Author: Kelly Link

Condition of Mr. Segundo: At odds with his boyhood dreams.

Subjects Discussed: Coffee, the Turkish language, planting little clues within stories, real-life inspirations for fantasy, writing short stories vs. novels, the value of a gestation period, on being easily distracted, being thrown off guard, Link’s pattern-making impulse, Douglas Adams, board games, Cadbury Creme Eggs, breakfast cereals, childhood sense memory, depicting characters without backstory, zombies, having psychologists as parents, William Gibson, bookstores, Edward Gorey, self-publishing, Ben Fountain’s Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, review coverage, “literary” credibility, Scott Smith’s The Ruins, the “literary fiction” label vs. the “science fiction” label, Laura Miller and H.P. Lovecraft, taxonomies, Shelley Jackson’s illustrations, fonts and EC Comics, reacting to older work, “massaging” work, Clarion, George Saunders and New Yorker “fantasy” vs. genre fantasy, and “fictiony literature.”

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Link: I think that being easily distracted mirrors, or is the same thing in some ways, as noticing connections too easily. And that does mean that once you have, once you’re solidly at work on a story, everything you see around you, you can sort of pull in and use. Everything in the story you can sort of tie down to other parts of the story.