Post by Livia Llewellyn on Nov 18, 2022 15:46:49 GMT
Because I'm fundamentally lazy, I'm repurposing part of the welcome from my old and highly unsuccessful Patreon account - updated of course to reflect all the amazing things I've accomplished since that exciting period of my life in the Before Times.
Narrator: No amazing things were accomplished, unless one counts learning how to bulk-buy snacks and liquor online during a pandemic.
Who am I? I’m Livia Llewellyn, and I’m a writer of horror, dark fantasy and erotica (and apparently some dark noir when the spirit moves me). My short stories, novelettes and novellas have been printed (and reprinted) in such anthologies and online-markets as Nightmare Magazine, Subterranean Online, The Weird Fiction Review, PseudoPod, Best Horror of the Year, Year’s Best Weird Fiction, and The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica. My collections Engines of Desire: Tales of Love & Other Horrors (2011, Lethe Press and Furnace (2016, Word Horde Press) both received Shirley Jackson Award nominations for Best Collection (I’ve also received two SJA nominations for my short fiction). My dark noir story "One of These Nights" (published in Cutting Edge, 2019, Akashic Books) received the Edgar Award for Best Short Story.
What do I write? A lot of my fiction is known for being extremely dark and sexual in nature, and the stories (and maybe, eventually, serialized novels) post here will be the same, dialed up to 11. My sources of inspiration are varied and a little messed-up: Clive Barker, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Laird Barron, abandoned shopping malls, the French Decadents, David Lynch, David Cronenberg, prehistoric religious sites, H.R. Giger, the Eleusinian Mysteries, Alexander McQueen, the Pre-Raphaelites, H.P. Lovecraft, insect colonies, vast haunted landscapes, cosmic mysteries, Jack Kerouac, demons, the Hudson River School, alchemy and the occult, wild and witchy girls, mid-century American suburbia, late 20th century exurbia, both goths and the Gothic, a deluge of Delta of Venus, a dash of The Story of O... If any of these things – plus healthy doses of darkness, beauty, unsettling explicit sex with humans and/or strange beings, and ambiguous and not always happy endings – pique your interest, then my fiction is definitely for you.
Day job? Yes! I work as an administrative assistant and file clerk for a group of about ten lawyers in lower Manhattan, near the edge of the island. It's very boring work - handing invoices and calendars, a lot of copying, online research for legal matters, and pulling files, contracts, and court papers. I love it - no one screams at me or throws fits, everyone's nice and mostly hands-off, and it's an easy commute from my teeny tiny apartment across the river. If I'd ever been truly financially successful with my writing, I absolutely would have quite so I could write full-time, but apparently that was not meant to be, so I'm fine with the very limited and ordinary trajectory of my life. Besides, the health insurance coverage is phenomenal, and at my age that's basically the equivalent to a second income, so I'm good.
What am I working on now? That's... complicated. Writing "One of These Nights," a non-supernatural dark noir story, seemed to rewire my brain - and the pandemic and two years of complete isolation coming on the heels of two spectacular novel submission wipe-outs with criminally indifferent/incompetent agents has made me take a long step back from the type of fiction I used to write. I'm not the same person, and so what I write isn't the same. The road I've been traveling down now has forks, and I've stalled at the crossroads, trying to figure out who I am and what I want to say with my writing, and which fork in the road is the best one to take. Anyway, while I'm thinking about big changes in the future, I'm still working on small things in the present. More on those in another thread.
Where am I online? Besides my website and the dying bloated corpse that is Twitter, I'm also on Instagram as liviallewellyn (I have a second, back-up account there, but currently don't use it). I'm not on any other social media sites - I've cut down on posting and being online in general, so no Mastodon or other Twitter replacements. And, I'll probably be a bit more quiet here than other writers. I'm a long-time internet lurker going all the way back to the early nineties, and that seems to be my preferred natural habitat, as a silent specter floating in the background. So please don't be angry if I don't respond or comment as quickly as others on the forum. Chances are I'm pushing a giant cart of research materials into a conference room or sitting in my darkened office staring at the mostly blank pages of my latest work in progress. It's not you: It's me, hi, I'm the problem, it's me.