I’ve always felt odd about other writers saying that-we make our characters, we are in control! But now I have to eat garbage-crow, because Tetley just appeared in my skull like Athena, determined to crack her way out. Tetley was her own self from the jump, and I just followed where she led. The voice arrived in my head with the first line of the short story and simply never left. How did you know you had the voice right? Was it difficult coming back to that specific voice after the initial novelette? First off, The Past is Red was so far my favorite book of the year, and a large part of that was Tetley’s voice. I was thrilled to get a chance to interview her. Her newest, Comfort Me With Apples, a genre-defying not-quite-horror not-quite-thriller not-quite-fairytale comes out November 9th. Her most recent, The Past Is Red, a post-climate change story of the last of humanity sailing on a pile of floating garbage, has been my favorite book I’ve read this year. Because I think we’re all tired at this point….”Ĭatherynne Valente is the author of over twenty books, several novellas, and a long list of short fiction. I’m still tired! Which I think is weirdly serving me pretty well! The tired balances out my predilection for purple prose and makes everything run damn smooth and just terribly accessible.

But also, to be blunt, I had had a baby about a year before and I was just tired. I think the stripped-down style was also helped by two things: one, I had done some media tie-in work recently, which requires pulling back on my own signature stylings quite a bit, so I was in good practice. valente “…I wrote Apples very quickly, it was very much all there before I set one word to paper.

Death in venice by thomas mann