friends. Really, you can read all the books you want, or watch all the TV, play all the games, but if you feel bad, you’re not gonna produce anything. Take care of yourself so the words can come out.
Since June is Pride Month, I have to ask: how has being transgender influenced or informed your writing?
First, it has made me profoundly more aware of the trials and tribulations of being transgender. It has introduced me to a whole new world of terror and paranoia that I’d never experienced before, not even during my year in Afghanistan, and a level of wonder and confidence I never could have dreamed of.
Second, it’s nothing short of astonishing watching my body and face change under the effects of the estrogen. I would almost say it’s sort of a form of body-modification. Six months in, the shape and texture of my face have changed to become more rounder and softer. All of the fat gain in my body has redistributed itself to a more feminine shape.
I say both of those things because I am a huge believer in the adage “Write what you know.”
Most people don’t understand what WWYK actually means, they think it means that you can only write things that you’re familiar with, or that you do for a living. They think WWYK means that plumber authors can only write plumber characters, or that they can’t write about exotic things that no one can experience, like meeting an alien disguised as a human, crashing a hovercraft into a cyberpunk city, or having your body torn apart by a monster. I’ve seen people reply with, “No! Write what you don’t know!” and I’m like, “But that’s what it really means! Use what you do know to write what you don’t.”
Write What You Know means to use the emotions and sensations you’ve experienced throughout your life to inform your writing, and infuse it with more authenticity, more depth, more tactility. Take your own pain, your own joy, your sorrow, your anger, and feed it to your characters. Let your characters feel it, and through them, your readers.
You don’t know what it’s like to crash a hovercraft into a cyberpunk skyscraper? Maybe not, but you’ve crashed a real car.
You remember the screech of the bumper ripping into the guardrail. You remember the flash as the reflection of your headlights gleamed on steel. The BOOM of the impact rippling through the entire car, rattling your bones, slamming the oxygen out of your lungs. The cold rush as the windshield smashed, letting in a gust of night air, and the feeling of being peppered with broken glass. You can translate all those sensations into the context of a hovercraft crashing into a futuristic skyscraper.
And the unique experience of being transgender has given me very valuable life experience that I can now use in my writing.
The creeping paranoia of walking around public spaces in a dress and makeup, feeling vulnerable, wondering who around me hates me and is currently fantasizing about hurting me—that could very well be used to inform a body-snatchers-style alien takeover scenario, or an espionage thriller where anybody could be a spy, or an action-drama involving racial violence, where any one of the hundreds of people I see every day might be a violent racist.
Or I could just go back to the source and write a transwoman protagonist.
And then: I’ve found sheer joy and amazement in watching my excruciatingly slow transformation into a woman and realizing my new body and confidence effect the people around me—seeing men feel attracted to me, having women say they love my dress, or that they’re jealous of my eyeshadow. I think it could translate to the feeling of, for example, psychically inhabiting an advanced android body, or realizing I’m developing incredible superpowers, or slowly becoming a werewolf, or something.
Something. Part of writing what you know is knowing and feeling where and when to use your memories to fill in your narrative. And in being transgender, I’ve collected some truly unique memories and advantages when it comes to WWYK.
You were in the military, both as military police and as a transportation coordinator in the Afghanistan theatre. Thank you for your service. Transgender folks serving in the military has obviously been a controversial topic under the current administration, but there’s a long history of anti-trans sentiment within and outside of the military (as I’m typing these questions, author JK Rowling has once again tweeted trans-exclusionary opinions on social media, for instance). I don’t seem to have a real question here, but I’d love to hear your thoughts on the state of trans-visibility and acceptance and what needs to happen to improve the situation.
Well, as I’m typing this, Trump’s administration has just stripped transgender people of protections in healthcare, potentially crippling our ability to find medical care without being prejudiced against. I feel like there are two extremes: people that just outright hate our guts—sometimes literally—and people that accept us and to a certain extent love us.
Honestly I don’t know how to improve public perception and acceptance of transgender people other than to keep normalizing positive acceptance.
Normalize the hell out of it. Keep encouraging people—especially young people—to explore their own gender expression, give them safe environments to do so in, and help them find the resources they need to express their chosen gender adequately. Keep encouraging cisgender people to treat us with respect and compassion, and reward them for their efforts with love and acknowledgement. The more mundane and everyday that trans acceptance becomes, the harder it will be to antagonize and oppose it.
Switching back to your writing: what inspires you, and what does your creative process look like?
I’m inspired by all kinds of things, really: conversations with friends, dreams, daydreams. Mostly daydreams. It helps to be bored—we have some of our best ideas when we’re bored. Which is why our minds go into overdrive when we’re in the shower, or sitting on the toilet, or lying in the bed trying to fall asleep. That’s the creative side of our brain trying to get cranked up.
My creative process: when I’m drafting, I get up and shower and shave, put on some clothes, then putter around and eat breakfast until it’s time to start work. Then I turn off the internet, open my project, and get to work.
I’ll work until my timer goes off, several hours, then put it away for the day and I don’t touch it until it’s time to work again. I’ve found that holding myself to the rules only work during worktime, and do not work during downtime helps keep me from getting burned out, and maintains a certain level of anticipation and excitement for the craft. Also, I try to stop working mid-sentence so I have something to get me going when I come back.
The absolute biggest thing is eliminating distractions. Eat, poop, do all the chores on your downtime. If you have self-control issues, set parental controls on your internet router that kick you offline for a certain period of time every day. Put your smartphone in the mailbox so you won’t pick it up and start messing with it.
Editing is another matter entirely. Usually I don’t bother turning the internet off, I just sit and read the manuscript and listen to music. It’s the Chill Phase.
What are you working on now and what do you have coming out soon?
Outlaw King 4, Malus Domestica 4, and a scifi John Carpenter homage that takes place in a nuclear winter caused by a war in the 1980s, so everything is technologically congruent with that era. As for what I have coming out soon, Malus 2 (“I Come With Knives”) and Malus 3 (“The Hellion”) release in mid-July and mid-September, respectively.
And finally, where can people find you and your work online?
The best place is probably sahuntbooks.com.
S. A. Hunt is the author of the Malus Domestica horror-action series from Tor Books, beginning with BURN THE DARK (Jan 2020). In 2014, Samara won Reddit's /r/Fantasy "Independent Novel of the Year" Stabby Award for her Outlaw King fantasy gunslinger series. She is an Afghanistan veteran (OEF 2010), a coffee enthusiast, a fervent bicyclist, and she currently lives in Petoskey, Michigan.