For the next several weeks I’ve decided to call Fridays ‘Fractured Friday’ and use them to share news, contributor interviews and excerpts from B is for Broken.
B is for Broken is the second title in the Alphabet Anthologies series. It follows A is for Apocalypse and will in turn be followed by C is for Chimera. Each story in the series is associated with a letter of the alphabet and is titled in the letter is for word format. What’s more, just to keep things nice and complicated, the story’s title isn’t shared at the beginning but at the end so that you can guess at what it might be while you read.
On that note, even though the story titles could be considered spoilers because of how the book is formatted, for the sake of simplicity if the author has chosen to post their title publicly somewhere else (their blog, Facebook, wherever) I am going to include it in my posts. If they haven’t revealed that information, though, I’ll list the story titles as Letter is for…
I met Samantha when she volunteered to be a slush reader for Niteblade. She had an uncanny knack for knowing which stories I’d want to read and consider and which I would end up passing on. That, combined with her insights into what worked (or didn’t) in a story made her contributions invaluable and told me I really needed to read her fiction. Once I had, inviting her to participate in the Alphabet Anthologies was a no-brainer 🙂
Interview With Samantha Kymmell-Harvey
What letter were you assigned? E
What is the thing you’ve most regretted breaking? My Dutch great-grandmother’s spinning wheel. I was a kid, I knocked it over and it busted. Because it’s so old, it would take some sort of antiques specialist to repair it. Now that I knit, I appreciate that spinning wheel so much more – and feel the regret all that much more too.
Have you ever broken something and not been saddened by it? Can you tell us about that? Well, a friend and I broke into her own house because she couldn’t find her keys and we were sopping wet from going to the swimming pool and needed to change into dry clothes. The extent of our “breaking in” was just lifting an unlocked window pane on the 1st floor, so nothing super crazy! This is probably a very boring answer.
If you could break one law and get away with it consequence-free, what would it be? Probably the law about importing/shipping wine. This might be a law particular to the State where I live, I’m not really sure. When I lived in France, I had the most amazing wines, some from tiny little vineyards. You can’t buy them anywhere in the States, so I miss them. It’d be great if I could just order them online.
Do you have any rules for yourself, a code of some sort, which you’d never break? I try to lead my life in a moral manner.
Never ever? No.
Really? Isn’t there something which could make you break it? Maybe if I had been brainwashed or placed under alien control (??)
Did you struggle with the letter you were assigned, or did the ideas come freely? Because “broken” can be interpreted in so many different ways, I had a ton of ideas so it was hard to narrow it down. Even as I went through the editing phases, I found that I had 2 stories within a story, so I had to focus even more on what exactly I meant by “broken.”
What was your favourite idea you didn’t use? I’m using a version of it for the next anthology – no spoilers!
What, aside from the anthology’s theme and your letter inspired your story? This story had two sources of inspiration: my great dislike of law school and my three times (at random!) being pulled up onstage as a magician’s assistant, which was totally embarrassing.
Samantha Kymmell-Harvey‘s stories can be found in Spark: A Creative Anthology, Every Day Fiction, and Waylines just to name a few. She is a 2012 graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop. You can follow her adventures on her blog: http://samanthakymmell-harvey.blogspot.com/
B is for Broken is available now at:
Smashwords
Kobo
Amazon
Barnes and Noble
And add it to your shelves at Goodreads
