Emily talks with horror author Nicole Wolverton about women in horror, her book The Trajectory of Dreams, and the upcoming menopause-themed horror short story anthology that she is editing with Sliced-Up Press.

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Foreign Welcome to the hybrid pub Scout

podcast, mapping the publishing frontier with stories of

publishing past, conversations with publishing professionals of

today and peeks into Publishing's future. I'm Emily

einerlander, and today's guest is Nicole Wolverton. Nicole M

Wolverton is a Philadelphia based writer of fiction and

nonfiction. She predominantly writes horror for adults and

young adults. Her short fiction has been published in a variety

of literary magazines and anthologies, including the

upcoming the half that you see anthology from dark ink books.

She is also the author of psychological thriller, the

trajectory of dreams, biting duck press 2013 a full list of

her publications can be found on nicolewolverton.com Nicole was

recently chosen as editor of bodies full of burning, a

menopause themed anthology of short horror fiction to be

published in September 2021 by sliced up press. She is a member

of SCBWI and the horror Writers Association, and she is

represented by Ann Tibbetts at the Donald moss literary agency.

Aside from Nicole's preoccupation with faceless

things waiting in the dark and other terrors, she is a gin

enthusiast and obsessed with travel. She has visited

approximately 21 countries, and is eagerly looking forward to

the pandemic easing so she can get back on a plane. She is an

assistant coach of a dragon boat team for people who have had

cancer and their caregivers, and is running for judge of

elections in her borough this year. She earned her BA in

English from Temple University when she was 40, and is

currently pursuing a Masters of liberal arts with a creative

writing concentration from the University of Pennsylvania. She

has been married for 20 years, and she and her husband have two

cats. Welcome Nicole. Thank you. What are your What are your cats

names? That's important on this show. I understand

I have two cats. The the oldest one's name

is Mayor McCheese. Mayor McCheese. Mayor McCheese.

He's a big fluffy cat, big fluffy orange cat. So

appropriate for that. The youngest cat's name is Smithers.

Oh, of course. You know Smithers lives up to the name entirely.

If you know the Simpsons very servile, sort of in a very

asshole ish way,

awesome, awesome.

So Nicole, how did you become a horror fan, and how did you

nurture that fandom into participation in creating art in

the genre. Over the years, I read in another interview that

it all started with watching a certain gateway horror film at a

very young age.

So my father was not a responsible parent, and let's

just leave it at that. But when I was about five or six, he

loaded my brother and I into his band and took us to the drive in

and we saw the exorcist.

Oh no, I didn't mean to do that.

So I grew up in a really rural area, and the drive

in theater was in the middle of nowhere, so we're sitting in

this van watching The Exorcist

in the middle of the woods. And I was a little

too young to really understand exactly what was

going on, but it clearly traumatized me in the best of

ways. All these years later, The Exorcist remains one of my

favorite films,

and from there,

let's just say that I grew up with a warped sense of

humor and a love of horror movies, including writing. When

I was a kid like maybe in, let's say, first grade, I drew little

stories and told them about my

my imaginary friend who had knives for

fingers. Oh, I bet your parents loved that.

I'm really excited, though, because the project

that's upcoming for me, next month, the half that you don't

see has a short story in there that involves my imaginary

friend.

What was your imaginary friend's name? Mona.

Mona, oh, my god, Mona with the knives her fingers

and so it's, it is literally the imaginary

friend named. Named Mona is in the story, I love it.

That's so nice of you.

So much honoring of Mona in your past. I

adore that deserves it. I had a I had a monster. It wasn't my

imaginary friend, but it was a monster that I would draw called

the Fon Santo. Don't know why it was called that. But then later,

I was like, sounds a lot like Monsanto, my activist.

Man, oh, my God, you were

a trailblazer. I just

got an amazing idea. But all right, um, so I

read your book, the trajectory of dreams a few years back, and

really enjoyed it. And it features a sleep lab technician

who breaks into astronauts homes to monitor their sleep, which

strikes me as a very interesting and very specific promise, and I

would love to know where it came from,

so you can you can blame Mary Roach entirely for

this.

Oh, okay, that explains everything. Yeah, if

you've

ever read any of Mary Roach's books, you know, she

writes science from a kind of a tongue in cheek

kind of perspective. I mean, serious but

still tongue in cheek. So I read packing for Mars, and

there's a lot of talk in the book about the

psychological testing the astronauts go through in order

to qualify to be astronauts. And in the book, she also mentions

the Lisa Nowak incident, right? You know, and sort of it got me

thinking about, sort of what sort of testing is involved in

terms of psychological testing, but also this woman didn't sleep

for what, like 24 hours when she was driving across country,

right, right? So I got to wondering about sleep patterns,

and my imagination took over from there, as it does.

Well, it's always nice when there's

something that people haven't really seen before in horror, I

guess that's I don't think of, like the the monitoring

astronauts in their sleep trope. Oh, that old chestnut.

You know, we try to come up with some interesting

things.

So are you aiming to write more novels, or

do you prefer the short story format? I am always

writing novels. I've been agented for, I guess, maybe

a little over a decade at this point, and I've been mostly

writing in the YA

horror sort of space. And

you know, I've been out on submission a few times, and

it just hasn't worked out. It's the whole thing. I was talking

about this earlier today on Twitter with the bird bodies

full of burning project I'm working on, right? You get these

novels or these stories, and you might get, I don't know, like,

three or four things that are similar, and you can't accept

every single thing that you get that you love, right? Because

maybe they're similar. And, you know, I've run into that a few

times. When I was on submission, an editor would love my my

story, and it just was maybe a little too similar to something

they already had on their list, and they couldn't take it, which

was heartbreaking, because, you know, it's it's great that your

work is resonating with someone, but at the same time, it's so

very sad that,

yeah, no,

I agree. Being rejected sometimes feels like,

even if they give you a reason like that, that maybe they're

just lying to save your feelings. But then when you do

the actual like, editing and selecting process. You're like,

No, it's true. Like, I really like all of these things, and I

wish I could pick them all completely.

It's It's interesting. It's an interesting experience

to see this from the editorial point of view, for sure.

Yeah, and this is the first time that you're

doing it from the editorial point of view, all right. Yeah.

Keep talking about it. How did this? How did this come about?

Like serendipitously? So I have a short story in

sliced up presses anthology called slasher tort. I have the

book behind me. And if you've read slasher tort, you know,

it's an anthology of

cake themed horror. Oh, my God, it's the

most awesome premise ever. So I mean, obviously,

when I saw this call for submissions, I had to put a

story in for it. But that has little to do with sort of how I

got to this place. So I was on Twitter one morning, and I was

just sort of thinking about some things I'd like to see in terms

of anthologies coming out. And I tweeted, you know what? I'd

really love to see a menopause themed horror anthology, because

you don't see. A lot of that. I mean, older women, we sort of

get shunted aside. We get forgotten about. You see a lot

of things about menopause, or not menopause, menstruation. You

see a lot of things about puberty, because it's all

horrifying and awful and terrible and well, not always,

but you know, you can think of a lot of horror things to say

about it,

poltergeist and werewolves and, yeah. I

mean, you

know, but you

never really hear much or see much in the horror field about

menopause.

So I

was probably two or three hours later, and I get

this,

this tweet, like a private direct

message from Ben, the owner of sliced up press. And he

was like, hey, oh,

you know, a little

I asked that question because I saw that

original tweet that you did, and then I saw that you were doing

it, and I was like, so did she, like, know? And was just kind of

gaging whether people would be interested or like, it came from

that tweet, yeah,

first time that's ever happened to me. Ever, you know,

I'm generally not that lucky. So, you know, I thought, okay,

Ben's gonna run with it, right? Then, he's like, Hey, you want

to be editor. I'm like, Really, I was so thrown back. I was

like, you've got to be kidding me. This is the best thing ever.

So here I am. That's so exciting.

Yes, I just accepted my first short story for the

anthology this morning. Oh, most exciting

thing ever. And you got to like, message the

author and let them know, or no,

I'm going to leave that to Ben, because I'd love to fan

girl a little

bit. But, you know, got to keep that

professional distance.

It's hard though. Like putting together an anthology, I

have like this thought in my head about what I want it to be

and what it should be. And like I was saying, with being on

submission so far, I've gotten, you know, maybe a dozen, two

dozen. The submission period is a couple months long, so we've

got some time at this point. But the early stories for many of

them, there was a similarity

in terms of theme.

And it's so difficult to actually pick sort of the one

that fits the what is in your head about what this should look

like, yeah. And then have to say, I can't accept these other

three.

Yeah, that is tough. And you say you have a

picture in your head of how you want it to be like. What does

that mean? Because, I guess, does that that mean you have,

like, a vision of the structure or the types of themes you want

covered, or both, a little bit,

I want a super wide ranging sort of experience of

authors, Age of authors where they are in life, where they are

geographically. I'd love to get some writers who have

disabilities or who are on the LGBTQ scale. I really want,

like, a super wide, you know, sort of anthology to come out

and be like, this is really interesting, because it's coming

from all these different perspectives. Different

perspectives. I'm really excited about it.

And for people who might be interested in like

writing for it, what are the does it need to be someone who's

been through menopause or not

at all? Or if it's like a 10 year old who you know, if

she or he or they decide to write a story about menopause.

That's Hari great.

I don't care if it's someone who has never even heard

of menopause, but like her grandmother, might be going

through

it, you know what I mean? Because you just

never know what

somebody is going to come up with. A lot of people

when they think about menopause, if they think about menopause,

you know, they think about the very typical thing, which are

the hot flashes.

And there are 10

million other things that sort of go along with menopause. And

I've always about it in terms of, like, when you think of

things like Carrie, the movie Carrie, and about her getting

her period and going through puberty, and it being a

horrifying situation. If you think Carrie's scary, think

about a woman who has had like five or six decades to foment

like this awful feeling of rage, of dealing with sexism and the

patriarchy and racism and like a

million other things, there's gonna be some

pent up thing that is

happening, and I really am thrilled to be able to sort

of put that out into the

universe. I mean, just look at Carrie's

mother, right?

You tell me that that was not perimenopause

exactly, extremely triggering. Like, Oh

no, it's starting again. Much, so much. Oh, my God, I love it.

I'm really excited that you had that experience, because Twitter

is is such a negative place sometimes that you forget that

good things can happen on it for sure. Yeah, that we're all still

there for some reason, having a having a time. So have had you

had a lot of experience on the editorial side of storytelling

and publishing before this point, so not in the way that

I'm working now. Probably about maybe 10 years ago,

I decided that I was going to give freelance editing

a try as like my full time gig,

which was a scary thing.

I was working in fundraising, nonprofit

fundraising at the

time, and I just I lucked

into an opportunity to go freelance, and I quit my job,

and I was like, oh my god, what am I doing? And I did that for

about three years. It turned out not to be for me, as much as I

enjoyed setting my own schedule,

there's sort of it's nice to know where your

next paycheck is coming from.

Yeah, you know. But during that three years, I did a

lot of editorial work,

not necessarily in publishing, like

in the way that you think fiction publishing, but in a lot

of different ways that was it has ended up being very useful

to me today. You got a lot of different irons in the fire. It

looks like from your bio here, I keep busy. I mean, that's good.

It's less less time for the existential dread to creep in,

oh yeah, out of trouble.

Although I will say that for dragon boating, it's

been tough because we didn't have a season last year, right?

And particularly for this group of people, they're, you know,

immune compromised, right? So I, I often wonder if we will have a

season this year, even if we can get everybody

vaccinated. Yeah,

I'd love to get out on the river. I miss it every day.

We do a is it every week or every other week,

we get on Zoom and we talk, we talk about training

to get back on the river. We just sort of talk

about what's going on in our lives. The women that are on the

team are really hilarious

and awesome, and it's always funny to talk to

them. I only have a few guys,

by the way. Oh, talk about that too much, but we do

have a few guys.

Are they invited to the Zoom call?

Always.

In fact, one of our members is an epidemiologist,

wow. So it's always handy to get his sort of perspective on

what's going on with the virus and the vaccination. Yeah.

I mean, I almost imagine that that would

be sort of have, ironically, a calming effect. Am I right about

that?

Like, but oddly, some things he says, really give me

plot bunnies for horror stories. So it all works out. It's full

circle.

Yeah, it seems like epidemiology has a lot of

space for like, contingencies.

That is not wrong

on which all horror relies.

Yeah, lots of stuff,

for sure. I always wanted to try dragon

boating, but that's, you know, that's unrelated to the podcast.

Move to Philly. I'll take you out on the boat. If I

come

to Philly, I will, I will take you up on

that. All right, so let's talk more about horror. I know I'm

sorry, but so which women do you feel it's it's women in Horror

Month. Which women do you feel should get more credit for their

contributions to horror lit, both historical and

contemporary. So I

think most people, when they think of like women who

started horror, right? You're thinking Mary Shelley.

So most people don't really think of Anne

Radcliffe. She had the first Gothic bestseller, and that was

what late 1700s Oh, okay, the mysteries of Udolpho. I did not

know that.

People don't. They think Mary Shelley

and I mean, even throughout history, right,

publishing

in general, has been thought of as a masculine sort

of thing to do, even though you. Some women have been lucky to

get their voices out there, and even today, publishing is

dominated by men in general in the

horror genre, and the people who buy horror in

general are men.

That's a little different in ya horror, of

course, because you know most, most of the people who write ya

in general are women, and

that's true in horror as well.

But if we're talking lesser known folks who need more

credit, I think let's say more traditional horror. I'd go with

Vernon Lee. Vernon Lee, pseudonym of violet Paget.

Paget, Violet Paget,

Vernon Lee wrote great ghost stories in the 19th

century. She was widely read at the time, surprisingly under

Vernon Lee, but I think there's been a resurgence of interest

in her, let's say, in the last decade,

really interesting, great stories. I'd love to see

everybody know about Vernon

Lee, okay,

more contemporary. I have a huge author crush on Kathy koja,

okay, if you've ever read the cipher, I mean, it's one of her

older novels. I think about it a lot like more than I should.

And when I'm in a

conversation with someone about horror, I always recommend that

book. And Kathy koja, I was talking to someone the other day

for work, and somehow it came up that I write horror and her

daughter, who is like, 1718, or so, well, maybe she's a little

younger than that, 1617, ish was like, I love her. I want to

write her for a living. And so this woman and I got into this

huge conversation about who she needs to be reading, other than

Stephen

King, right? And Kathy Kocha came up, so

I have now hopefully started my own little fan club.

Oh, well, I just added it to my story graph.

So is the kind the cipher in particular, is the

kind of book that you will always be thinking about. It's

haunting. And I know that Kathy has a short story collection

that is on the stoker final ballot for this year of

velocities, that is on my to be read list. I can't wait to get

to it.

I would say also dia Reeves is awesome.

I have slice of cherry on my bookshelf, which I've read

at least once, probably more than that. At this

point, I'm trying to get to more of her work. And Jamia Johnson,

I think is awesome. Okay, that's a lot of good recommendations.

Um, yeah. As soon as we're done here, I'm just going to go back

over the recording, then put everything into my story graph,

I realized that I a lot of the things that I was thinking about

the books that I had read that were horror, and I realized a

lot of them were actually thrillers by women. And I was

like, Oh, I know, yeah,

horror is a huge, wide tent.

And even the stuff that you think

of as a thriller is probably harder in some way.

I've always agreed with that mostly. But,

like I realized it was mostly stuff that is technically like,

considered a thriller, shelved as a thriller, I guess. And I

think of it as horror. It gives me the same feels as horror, but

I'm just saying that I need to expand my horizons, not

discontinue reading thrillers because I love them, but add a

little bit more of the of the woman written or definitely,

candisha Press, is a woman owned publishing house

that specializes in horror, and they do these awesome

anthologies of women horror writers, which I always

recommend.

I think there's something about

womanhood, and not just womanhood, but like being a part

of a marginalized identity that makes horror extra special, like

I almost feel like it belongs to people with marginalized

identities more than anybody else, but

more horrifying, right? Yes, like,

I mean, and that's why so often those are

like, the avatars for when the men were in charge of making all

of these movies. It's like, what if you were a woman? Well, I

mean, I'm sure you've read Carol clover, right? Yes, yeah.

Anyway, that's why women in Horror Month is important. Yes,

well, so I'm gonna, I'm going to go beyond books as well. What

was the last piece of horror media you consumed that you

absolutely loved? Could be a movie.

Book. So I'm taking a storytelling class this

semester, and it is both fiction and creative nonfiction, and on

my reading list for the semester was Octavia Butler's Kindred,

which I had never read before. I don't read a ton of science

fiction, which I think of her more as a science fiction

writer,

so

Kindred, just like kind of blew me away, but also in the

context of, sort of the slave written testimonials that we've

read as part of class, and sort of looking at those juxtaposed

against

Kindred, which has been super interesting. So

like, in terms of consuming horror media

that was done in a way that was really interesting, and

I think everybody should kind of have to do it that way, in the

same context. I recently re watched

Lovecraft country.

I'm in the middle of that good

but apparently there is a podcast that goes along with

it, which I've never really listened to, and I'm kind of

thinking that I need to re watch Lovecraft country while also

simultaneously listening to this podcast, because apparently it

has that same kind of effect,

effect I read. I've listened to the first two

episodes, and it's mostly like historical commentary type

stuff. The podcast is good. It's very like, contextualizes

everything really well. That's a great show. It's hard to watch.

But, you know, we should, we should have to watch it because

it's hard to watch.

Yeah, so good and satisfying. Oh, so hard to

explain to people.

All you have to do is like, yell, bash it

with the bat, like, break that windshield. I also just saw on

shutter the film host, yeah, that was

really an interesting way to sort of bring the

pandemic into your house.

It's also short. It's only like 60

minutes. Yes, yeah, yes. It was like watching that one kind of

made me nervous. I have such a I get so nervous about electronic

horror stuff, you know, like, because we rely on our screens

to look a certain way, and when they kind of like blip, you're

like, wait, I'm not in control of this.

It was really interesting and well done. And I

just, yeah,

I loved it, yeah, one of the best things I

did during the pandemic was pay for a shutter subscription.

Seriously, yeah, like, I can't say enough good things

about that at all. Awesome.

I'm glad we agree. So can you tell people

how to submit their work for bodies full of burning?

Yes, and I think we were supposed to talk about that

before. And I got sidetracked by, like, two different things.

Well, I mean, it's i It's my fault just

because I get too excited about horror things, I think I like in

a different direction. All right, so

the sliced up press.com website has the full submission

guidelines, and you email them to Ben at sliced up press

actually, that's not the correct email, but it's on the sliced up

press website. And I want to say I can't, I'm not looking at it

right now, but I think that we set the minimum guideline at

1000 words maximum, I think was like maybe four or 5000 and you

have until, I believe, the end of May okay to get your

submissions. And it's a long submission period, mostly

because we didn't expect people just to have menopause the

entire things sitting around. No, yeah, we wanted to give

people plenty of chances to, you know, write something great, and

also make sure that the call for submissions was distributed as

widely as possible, right? Great.

I'll make sure to post the links. Thank you for

sure, we got a lot of authors who and hopefully some of them,

are writing scary stories.

We actually know of a couple people who have never

written short stories before who decided to do so for this call.

Oh, really

am thinking about that? Oh, that's awesome.

I think that short story horror is like one of the best ways to

take it in.

Definitely, even if you think you don't know what you're

doing, you just. Don't know what you're going to be able to

produce.

Let your imagination take you away. And

where can our listeners find you? Oh, so

I have a website, www.nicolewolverton.com, you can

always find me there, and I'm probably on Twitter more often

than I should be. And you can find me there at Nicole

Wolverton, excellent.

You can find us hybrid pubscout.com Facebook

at hybrid pubscout, Twitter at hybrid pub scout and Instagram

at hybrid pubscout pod. And you can find us on any of your

favorite podcast platforms, Nicole, thank you so much for

joining me. Thank you, Emily. I appreciate it. Thanks for giving

a rip about books. You.