Tag: phoebe barton

Writer Wednesday: Phoebe Barton

Posted on by Carrie Cuinn

Please note: under normal circumstances this would have been posted and promoted on Wednesday Jan 20, 2021. Due to the US Inauguration and the flood of news surrounding it, I decided to push Phoebe’s interview by a day so it wouldn’t get lost. – Carrie Cuinn

Phoebe Barton. Photo courtesy of the author.

Phoebe Barton is a queer trans science fiction writer. Her short fiction has appeared in venues such as Analog, On Spec, and Kaleidotrope, and she has experience with more than a dozen transit systems across North America and Europe. She serves as an Associate Editor at Escape Pod, is a 2019 graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop, and lives with a robot in the sky above Toronto. Connect with her on Twitter at @aphoebebarton or www.phoebebartonsf.com.

Today we’re bringing her in to talk about her latest release, a huge text-based interactive fiction game out now from Choice of Games.

The Luminous Undergroud. Image from Choice of Games. Art by EJ Dela Cruz.

Strange things are going down underground! Build your team, descend beneath the city streets, and face down daemons with magic and science in The Luminous Underground, a 660,000-word interactive, choice-based secondary-world science fantasy novel by Phoebe Barton. Can you and your crew clear out a haunted subway that’s slowly falling apart? Here’s your chance to find out! Grab your gear, build your team, and brave the tunnels – and if you’re good enough, maybe you can prove to everyone that you’re the best daemon hunter in town.

Without context, what’s one of your favorite sentences in the book?

It’s not a sentence so much as a line of dialogue, but it’s one I keep coming back to. I feel like it encapsulates the energy I put into the game, of doing your best but being thwarted by and and taking the heat for forces beyond your control.

“Bells.” McCowan brushes demolition dust and stray bits of wreckage off his coveralls. “I’ll bet we get blamed for this.”

What Earth-like traditions or objects were important to you to include in your story?

While The Luminous Underground is set in a secondary world, a lot of its aspects are imported from Earth for commentary and familiarity – which also makes it easier for me, because the work’s already been done! The Barrington subway is strongly influenced by the Toronto subway system, seeing as how that’s the one I’m most familiar with, but the most personal inclusion from reality is Bradford Street Public School in Chapter 1: it’s not based so much on my old elementary school so much as I used the memories of my old elementary school as a set.

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Announcing: “Writer Wednesday” Returns!

Posted on by Carrie Cuinn

This year wasn’t what I hoped for, in so many ways. While the “New Year” is kind of arbitrary, I like the idea of getting a chance to start over, simply because the date on the calendar changed. I don’t have a lot of goals for the next year – the last thing any of us need right now is to set ourselves up for failure by taking on too much – but one of them is that I want to use my time and platform to promote other writers and creators. It’s important to me not just because we’re friends or I love their past work, but because supporting each other is a vital part of our community. Any time I get a little bit of a leg up in this world, I want to bring everyone else with me.

Years ago, in a different version of this blog, I used to post a weekly writer interview with friends. For 2021, I’m bringing that back. Some of these new projects are books, others are story collections, or games – but they’re all unique and I’m excited to learn more about them.

For January 2021, I’ve got interviews with:

Upcoming interviews include Kelley Robson, Wendy N. Wagner, Premee Mohamed, Karen Armstrong, A.C. Wise, and a lot more. But, I still have spots open for later in the year, so if your book-length project is being published in the next 12 months and you’re interested in being interviewed, please get in touch. The earlier you reach out, the more likely I am to be able to fit you in close to your release date.

I’m particularly interested in speculative fiction novels, text-heavy games, or nonfiction that relates to SFF. Traditionally published books available on multiple platforms are more likely to find a place here because I’d like to include links to small bookstores that are local to the writers themselves, which means showcasing books you could order from those independent shops. I’ll also consider small press publications if the press is established and well regarded, and the books are available from multiple outlets (which can include buying directly from the publisher). I know Amazon is inevitable but I don’t want them to be the only source for books if we can help it.

I can’t guarantee you a spot – I am trying to keep the schedule balanced between different types of projects, with an emphasis on early career writers or writers from marginalized communities – but I can promise to carefully consider all requests. Please give me at least 30 days to respond before querying again.