A snake isn't worse than a rose if you are looking for a way to kill a character. A jewel isn't better than a tornado if you want to move the action of your story somewhere else.

How might you figure out a style? You start word by word, page by page, building slowly, incrementally, and intuitively.

You unearth your work like an archaeologist discovers treasures, or a farmer pulls up crops.

In the writing workshop, there is more free association than we admit, and there is more impossibility than the form officially allows.

On Christmas night, a small girl is crowned at a pageant, before stumbling into the snowy darkness, alone, to meet her greatest fan. Set in Rosewood’s forest, the “creeping liquefaction” of the dead produces a fungal harvest that casts a spell on the town. In the endless dark of winter, feral creatures thrive, and psychedelic spores infect the air. The Museum of Atheism, deep below ground, is full of hallucinatory terrors.

The cocoon is not about shame and fear and perfection but it does allow those elements to be held; it contains multitudes. It allows those things to decay and to be renewed. It is miraculous.

The charge of a banal, homely setting or an idyllic landscape degraded by violence has always held a dark fascination for me. Luminol felt both materially and metaphorically significant as a way to reveal hidden or previous violence even in an ostensibly untroubled location. I wanted to extend this idea out to think about culture (especially US culture), in order to reveal what has been occulted and to illuminate the contemporary United States as a crime scene.

The bare tree still looks pretty.

The reindeer glow.

A creative block is so often about being in the liminal space where something new is waiting to emerge.

In Catholicism there is endless creativity in the naming of patron saints. Some of the more obscure ones include St. Julian the patron saint of murderers, and St. Lidwina, the patron saint of ice skaters…

In Blood Forest, there is the history of violence, but also the power of human erotic magic and nonhuman desire.

How do you build rest into your writing practice? When do you let the field lay fallow, and when do you let it grow wild? What is a writing sabbatical, and how can it support your creativity?