As I have been having some tech related problems lately, I prepared a few facts for the horror dungeon release party if for some reason everything crashed and I wouldn't make it. I made the online release party, so here, as promised, is what I prepared incase I didn't. My first two releases of 2018 aren't included as I only had an hour slot, each book would have only had ten minutes. I'm sure I can add thr3 of a kind and dual depravity 2 at some point, or you can click on over to press and interviews and click on the july 2018 interview with roma gray.
Dani Brown TBM release party 29 July 2018
Greetings, I plan on handling my own slot but due to potential tech problems, I’m filling out the questions for Roma as well.
Books up for promotion:
In case you want Roma to run it for you:
•Why are they writing in that genre
Ket Pandas could be nothing but extreme. And bizarro. They’re pandas. Actual pandas. That have taken on the most extreme rumours about black metal and blew them so far out of proportion that over the top wouldn’t even begin to describe the panda’s behaviour. This is the book I needed to write at the time. It returned joy to my life after dealing with too many people with some rather extreme points of view. Anything and everything the pandas say and do is more extreme than anything else.
•Any fun fact they can think of about the book.
I kept Ket Pandas running on my computer from late December 2016-July 2017 in the background. Some days I would add 400 words to it and other days upwards of 4000 words. Every time I worked on it, the problems I was going through at the time, with people telling me what to do and making demands on my time, seemed small. Ket Pandas returned happiness to my life. It reminded me that I am, first and foremost, a creative. I can’t fit in with people who spend their time gossiping. I’d much rather be at home writing. It was the first time I really started to talk about what I was writing. The people who attached themselves to me like leeches started to leave. I felt relief for the first time in years. I made new friends and remembered it is okay to have fun. I wrote a lot of short stories and various other things while this ran on my computer. It wasn’t the centre of my attention. It started as a short story but grew and grew. I have a squeal planned. Ket Pandas is pure entertainment. Readers aren’t going to grow as people by reading it. But, they should have fun and be left with a sense of “what the fuck?”. Nothing deep and meaningful. At the end of the day, fiction is entertainment, same as someone switching on the tv or going to see a film. Sometimes, fiction has little gems of hidden meaning or is multi-layered with a lot of hidden things. Not Ket Pandas. I’m looking forward to writing the second one.
For Ket Pandas, I had to look up the effects of ketamine, having never taken it myself. I don’t know why I bothered. They’re pandas. Ketamine isn’t strong enough and it won’t have a party drug effect in real life. Nothing about Ket Pandas is realistic.
I used to listen to a lot of black metal. People, not black metal fans, but people in general would read far too much into this and have me down as someone with extreme viewpoints. Most people’s thinking and points of view operate within grey areas. My view points are along the lines of, if it doesn’t directly impact my life, then, I don’t care, leave me alone. I don’t listen to much black metal anymore. The only reason I started listening to black metal is an ex-boyfriend from many, many years ago would complain that the music I listened to wasn’t obscure enough for his liking, like he was a prototype hipster or something. Black metal seemed to piss him off the most. I would however, play Mayhem or Darkthrone on my iPod after dropping off my son at school to get into the mood to write this. I can’t write while listening to black metal, even when I was younger and listened to a lot more of it. “Seth”, my other black metal piece, was mainly written while listening to Kraftwerk. The idea was conceived while listening to Mayhem though, to drown out the sounds of aforementioned miserable prototype boyfriend and his friend having a party of two. “Seth” remains incomplete. I’m glad that not only did I finish a black metal story, but it is due to be published/has been published. It played a large role in my life for many years.
I believe black metallers prefer trance to techno, but don’t hold me to that. I’m not a dance music expert and a lot of it sounds the same to me. The techno goes back to my teenage years, before people would tell me what to do and make all sorts of “helpful” suggestions about my future, project their lives and horrible negative stereotypes onto me, or try to involve me in social competitions I had absolutely no interest in. I was looking back over my life, trying to work out where I stopped living when the weight of other people’s problems became too much. It was when I was 16 and moved back to the UK. I had all these happy memories between the ages of 14-16. Me and some friends would drive around while blaring techno, so when choosing dance music for the pandas, I put in techno as a tribute to my friends.
The story floated around in my head while I tried to come up with names for the characters. I had Cody and Corey. I knew there was another name with a “C” at the beginning and “Y” at the end. It took a few weeks to remember “Casey”. I woke up early one morning with the name. The story flowed after that whenever I worked on it. It wasn’t my top priority at the time though. I can’t remember what was, other than getting away from the negative people.
I had finished Ket Pandas in July 2017. Spark the Spunky Robot was probably the next long story I wrote and I was immensely happy with how that book turned out. I think The Crack House in the Desert was my next long taking after Sparky. I had promised myself I would cut down on short stories and really focus on the longer pieces while gaining back the drawing skills stress stole from me over the years. This story was difficult. Every attempt I made, it came across as being too much like The Reanimator for my liking. I ended up scarping the entire thing and starting over again more than once. It took about four weeks to write. Someone had decided to press all my buttons to induce a PTS reaction after being sucked into some drama a few weeks prior to writing this, I was already on edge and trying to calm down. I don’t remember writing this book as the PTS was at the worse level I had ever experienced. I don’t often write when I get badly triggered. I carried on this time though. I wasn’t about to cave into some arsehole going out of his way to be a bastard, bringing in his merry little group of gossips. I had enough. I stated so long before writing The Crack House in the Desert. I said I wasn’t tolerating bullshit anymore while writing Ketamine Addicted Pandas. I wasn’t about to let someone else stand between me and my story, even if I was shaking with tears running down my face on no sleep. Fuck that shit. It was the last time the PTS was triggered. People don’t respect my boundaries, they can get out and I’m going to continue writing and creating because I’m totally miserable trying to conform to another way of thought.
•Why are they writing in that genre
The Crack House in the Desert…I can’t even remember writing it. I think I wanted a sci-fi horror thing. Skimming through it, I consider myself successful.
•Any fun fact they can think of about the book.
Sheer stubbornness and a refusal to conform to other people’s demands on me wrote this book. My playlist would have probably been the “safe” band I listen to that is meant to get my mind off the PTS followed by Kraftwerk as I was completing it. When my memories started to come back after eliminating the causes of stress from my life, I remembered how much I love to listen to Kraftwerk while writing. Mainly because the previously mentioned unfinished piece “Seth” was written while listening to them. Having them on gives me that drive to carry on. I was not going to lose myself to any form of stress again.
While writing The Crack House in the Desert, Smothered Hope came to me. This was the last “Queen of Filth Era One” book. Obviously, I’m going to go back and revisit Ket Pandas, but this is the last book I wrote while under stress and most of the first Ket Pandas was written without stress and while thoroughly enjoying myself. I started calling my stories after this Era two because the entire Push the Button/Tainted Love group of stories are connected in one way or another. Smothered Hope is a novel within that group. I already have notes for Era Three (see below).
I knew writing this book and finishing it and handing it in long before the deadline would make me stronger, even if I felt at one of my lowest points while writing it. I’m glad I finished it. I’m glad I’m going to sell it at events. I already have a place planned for it on my table. A giant Fuck You for the people that tried to bring me down. They succeeded for all of four weeks. They can go find someone else to take their problems out on, or better yet, sort out their problems.
56 Seconds of love/lust lost in a total lack of social skills. This is the second story from Queen of Filth Era two. It sees me return to much earlier, very repetitive writing style. Writing this book, it is only short, less than 20K words, saw me obtain the “Broccoli” high as I call it. It waved high during the beginning of The Crack House In the Desert (probably contributed to how upset I was that someone would go out of their way to be a bastard because they knew how I felt when Crack House finally started to click into place) and Sparky the Spunky Robot. I knew I was nearly there while writing Ketamine Addicted Pandas and even had hints of it while writing the as of yet unpublished Stef and Tucker books. When I wrote Broccoli between 2009-2011, I would feel like I was chasing the ultimate high. Like, I felt really good whenever I would get a chance to work on Broccoli (I had a baby and a serious or series of serious post-natal infections in that time, hence why it took so long). The memory of the high was what kept me waking up at 5AM to write and carry on writing while I felt I had no future under the weight of other people’s problems etc. I knew that one day, it would be worth it. 56 Seconds proves it. I had finished the first story in Era Two, but I hadn’t realised it yet. I was trying to write either Smothered Hope, Dream Princess or Push the Button. I have them in a green folder, but it wasn’t happening. I had this first story on my mind though. Or, more a certain aspect of it. A cumshot to be precise about it. Way back when writing Ket Pandas (it seems so long ago now), I had a Tinder account. And with online dating comes dick pics. 56 Seconds explores what would motivate someone to send one. I started typing out a story to work with. By the end of the second day, I was oozing post it notes for 56 Seconds. I had to get a notebook. I wasn’t going to put these stories in any random notebook that litter my house (I keep notebooks in every room, what that’s perfectly normal, okay). But as I was writing this story, other stories started to come to me. It was when I was finally able to embrace myself and my creative life since Broccoli. And even while writing Broccoli, I wasn’t able to fully embrace who I was. I was too sick. There were too many problematic people with their personality disorders lurking about. I repeatedly say things like “borderline rage” in this story and “out-narc frenemies” in other Era two stories. 56 Seconds sees me taking in fantasy and reality and repetition and letting it run wild. By the end of the second night, when Marcy starts to develop, I’m high as a kite on writing and no longer missing a youth (or two years) spent partying and creating. I have it back now.
•Why are they writing in that genre
I call this book experimental. It is the first time I really tore myself open and wrote, not caring if my own emotions became mixed up in it. I purposely started crafting playlists around these stories. And then, started to let them craft themselves. The flies and the honey are direct from a music video I watched a lot for the first Era Two story. So, of course, I pulled the band up on Spotify having never listened to them before. I’ll reveal the music video when all these stories are published. I’m saving it. I dug out my old Crowley books I bought for uni. I still can’t stand his prose but “Love is the law” and “Love Under Will” etc, worked really well within the piece. And the repetition. I haven’t used it to that extent for years.
•Any fun fact they can think of about the book.
Way back in February, I attended an EBM night at a local bar. With all the years of stress, I’m often in too much pain to dance. I sat there nursing really cheap gin and watching the DJ add empty fog to the dance floor. I took a picture. Following therapy, it was suggested I start including real events in my writing. I don’t think that was what they meant, but I knew the DJ adding fog to an empty dance floor would have a significant impact upon my writing somewhere along the line. It looked sad.
I decided I would superimposed a call lasting 56 seconds onto the picture. While searching through my phone, as I wanted to use an actual one and it never occurred to me to have someone phone me for that amount of time, I found a call from nearly one year ago. Instead of taking the screenshot I wanted, my thumb slipped and I accidentally video phoned the guy. I totally freaked out. He phoned back the next day. I did a shitty job of explaining myself.
This took about two weeks to write. Donnie appears as The Knight in Strip/Becoming, which follows Marcy’s story prior to the events in 56 Seconds.
Honey’s name is from the music video. As is Marcy’s. And her character throughout the Era Two stories.
Although I’ve been trying to keep track of my influences while writing the Era Two stuff, I’m sure there’s stuff I’ve missed. I’ve been really embracing the creative aspects of my personality while constructing these stories. And really embracing outside influences and letting them flow through me. When I knew I wanted to be an author, way back in my second year of university, I wrote an untitled piece (https://danibrownqueenoffilth.weebly.com/i-knew-then.html). This piece is why I wanted to be a writer, I discovered it while writing it. To me, it’ll always be an emo version of Narnia. But to readers, it is something else. Even yesterday (27/05/2018), while talking about a silly little piece I’m writing while Push the Button comes into proper form in my head (Dancing with Wasps in my Ass), people were saying “I would have never thought of that” despite me saying where the idea came from. 56 Seconds is the first time I’m really embracing all of this in my head and letting it fall out on the page. An acceptance of who I am. After the intense stress earlier in the year, I am at the mentally best place I’ve been at since my teens. I’m not taking anyone’s crap and I see hope for the future for the first time in years. People are accepting me as a creative. And I like that. I used to have to hide it. I don’t anymore.
•Plans for the future
Right now, I’m still working on Queen of Filth Era Two stories. They’re so connected it hurts. I have a special notebook for them. I wrote four one after the other and burnt out a bit on them. Honey’s castle in Push the Button is still developing inside my head (the entire story will probably be finished by the time anyone reads this). I thought it was best to take a little break while it develops and work on something else instead of forcing it. I spent so long forcing stories under the stress, that I’m enjoying letting them develop naturally. I would say this is a slower pace for me, but it isn’t. I wrote Strip/Becoming in just under five weeks while making notes for the other stories. Reptile is the only other thing I have around the length of Strip/Becoming and that took the best part of one year to write. While that is going on, I’ve been working on my Era Three stuff and writing the odd note for the other Era Two stories. I don’t know how long Era Two will be. Each time I finish a story, I realise at least two more appeared while writing it. You can follow my progress on facebook at facebook.com/danibrownbooks or twitter @danibrownauthor. Era Two is really helping to clear up my PTSD. I don’t expect it’ll ever go away entirely, but I have a much better handle on it now. Era Three is opening with a silly little story about wasps coming from Satan’s ass. After that, I have an erotic bizarro story planned. I seem to like those. Both “Dancing with Wasps in my Ass” and the erotic bizarro story will probably be written between Era Two stories. I was thinking of setting up a patreon account for them as I’m going to wear out publishers with Era Two and self-publishing paperbacks isn’t an option with my current tech problems. Beyond that, I don’t know what the future holds. I need a new computer, but I would like to work within different mediums again and I’ll be saving to get a computer that can handle this. It’ll probably see me pick up The Panda Says No! and complete it as the sound piece I intended all those years ago. The future is going to include more Ketamine Addicted Pandas as well. I can’t not write. I can’t not create. That is sheer crazy talk that ended up giving me a mental illness.
•Link to author page on Amazon and/or Audible
https://www.amazon.com/Dani-Brown/e/B00MDGLYAY/
•Other works
The best places to find links to my other works are on my facebook page and website. Facebook.com/danibrownbooks, which I also use as a place to talk about what I’m currently writing, watching, listening to etc. And a friendly place to interact. If you’d rather remain anonymous, my website has a page for upcoming books and another page for published books with a little synopsis and links as well as free short stories and interview links https://danibrownqueenoffilth.weebly.com/
•Tips to other authors
Don’t let the world drag you down. Even if you have to write in secret at 5 in the morning, it’ll be worth it.
•How the author got into writing
I got into writing while at university. I enrolled on a creative writing degree. I hadn’t written much fiction before then. I literally rolled dice to choose a degree. I did Art and Media at college. While taking Media, I realised that I wouldn’t make it in film. Not with all boys in my class. I didn’t have a voice amongst them. And I lost my drawing skills during that time (I can still paint though). During my second year of university, I realised how much I loved it (see above). And now, I can’t go a day without writing. If I’m experiencing a creative block, like a total block, no drawing, no notes, etc, I will watch tv and if possible, party and go out and enjoy live music and life in general. I know the creative part of me is working out the frustrations and sometimes I need to re-enter reality beyond routine day-to-day life to be able to create again. I was always a creative though. Even when I wanted to be a doctor. Medicine can be an extremely creative field and as I joke now, with a stable income.
Greetings, I plan on handling my own slot but due to potential tech problems, I’m filling out the questions for Roma as well.
Books up for promotion:
- Ketamine Addicted Pandas (JEA)
- The Crack House in the Desert (JEA) part of the creature feature
- 56 Seconds (Nihilism Revised)
- Sparky the Spunky Robot (Bizarro Pulp Press, part of Journalstone)
These four should cover my releases up to the end of the year.
In case you want Roma to run it for you:
- Ketamine Addicted Pandas. Pandas don’t like living in the zoo. The final straw comes when a black metaller in full corpse paint brings his family to gawk at the pandas. They bust out. Baboon brains and ketamine. Death and destruction. Church burnings while Nazis pursue them. Aided by Demons and techno, they take in the sights and burn them in mass orgies lubed by blood.
- The Crack House in the Desert. On a raft of floating bodies, Vict is pulled into safety in the mountains in a dying world. He’s special. Dreams of the past can help rebuild the world. But first, he needs to learn how to channel them. Ancient hospitals and suspended animation waits in the desert.
- 56 Seconds. 56 seconds of love/lust lost in glory on the sheets. Donnie lacks social skills. Haunted by the memory of a pretty woman he scared away, she screams inside his head. Haunted by the memory of a hookup, she brings him gin with the tonic already poured in. Flies. Cumshots. Reanimated taxidermy. DJ Donnie plays for an empty room as time reverses.
- Sparky the Spunky Robot. Dreams are meant to live in garden sheds. Matthew goes out every night while Karen sleeps. He can’t cover his keytar in cum. It’ll break. That’s what Sparky is for. Too much cum and Sparky comes to life without a voice. He spends the night breaking into sheds to find the ingredients he needs to talk. So many broken dreams traded in for garden decorations.
- Ketamine Addicted Pandas
•Why are they writing in that genre
Ket Pandas could be nothing but extreme. And bizarro. They’re pandas. Actual pandas. That have taken on the most extreme rumours about black metal and blew them so far out of proportion that over the top wouldn’t even begin to describe the panda’s behaviour. This is the book I needed to write at the time. It returned joy to my life after dealing with too many people with some rather extreme points of view. Anything and everything the pandas say and do is more extreme than anything else.
•Any fun fact they can think of about the book.
I kept Ket Pandas running on my computer from late December 2016-July 2017 in the background. Some days I would add 400 words to it and other days upwards of 4000 words. Every time I worked on it, the problems I was going through at the time, with people telling me what to do and making demands on my time, seemed small. Ket Pandas returned happiness to my life. It reminded me that I am, first and foremost, a creative. I can’t fit in with people who spend their time gossiping. I’d much rather be at home writing. It was the first time I really started to talk about what I was writing. The people who attached themselves to me like leeches started to leave. I felt relief for the first time in years. I made new friends and remembered it is okay to have fun. I wrote a lot of short stories and various other things while this ran on my computer. It wasn’t the centre of my attention. It started as a short story but grew and grew. I have a squeal planned. Ket Pandas is pure entertainment. Readers aren’t going to grow as people by reading it. But, they should have fun and be left with a sense of “what the fuck?”. Nothing deep and meaningful. At the end of the day, fiction is entertainment, same as someone switching on the tv or going to see a film. Sometimes, fiction has little gems of hidden meaning or is multi-layered with a lot of hidden things. Not Ket Pandas. I’m looking forward to writing the second one.
For Ket Pandas, I had to look up the effects of ketamine, having never taken it myself. I don’t know why I bothered. They’re pandas. Ketamine isn’t strong enough and it won’t have a party drug effect in real life. Nothing about Ket Pandas is realistic.
I used to listen to a lot of black metal. People, not black metal fans, but people in general would read far too much into this and have me down as someone with extreme viewpoints. Most people’s thinking and points of view operate within grey areas. My view points are along the lines of, if it doesn’t directly impact my life, then, I don’t care, leave me alone. I don’t listen to much black metal anymore. The only reason I started listening to black metal is an ex-boyfriend from many, many years ago would complain that the music I listened to wasn’t obscure enough for his liking, like he was a prototype hipster or something. Black metal seemed to piss him off the most. I would however, play Mayhem or Darkthrone on my iPod after dropping off my son at school to get into the mood to write this. I can’t write while listening to black metal, even when I was younger and listened to a lot more of it. “Seth”, my other black metal piece, was mainly written while listening to Kraftwerk. The idea was conceived while listening to Mayhem though, to drown out the sounds of aforementioned miserable prototype boyfriend and his friend having a party of two. “Seth” remains incomplete. I’m glad that not only did I finish a black metal story, but it is due to be published/has been published. It played a large role in my life for many years.
I believe black metallers prefer trance to techno, but don’t hold me to that. I’m not a dance music expert and a lot of it sounds the same to me. The techno goes back to my teenage years, before people would tell me what to do and make all sorts of “helpful” suggestions about my future, project their lives and horrible negative stereotypes onto me, or try to involve me in social competitions I had absolutely no interest in. I was looking back over my life, trying to work out where I stopped living when the weight of other people’s problems became too much. It was when I was 16 and moved back to the UK. I had all these happy memories between the ages of 14-16. Me and some friends would drive around while blaring techno, so when choosing dance music for the pandas, I put in techno as a tribute to my friends.
The story floated around in my head while I tried to come up with names for the characters. I had Cody and Corey. I knew there was another name with a “C” at the beginning and “Y” at the end. It took a few weeks to remember “Casey”. I woke up early one morning with the name. The story flowed after that whenever I worked on it. It wasn’t my top priority at the time though. I can’t remember what was, other than getting away from the negative people.
- The Crack House in the Desert
I had finished Ket Pandas in July 2017. Spark the Spunky Robot was probably the next long story I wrote and I was immensely happy with how that book turned out. I think The Crack House in the Desert was my next long taking after Sparky. I had promised myself I would cut down on short stories and really focus on the longer pieces while gaining back the drawing skills stress stole from me over the years. This story was difficult. Every attempt I made, it came across as being too much like The Reanimator for my liking. I ended up scarping the entire thing and starting over again more than once. It took about four weeks to write. Someone had decided to press all my buttons to induce a PTS reaction after being sucked into some drama a few weeks prior to writing this, I was already on edge and trying to calm down. I don’t remember writing this book as the PTS was at the worse level I had ever experienced. I don’t often write when I get badly triggered. I carried on this time though. I wasn’t about to cave into some arsehole going out of his way to be a bastard, bringing in his merry little group of gossips. I had enough. I stated so long before writing The Crack House in the Desert. I said I wasn’t tolerating bullshit anymore while writing Ketamine Addicted Pandas. I wasn’t about to let someone else stand between me and my story, even if I was shaking with tears running down my face on no sleep. Fuck that shit. It was the last time the PTS was triggered. People don’t respect my boundaries, they can get out and I’m going to continue writing and creating because I’m totally miserable trying to conform to another way of thought.
•Why are they writing in that genre
The Crack House in the Desert…I can’t even remember writing it. I think I wanted a sci-fi horror thing. Skimming through it, I consider myself successful.
•Any fun fact they can think of about the book.
Sheer stubbornness and a refusal to conform to other people’s demands on me wrote this book. My playlist would have probably been the “safe” band I listen to that is meant to get my mind off the PTS followed by Kraftwerk as I was completing it. When my memories started to come back after eliminating the causes of stress from my life, I remembered how much I love to listen to Kraftwerk while writing. Mainly because the previously mentioned unfinished piece “Seth” was written while listening to them. Having them on gives me that drive to carry on. I was not going to lose myself to any form of stress again.
While writing The Crack House in the Desert, Smothered Hope came to me. This was the last “Queen of Filth Era One” book. Obviously, I’m going to go back and revisit Ket Pandas, but this is the last book I wrote while under stress and most of the first Ket Pandas was written without stress and while thoroughly enjoying myself. I started calling my stories after this Era two because the entire Push the Button/Tainted Love group of stories are connected in one way or another. Smothered Hope is a novel within that group. I already have notes for Era Three (see below).
I knew writing this book and finishing it and handing it in long before the deadline would make me stronger, even if I felt at one of my lowest points while writing it. I’m glad I finished it. I’m glad I’m going to sell it at events. I already have a place planned for it on my table. A giant Fuck You for the people that tried to bring me down. They succeeded for all of four weeks. They can go find someone else to take their problems out on, or better yet, sort out their problems.
56 Seconds of love/lust lost in a total lack of social skills. This is the second story from Queen of Filth Era two. It sees me return to much earlier, very repetitive writing style. Writing this book, it is only short, less than 20K words, saw me obtain the “Broccoli” high as I call it. It waved high during the beginning of The Crack House In the Desert (probably contributed to how upset I was that someone would go out of their way to be a bastard because they knew how I felt when Crack House finally started to click into place) and Sparky the Spunky Robot. I knew I was nearly there while writing Ketamine Addicted Pandas and even had hints of it while writing the as of yet unpublished Stef and Tucker books. When I wrote Broccoli between 2009-2011, I would feel like I was chasing the ultimate high. Like, I felt really good whenever I would get a chance to work on Broccoli (I had a baby and a serious or series of serious post-natal infections in that time, hence why it took so long). The memory of the high was what kept me waking up at 5AM to write and carry on writing while I felt I had no future under the weight of other people’s problems etc. I knew that one day, it would be worth it. 56 Seconds proves it. I had finished the first story in Era Two, but I hadn’t realised it yet. I was trying to write either Smothered Hope, Dream Princess or Push the Button. I have them in a green folder, but it wasn’t happening. I had this first story on my mind though. Or, more a certain aspect of it. A cumshot to be precise about it. Way back when writing Ket Pandas (it seems so long ago now), I had a Tinder account. And with online dating comes dick pics. 56 Seconds explores what would motivate someone to send one. I started typing out a story to work with. By the end of the second day, I was oozing post it notes for 56 Seconds. I had to get a notebook. I wasn’t going to put these stories in any random notebook that litter my house (I keep notebooks in every room, what that’s perfectly normal, okay). But as I was writing this story, other stories started to come to me. It was when I was finally able to embrace myself and my creative life since Broccoli. And even while writing Broccoli, I wasn’t able to fully embrace who I was. I was too sick. There were too many problematic people with their personality disorders lurking about. I repeatedly say things like “borderline rage” in this story and “out-narc frenemies” in other Era two stories. 56 Seconds sees me taking in fantasy and reality and repetition and letting it run wild. By the end of the second night, when Marcy starts to develop, I’m high as a kite on writing and no longer missing a youth (or two years) spent partying and creating. I have it back now.
•Why are they writing in that genre
I call this book experimental. It is the first time I really tore myself open and wrote, not caring if my own emotions became mixed up in it. I purposely started crafting playlists around these stories. And then, started to let them craft themselves. The flies and the honey are direct from a music video I watched a lot for the first Era Two story. So, of course, I pulled the band up on Spotify having never listened to them before. I’ll reveal the music video when all these stories are published. I’m saving it. I dug out my old Crowley books I bought for uni. I still can’t stand his prose but “Love is the law” and “Love Under Will” etc, worked really well within the piece. And the repetition. I haven’t used it to that extent for years.
•Any fun fact they can think of about the book.
Way back in February, I attended an EBM night at a local bar. With all the years of stress, I’m often in too much pain to dance. I sat there nursing really cheap gin and watching the DJ add empty fog to the dance floor. I took a picture. Following therapy, it was suggested I start including real events in my writing. I don’t think that was what they meant, but I knew the DJ adding fog to an empty dance floor would have a significant impact upon my writing somewhere along the line. It looked sad.
I decided I would superimposed a call lasting 56 seconds onto the picture. While searching through my phone, as I wanted to use an actual one and it never occurred to me to have someone phone me for that amount of time, I found a call from nearly one year ago. Instead of taking the screenshot I wanted, my thumb slipped and I accidentally video phoned the guy. I totally freaked out. He phoned back the next day. I did a shitty job of explaining myself.
This took about two weeks to write. Donnie appears as The Knight in Strip/Becoming, which follows Marcy’s story prior to the events in 56 Seconds.
Honey’s name is from the music video. As is Marcy’s. And her character throughout the Era Two stories.
Although I’ve been trying to keep track of my influences while writing the Era Two stuff, I’m sure there’s stuff I’ve missed. I’ve been really embracing the creative aspects of my personality while constructing these stories. And really embracing outside influences and letting them flow through me. When I knew I wanted to be an author, way back in my second year of university, I wrote an untitled piece (https://danibrownqueenoffilth.weebly.com/i-knew-then.html). This piece is why I wanted to be a writer, I discovered it while writing it. To me, it’ll always be an emo version of Narnia. But to readers, it is something else. Even yesterday (27/05/2018), while talking about a silly little piece I’m writing while Push the Button comes into proper form in my head (Dancing with Wasps in my Ass), people were saying “I would have never thought of that” despite me saying where the idea came from. 56 Seconds is the first time I’m really embracing all of this in my head and letting it fall out on the page. An acceptance of who I am. After the intense stress earlier in the year, I am at the mentally best place I’ve been at since my teens. I’m not taking anyone’s crap and I see hope for the future for the first time in years. People are accepting me as a creative. And I like that. I used to have to hide it. I don’t anymore.
- Sparky the Spunky Robot
•Each author needs to provide a list of “Did you know?” facts about their book
Sparky is my baby. I don’t consider it Era One or Two but part of the bridge between my earlier published stuff and Era Two. It is a story I’ve been trying to tell since 2013 and it took some sarcasm about an emotional robot powered by cum to do it. Although I only had hints of the “Broccoli” high while writing it and nowhere near as good as 56 Seconds, I ended up with Sparky tattooed on me and a little preview of things to come in terms of writing. I wrote it in October of 2017 after a few false starts. Obviously Sparky is the story of a robot who has emotions because he is powered by cum. But it is so much more than that. In 2013, I realised that people weren’t going to leave me alone to pursue my dreams and goals and my own form of happiness. I tried so hard to put it into words but there was too much stress lurking around at the time and I was very uncomfortable writing within my own experience. I wondered what motivated people to do and say such awful things. I wasn’t hurting them or intruding on their lives in anyway. As the stress grew worse, writing something with meaning was pushed far away. I was writing to try and chase the high and entertain people. The false starts with Sparky saw nothing from my life whatsoever. All robots in a dead world, pretty much like an as of yet unpublished short story of mine. I didn’t want to tell the same story twice. This was after I wrote Ket Pandas. I was able to think clearly for the first time in many, many years. Medical advice was to write about my experiences. It had me thinking about why people would go out of their way to stop someone from working towards their dreams. There isn’t really any good explanation. I wrote a story years ago while under a lot of stress about garden gnomes. This story remains unpublished but it must have been on my mind. Garden decorations seems as good a reason as any to stop someone who isn’t intruding on anyone else’s life to live hers. So there’s a hierarchy of garden decorations. Give up your dreams and make them live in the shed, get more garden decorations to show to the neighbours what a good conforming citizen you are. There’s my sarcasm in there. Sparky could have easily had emotions because he’s malfunctioning in some way, circuits breaking down, etc. But I was writing a lot of the Chester and Lester stories at the time (see my website) and they’re all about creative ways to use cum. And I wanted to handle such serious subject matter (what do the Jones’s have/do/etc) in a lighter way. Keeping with the 80s theme of Chester and Lester, Matthew became a failed synthpop star. I can’t say I have ever owned or desired to own a keytar but I find them to be funny and my ex-boyfriend wants one so every time I need an instrument in a story, it is a keytar. Matthew could have made it. His band went on without him, but he had Karen, his wife and her nagging to deal with. She cared too much what the neighbours thought. I also had the last dying remains of the bulk of the arseholes, some I was reluctant to cut out, to contend with during the few weeks I was writing Sparky. The final straw came and I stated as such. They weren’t overly thrilled about this and called me a bunch of mean names. These mean names ended up in the story. They were warned. It isn’t pleasant being caught between people with no life ambition and people who like to go around intruding on other people’s lives while claiming they are “helping”. Both groups have a habit to project their views onto other people, instead of listening to what the other people have to say, taking it in and processing it. Will the reader grow as a person? That’s up to the reader. Remember, the surface layer of the story is about a robot powered by spunk. Anything deeper is up to the reader to think about or not. Because books need to be entertaining above everything else.
•Why are they writing in that genre
I’m not the first writer to write about failed dreams and I won’t be the last. These stories cover all genres. In the case of Sparky, it came out as bizarro. I don’t limit myself by sticking to genres. I have notes for stories that cover just about everything. Some of them will never see the light of day and others, I will write. Sparky is very different to my extreme offerings. I hope my audience enjoy it. The story means so much to me. I ended up with PTSD because people wouldn’t leave me alone to pursue my dreams and tried to turn me into somebody I’m not. I have no interest in competing with anyone, unlike Karen.
•Any fun fact they can think of about the book.
I had to look up home pregnancy tests in the 80s. I also had to look up how to use a keytar. I will be having Sandy, the other robot in the story, tattooed next to Sparky at some point in the future. They will be the only characters of mine to be tattooed on me. The rest of the tattoo (it will be covering a large area) has been designed around them. Depeche Mode are mentioned in the book. They were on my playlist. I don’t think they ever used keytars though.
•Plans for the future
Right now, I’m still working on Queen of Filth Era Two stories. They’re so connected it hurts. I have a special notebook for them. I wrote four one after the other and burnt out a bit on them. Honey’s castle in Push the Button is still developing inside my head (the entire story will probably be finished by the time anyone reads this). I thought it was best to take a little break while it develops and work on something else instead of forcing it. I spent so long forcing stories under the stress, that I’m enjoying letting them develop naturally. I would say this is a slower pace for me, but it isn’t. I wrote Strip/Becoming in just under five weeks while making notes for the other stories. Reptile is the only other thing I have around the length of Strip/Becoming and that took the best part of one year to write. While that is going on, I’ve been working on my Era Three stuff and writing the odd note for the other Era Two stories. I don’t know how long Era Two will be. Each time I finish a story, I realise at least two more appeared while writing it. You can follow my progress on facebook at facebook.com/danibrownbooks or twitter @danibrownauthor. Era Two is really helping to clear up my PTSD. I don’t expect it’ll ever go away entirely, but I have a much better handle on it now. Era Three is opening with a silly little story about wasps coming from Satan’s ass. After that, I have an erotic bizarro story planned. I seem to like those. Both “Dancing with Wasps in my Ass” and the erotic bizarro story will probably be written between Era Two stories. I was thinking of setting up a patreon account for them as I’m going to wear out publishers with Era Two and self-publishing paperbacks isn’t an option with my current tech problems. Beyond that, I don’t know what the future holds. I need a new computer, but I would like to work within different mediums again and I’ll be saving to get a computer that can handle this. It’ll probably see me pick up The Panda Says No! and complete it as the sound piece I intended all those years ago. The future is going to include more Ketamine Addicted Pandas as well. I can’t not write. I can’t not create. That is sheer crazy talk that ended up giving me a mental illness.
•Link to author page on Amazon and/or Audible
https://www.amazon.com/Dani-Brown/e/B00MDGLYAY/
•Other works
The best places to find links to my other works are on my facebook page and website. Facebook.com/danibrownbooks, which I also use as a place to talk about what I’m currently writing, watching, listening to etc. And a friendly place to interact. If you’d rather remain anonymous, my website has a page for upcoming books and another page for published books with a little synopsis and links as well as free short stories and interview links https://danibrownqueenoffilth.weebly.com/
•Tips to other authors
Don’t let the world drag you down. Even if you have to write in secret at 5 in the morning, it’ll be worth it.
•How the author got into writing
I got into writing while at university. I enrolled on a creative writing degree. I hadn’t written much fiction before then. I literally rolled dice to choose a degree. I did Art and Media at college. While taking Media, I realised that I wouldn’t make it in film. Not with all boys in my class. I didn’t have a voice amongst them. And I lost my drawing skills during that time (I can still paint though). During my second year of university, I realised how much I loved it (see above). And now, I can’t go a day without writing. If I’m experiencing a creative block, like a total block, no drawing, no notes, etc, I will watch tv and if possible, party and go out and enjoy live music and life in general. I know the creative part of me is working out the frustrations and sometimes I need to re-enter reality beyond routine day-to-day life to be able to create again. I was always a creative though. Even when I wanted to be a doctor. Medicine can be an extremely creative field and as I joke now, with a stable income.
