With this final inter­view, Sum­mer (begins to) and the Sum­mer Ses­sions come to a close. I’d like to give my own per­sonal thanks to Jolene for being so heav­enly to work with, to every­one else for par­tic­i­pat­ing and being so fun and inter­est­ing to get to know, and espe­cially to Magen Toole and Melissa Dominic for set­ting every­thing up this year and includ­ing me. I’ve been absolutely inspired, and I can only hope that we’ve done the same not only for each other but for all of our readers.

As a writer with a deep love of music and an ever-changing style, Shilo Christina shares with us a lit­tle bit about her work, her love of jour­nals, and her favourite words. Inter­viewed by Jolene Frances.

When did you first con­sider your­self a writer?

8th grade Sci­ence class. I started, very sud­denly, to write my very first story. It was a hideous teenage love drama, writ­ten in first per­son (and of course, I shame­lessly lived vic­ar­i­ously through the main female char­ac­ter) and clev­erly called “My Story.” After 40 pages and an entire semes­ter, I had had enough, and didn’t start writ­ing again until 10th grade Art class. I began writ­ing 5 of 7, a crime thriller, and an Unti­tled vam­pire story that was inspired, no sur­prise, by Anne Rice’s Vam­pire Chron­i­cles. I even­tu­ally scrapped the vam­pire project, and put 5 of 7 on the side­lines because at fif­teen I knew that I didn’t have the skills to give it the ded­i­ca­tion it deserved (I still don’t, as far as I’m con­cerned, but it sits qui­etly in a folder on my com­puter). In 11th grade, my fam­ily moved to a new city, and I had a whole new life that, at six­teen, I couldn’t adjust to. I felt alone and scared, so I turned to my sto­ries for com­fort, and through them, I made new friends (specif­i­cally, met my best friend), and I dis­cov­ered the per­son I wanted to be, and the life I wanted to live. That was the defin­ing point for me. When I real­ized how much writ­ing, and telling sto­ries, and cre­at­ing char­ac­ters and worlds, meant to me — how much it helped me express every­thing I was, that. That was when I knew writ­ing was what I wanted to do with my life.

Do you lis­ten to music while writing?

That’s basi­cally like ask­ing if I breathe while I write! Music is one of my biggest inspi­ra­tions. It helps set the mood for scenes, it becomes anthems for char­ac­ters and themes for entire projects. One of my biggest branch-hobbies from my writ­ing is that I make sound­tracks (not playlists, no, I con­sider these full fledged sound­tracks) for every­thing. Char­ac­ters, rela­tion­ships, scenes, plots… I’ll even choose a song to lis­ten to on repeat just because it may have a lyric that’s sim­i­lar to a line of dia­logue I wrote.

In fact, one of my favourite times to write, is Thurs­day nights when I go down­town to a lit­tle café for the Open Mic night. Answer­ing most of these inter­view ques­tions, I’m actu­ally sit­ting at a table there right now, lis­ten­ing to a friend as she’s up on stage. I’m friends with all the per­form­ers, and lis­ten­ing to them sing and play music is so inspir­ing to me that I find myself pulling out my note­book and writ­ing things down, even if they’re just sen­tences or entire chap­ters. Music plays a very cru­cial role in my writing.

Have you learned any­thing from other writ­ers? What’s the best writ­ing tip you’ve ever been given?

I’m always, always, always learn­ing from other writ­ers, both pub­lished and unpub­lished. You should never stop learn­ing things about your writ­ing, or some­one else’s writ­ing, or writ­ing in gen­eral, just like you should never stop learn­ing about other things in life. Can I think of any­thing I’ve learned specif­i­cally? No, not really — at least, not one thing that would be more impor­tant than the count­less others.

The best tip I’ve ever been given, though not ver­ba­tim, would be: to write what I want, what­ever it is, no mat­ter who is going to like it and who is going to hate it, and to write how I know to write, not how some­one else can teach or tell me to. My friends are the best at giv­ing me tips, with­out even real­iz­ing they’re doing it. They all have this habit of say­ing some­thing that just hits me, and lets me know that this, writ­ing, is what I’m meant to do.

Where do you draw inspi­ra­tion from in your writing?

Exist­ing.

Do you have a spe­cific style? If so, what would you call it or define it as?

I have a hideous writ­ing style that would give Eng­lish teach­ers aneurisms. I am full of run on sen­tences, frag­ments, rep­e­ti­tion, and an excess of ital­ics and em-dashes. I like to think that my style empha­sizes the emo­tion in the scene. If some­thing is dra­matic, action packed, over­whelm­ing, then I like to write it that way, until you’re prac­ti­cally los­ing (or hold­ing) your breath while read­ing it.

My style also changes from project to project. For exam­ple, with The For­get­ting Boy, my fan­tasy novel, I’m much more elo­quent and… gen­tle, with my words, than I am in, say, The De Sade Virus, a co-written project about sur­vivors in a world where a deadly dis­ease has ruined any chance of recov­er­ing from the series of nat­ural dis­as­ters that destroyed every­thing — in De Sade, I write much more vio­lently, and urgently.

It can also vary from char­ac­ter to char­ac­ter. Writ­ing Dodge Kelly, an aver­age but sad boy who’s basi­cally a liv­ing, breath­ing embod­i­ment of the city he lives in, is much more sub­dued and pas­sive, but also more intu­itive, than writ­ing Gem­ini, a vul­gar hit­man strug­gling with his con­science, whose per­son­al­ity is reflected in the way I describe the actions he takes and his surroundings.

Basi­cally, my style is incon­sis­tent, and I guess that’s a style in and of itself.

Is it dif­fi­cult to keep the moti­va­tion to fin­ish an entire story? How do you keep your­self motivated?

For me, it’s never about the moti­va­tion, that’s the one thing I never lose. I have a lot of trou­ble focus­ing on one project long enough to fin­ish it. I fin­ish chap­ters and scenes and snip­pets all the time, all the time, but even­tu­ally I wan­der to another project. In a round­about way, that’s how I do keep my moti­va­tion though. If I begin to write some­thing, I get… basi­cally home­sick, for other char­ac­ters and worlds, and I’ll think about them until finally I just go back to them. It keeps me push­ing for­ward on sev­eral things, but it’s a slow pace. I don’t really com­plain, though.

Where do you write, most often?

Cur­rently, my couch. I moved into a two-bedroom apart­ment specif­i­cally so that I could cre­ate a writ­ing room for myself, but I’ve since adopted a sec­ond bed and couch, and the room has become crowded and gone from a writ­ing room to a spare bed­room. I write down­town at the café I men­tioned before, but there’s really no where that I go to specif­i­cally to write, no. I write when I need to, so, wher­ever I am, I write.

Do you express your­self cre­atively, in ways other than writing?

I do! I have sev­eral other out­lets, actu­ally. I paint and col­lage, both tra­di­tion­ally and dig­i­tally. I absolutely love doing graphic design, and make dig­i­tal jour­nal pages. I dab­ble in inte­rior dec­o­rat­ing, or at least I like to think I do, and, though it feels so cliché these days, I’m also really into pho­tog­ra­phy. I’ve been try­ing to jus­tify spend­ing the money on a nice, respectable DSLR cam­era, but I can wait until I both deserve it and can afford it. I also love to cook extrav­a­gant meals, if that counts as express­ing myself creatively?

Do you keep a writ­ten journal?

I am an elite, obnox­ious hip­ster. I carry on my per­son, at all times, three Mole­sk­ine note­books. One is the clas­sic black cover with lined pages, the other has a red cover with blank pages, and the last is one of the tiny brown card­stock ones. I would never have owned a Mole­sk­ine in my life had it not been for the fact that I got my first one as a Christ­mas present, and then I was hooked. They are per­sonal jour­nals that I write absolutely every­thing in, from triv­ial moments in my life, to Chi­nese food menus, to really impor­tant thoughts, to bits and pieces of sto­ries. I also carry another note­book with me, and I have a shoe­box in my writ­ing room stuffed with jour­nals I haven’t touched yet. I’m always buy­ing more, even if I know I won’t be using them for years. I also get jour­nals specif­i­cally for projects, and I’ve even started to keep a jour­nal writ­ten from one of my character’s point of view. So, yes. I am a jour­nal whore.

Do you have a favourite author? If so, why are they your favourite?

I have sev­eral. I grew up on Stephen King, which isn’t all that rare, I know. Des­per­a­tion was the first book I read that wasn’t manda­tory for school. I read it when I was ten. I’m read­ing his auto­bi­og­ra­phy, On Writ­ing, at the moment. He’s a sta­ple author for me, I need his sto­ries in my life, but he’s not my favourite.

Christo­pher Moore is my favourite author. I stum­bled upon him by pure fluke (Moore fans will get that joke), and was hooked instantly. My favourite of his is LAMB, and A Dirty Job. His nov­els are all, or mostly, come­dies, and he’s great with wit, and dark humour, with some really well-placed slap­stick moments, but through all of that, he never fails to tell a really inge­nious, touch­ing story. I’m not a big fan of com­edy, espe­cially in movies and tele­vi­sion, so he’s my out­let for that.

I also admire and respect Chuck Palah­niuk, though more for his style of writ­ing and less for his actual sto­ries. Haunted had a really, really big impact on my writ­ing style, though.

Do you have a favourite word, or a list of favourite words?

This is pretty much my dream inter­view ques­tion. I have both. My two, be-all end-all favourite words, are civil and riot, and I hon­estly never noticed the jux­ta­po­si­tion between them before until just now. That speaks vol­umes about the per­son I am.

I do have a list of favourite words. It’s huge and always grow­ing, so I’ll just pick some at ran­dom to share: awk­ward, run­away, aver­age, con­text, raw, weath­ered, gen­tle­man, freak­show, ver­tigo, inten­tions, hip­bone, wires, street, loy­alty, rev­o­lu­tion­ary, techno­pho­bia, moth­er­fucker, the­ory, mechan­i­cal, wreck, fool, worst, role, guts, method, gypsy, knot, city, bone, this, exist, thrill, anatomy, state, basis, worth, vul­gar, leg­end, still, scrapes, sat­isfy, boy, dirt, nerve, and settle.

This is the first time in my life that I have ever filled an entire jour­nal. I was given this Mole­sk­ine as a Christ­mas present in 2008, and didn’t find the courage to write a sin­gle word in it until July 2009. Every day since then, I have kept this with close, always within reach. Some­times, I went weeks with­out writ­ing any­thing in it, but it was there when I needed it. It was there for me to con­fide in. I wrote to-do lists, song lyrics, story ideas, recipes, I drew and painted pic­tures, ripped pages out, I filled it with quotes and excerpts, moments, praises, doubts. I wrote in it the day I almost died. I wrote in it the day my father died. I wrote in it the day I moved out, the day I found a job and then quit it. I wrote in it when I vis­ited my best friend for the first time, I wrote in it every time she vis­ited me there­after. I wrote in it when I saw my favourite band in con­cert for the first time, when I made new friends and regained old ones.

I wrote in it when I had no where else to go with the words I needed to say.

I dis­cov­ered myself in these pages, I dis­cov­ered who I am and who I don’t want to be.

A sense of panic hits me now, on what I’m sup­posed to do. I already have a new Mole­sk­ine, this time a red one with blank pages. But, I know that, for a while at least, I’ll con­tinue to carry this one with me. To be with­out it would be too raw. Calm, though, fills me too. My life is here, real and pure and per­ma­nent. I don’t regret a sin­gle page within this. I don’t regret the days that I didn’t write in it, or the days that I wrote too much.

I made a life within those pages. I will make a new life for the next pages.

lyrics shown are “Ask DNA” as writ­ten (and per­formed) by Yoko Kanno & The Seat­belts, from Cow­boy Bebop the Movie: Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.

Here’s the thing. It’s been a long cou­ple of months. Things have hap­pened. Things haven’t hap­pened. We, you and I, have a lot of catch­ing up to do and I plan to do it all very, very soon. fauxRIOT is about to undergo some major changes, mainly in aes­thet­ics, once I either take a crash course in learn­ing to do some seri­ous cod­ing, or con­vince a friend to help me out as soon as I think of some­thing more to offer them than my ever­last­ing love and devo­tion (because they already have these things, and they know they do).  The blog will be up and run­ning again, though I can’t make any promises as to when.

That said, I do feel the need to point out that fauxRIOT was never meant to be my chunk of the inter­net solely for blog­ging. That’s not what my goal was, that’s not what it is. The last post, though I know it looks long and for­got­ten, is the real pur­pose. I have been work­ing on get­ting my writ­ing projects ready to reveal, and can’t wait until I’m happy enough with what I have to share it all with you.

So don’t give up on me, and quit wor­ry­ing. I’m here, and things are going to get shinier. Here are some things to look for­ward to:

• Writ­ing. Excerpts and chap­ters and entire scenes. Sum­maries and expla­na­tions and essays on the foun­da­tions and devel­op­ments of char­ac­ters and plots.
• Graphic Design. A port­fo­lio of the art I’ve done. My dig­i­tal journal.
• Blog Posts. More child­hood mem­o­ries, the con­tents of my fridge, book/movie/album/game reviews, thoughts on liv­ing alone, my five year ten year life time plan and why it always changes.
• Vlogs and/or Podcasts.
• Pho­tog­ra­phy. Glances into my phys­i­cal jour­nal, my paint­ings, moments that hip­sters would be proud of.
• Me. My hon­esty. Con­nect­ing. Recon­nect­ing. Choices. Inde­ci­sions. Life.

Let’s keep in touch, dar­lings. This is going to be good.

Alter­na­tive titles for this post were: It Sucks That I’ll Never Get To Marry Jeff Bridges and Immor­tal Trea­sure Hunt­ing Amne­si­acs Liv­ing on the Streets of Man­hat­tan. All will be explained soon.

Let me be hon­est here. A lot of things com­pelled me to finally cre­ate fauxRIOT. The slim-but-not-impossible chance I would find fame and become rich enough to… pay some­body else to think up some­thing witty I could do with all the money I would have. The abil­ity to open myself up to friends and strangers, and share the things I find inter­est­ing. Being able to beef up my HTML skills by fight­ing with codes that, back in high school, I would have e-mailed to a friend to fig­ure out for me (no, I did not e-mail my C++ home­work to a friend, how could you ever think…). Hav­ing a place to share my love for Jeff Bridges’ voice because oh, I am lis­ten­ing to the TRON: Legacy sound­track right now and “The Grid” just played and oh…

Okay, maybe I just got a lit­tle too hon­est. Let’s face it, though: fauxRIOT is really here for one sole pur­pose, and sadly it isn’t my love of Jeff Bridges.

fauxRIOT was cre­ated for my writ­ing. This is the place for me to share it all, or at least, most of it. Sorry, some projects I have to keep under wraps if I ever want to try my hand at pub­lish­ing. But, for the most part, I have so many more sto­ries that I want to share now, not later. I absolutely love the inter­net, and what it can do for writ­ers. Being able to share a story right away, chap­ter by chap­ter. I love web­se­ri­als, their tip-of-the-hat to the seri­als printed in news­pa­pers way back when and then some. Scheherazade really did have the right idea, and just like her, I have so, so, so many sto­ries to tell... I just don’t know where to start.

So I’m leav­ing it up to you!

Cur­rently, I have sev­eral projects that I’m ready and will­ing to seri­al­ize for every­one to read. At least, they’re almost ready. Know­ing which one would be the most pop­u­lar would help me focus on it in par­tic­u­lar, and that would be good for all of us, yes yes? Yes. So, before I inevitably start gush­ing about Jeff Bridges again (my good­ness the man is almost old enough to be my grand­fa­ther and I do. not. care!), I’d like to share the three spe­cific projects I have, and a poll for you to tell me which one you’d like to read the most!

If you just don’t think you’d be into fol­low­ing a ser­ial for weeks/months/who knows how long, rest assured I’ll be post­ing short sto­ries at some point too, so if you’d like to read those, tell me tell me!

CLICK TO READ SUMMARIES AND EXCERPTS FOR THE FORGETTING BOY, CIVIL STREET, AND AMONG THIEVES

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It’s exactly as the tweet says. To explain it more thor­oughly would almost ruin the fun, but it’s for the best. To begin, you should know if you don’t already, that on March 1st I’ll be mov­ing into my first apart­ment. I’m finally tak­ing that leap into adult­hood, and mov­ing out on my own. I real­ize March 1st is three weeks away from today, but on top of being extremely excited, I’m also ridicu­lously OCD. I’ve been pack­ing, unpack­ing, trash­ing, untrash­ing, repack­ing, and I’ve filled 3 boxes with books, 2 boxes with DVDs, 1 box with albums, and 1 box with pretty much every­thing else in my room. Except for the essen­tials, every­thing is ready to be car­ried into the car and taken to the place I’ll soon be call­ing home.

Aside from try­ing to decide what to do with every­thing I already have, I’ve been try­ing to decide how I’ll dec­o­rate this new space of mine. Do I go shabby-chic, mod­ern, min­i­mal­is­tic, bright and vibrant… Do I deal with the fact that I am only 21 years old and every­thing I own in the way of fur­ni­ture and decor is likely to come from the thrift and dol­lar stores.

Yes, that’s exactly what I do. Except, for today’s case, I bought decor for my soon-to-be bath­room off of kijiji, a site sim­i­lar to craigslist. For $45 I could be the proud owner of an antique med­i­cine col­lec­tion from the 1960’s. It was an impulse deci­sion, but I e-mailed the seller, ask­ing if there was any other inter­est, and that if he would just hold on to the col­lec­tion until I could pick it up on Tues­day, I would pay him $50 instead. A few hours later, I got an e-mail back say­ing that not only would he hold the entire col­lec­tion for me, but he would throw in a few antique chem­istry instru­ments he had just found as well.

Today, at noon, my mom and I met him in the park­ing lot of one of the mall’s of my city, a bright and open place. He was a nice, elderly gen­tle­man, and the sale was quick and easy, but he took the time to actu­ally explain some of the items to me, which I thought was really nice of him. It’s so much more than I expected to get, and with just a lit­tle bit of damp paper towel I wiped off all the bot­tles when I got home, and every­thing looks splen­did. My plan is to buy some shadow-boxes to hang up and down the one wall of the bath­room, and voila, instant vin­tage decor!

how is your bath­room decorated?