I contain multitudes. (At least, we like to think so!) Zinna Kingsley is a pen name, and I have several others (Sholder Greye, Shelley Altamont, so far), but my real name is Yarrow Paisley, under which name I also publish, but not in the indie vein. (It's not immediately discernible from my name, but I am a man, and so one might wonder why I've endowed my creation with a feminine name, and in fact, I wonder that myself sometimes, but not for very long.)
Years ago, as a youth, I was a different sort of writer than I am now, with different interests and aspirations, and while I didn't achieve my publication goals, the materials I produced (stories, novels, all with a genre bent) have traveled with me from floppies to hard drives and cds, gathering the proverbial "dust." I've always been fond of them, however . . . and with the advent of the indie publishing boom, it occurred to me that it was high time to haul that stuff out and give it some kind of life!
There is a tradition, especially strong in the classic pulp genres, of using pen names to keep a writer's disparate genre writings distinct from each other, and so, Zinna Kingsley is the name I have chosen to represent my fantasy / horror writing and separate it from my current literary / "experimental" writing. The Lord of Dream and Metal was my first novel, written in collaboration with my father when I was sixteen. (Thus, in this case, the pen name covers both of us! All the rest of Zinna Kingsley's work is and will be mine alone.) Do you think you'll be able to tell which parts were written by the 16-year old and which parts were written by the 40-year old? (Hint: "Yes.") The story of how my father and I managed to write this novel together will be detailed in the Monday Interview, so stay tuned!
I think the first writer I fell in love with, who made me want to read endlessly, was Isaac Asimov. I discoveredFoundation quite randomly in a bookstore and it was a revelation, as were the robot stories . . . so I read all the Asimov I could find (which was quite a lot back then; he was still alive and had a lot of work available in bookstores), which of course led me to other Golden Age classic authors like Heinlein, Burroughs, and Clarke. Later on, I discovered horror in the form of Stephen King, in particular The Shining, The Stand, and It. King, like Asimov, is a prolific genius and kept me busy for quite a while, and he led me to the likes of Lovecraft, Howard, Disch, Matheson, and many others. I suppose I would count Asimov and King as the strongest influences in my genre writing, but all of these writers played their part! (If I'd found Walter Tevis back then, by the way, he most certainly would have played a formative role, and if one takes nothing else from this Author Spotlight, one should take this recommendation: read The Queen's Gambit by Walter Tevis. It's not speculative, but that's okay because Tevis wrote The Man Who Fell to Earth. ;)
My parents were divorced when I was a baby, so I saw my father a few weeks out of the year and talked on the phone with him now and then. When I was in the tenth grade, I wrote a short story for an English class assignment, and I enjoyed the experience so much that I wanted to write a novel . . . my father suggested we write one together. Looking back, it's obvious he saw it as a father / son bonding opportunity, but being a kid, I just saw it as fun. Which it was! We wrote The Lord of Dream and Metal together, and that was the beginning of my lifelong dream of being a writer. I wrote stories and novels, even majored in Creative Writing at Bard College. At that point, I became more interested in "literary" writing, influenced by the likes of Pynchon and DFW, which is to say I went off a cliff. . . . :)
I've spent the intervening years trying to scramble back to a stable purchase, but it's been a struggle. My writing output plummeted, and I became discouraged (especially when I took on raising a son as a single father!), but in recent years, as Yarrow Paisley, I've had some modest success placing my work in literary magazines, both online and in print. Some of my publication credits that might interest Zinna Kingsley fans include Pulp Modern, Sein und Werden,Collective Fallout, and the Shadowplay horror anthology from Post Mortem Press, and I have work forthcoming this year in Gargoyle, as well as anthologies from Chômu Press, Dagan Books, and newcomer West Pigeon Press. My bibliography can be found at yarrowpaisley.com. My Zinna Kingsley bibliography can be found at -- you guessed it! --zinnakingsley.com.
I am already in the process of releasing my next Zinna Kingsley novel. This one, called Voidum, is even longer thanThe Lord of Dream and Metal, and I've decided to split it into three ebooks. (I'm discovering that perhaps the ebook format is kinder to shorter volumes.) The first book of the Voidum trilogy, Conception, has recently been released at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords, and books two and three should both be out within the next month or two.
I'd like to thank Kristi for Books N Beans. This is an awesome site, and I'm deeply gratified by the opportunity she offers for some exposure.
Years ago, as a youth, I was a different sort of writer than I am now, with different interests and aspirations, and while I didn't achieve my publication goals, the materials I produced (stories, novels, all with a genre bent) have traveled with me from floppies to hard drives and cds, gathering the proverbial "dust." I've always been fond of them, however . . . and with the advent of the indie publishing boom, it occurred to me that it was high time to haul that stuff out and give it some kind of life!
There is a tradition, especially strong in the classic pulp genres, of using pen names to keep a writer's disparate genre writings distinct from each other, and so, Zinna Kingsley is the name I have chosen to represent my fantasy / horror writing and separate it from my current literary / "experimental" writing. The Lord of Dream and Metal was my first novel, written in collaboration with my father when I was sixteen. (Thus, in this case, the pen name covers both of us! All the rest of Zinna Kingsley's work is and will be mine alone.) Do you think you'll be able to tell which parts were written by the 16-year old and which parts were written by the 40-year old? (Hint: "Yes.") The story of how my father and I managed to write this novel together will be detailed in the Monday Interview, so stay tuned!
I think the first writer I fell in love with, who made me want to read endlessly, was Isaac Asimov. I discoveredFoundation quite randomly in a bookstore and it was a revelation, as were the robot stories . . . so I read all the Asimov I could find (which was quite a lot back then; he was still alive and had a lot of work available in bookstores), which of course led me to other Golden Age classic authors like Heinlein, Burroughs, and Clarke. Later on, I discovered horror in the form of Stephen King, in particular The Shining, The Stand, and It. King, like Asimov, is a prolific genius and kept me busy for quite a while, and he led me to the likes of Lovecraft, Howard, Disch, Matheson, and many others. I suppose I would count Asimov and King as the strongest influences in my genre writing, but all of these writers played their part! (If I'd found Walter Tevis back then, by the way, he most certainly would have played a formative role, and if one takes nothing else from this Author Spotlight, one should take this recommendation: read The Queen's Gambit by Walter Tevis. It's not speculative, but that's okay because Tevis wrote The Man Who Fell to Earth. ;)
My parents were divorced when I was a baby, so I saw my father a few weeks out of the year and talked on the phone with him now and then. When I was in the tenth grade, I wrote a short story for an English class assignment, and I enjoyed the experience so much that I wanted to write a novel . . . my father suggested we write one together. Looking back, it's obvious he saw it as a father / son bonding opportunity, but being a kid, I just saw it as fun. Which it was! We wrote The Lord of Dream and Metal together, and that was the beginning of my lifelong dream of being a writer. I wrote stories and novels, even majored in Creative Writing at Bard College. At that point, I became more interested in "literary" writing, influenced by the likes of Pynchon and DFW, which is to say I went off a cliff. . . . :)
I've spent the intervening years trying to scramble back to a stable purchase, but it's been a struggle. My writing output plummeted, and I became discouraged (especially when I took on raising a son as a single father!), but in recent years, as Yarrow Paisley, I've had some modest success placing my work in literary magazines, both online and in print. Some of my publication credits that might interest Zinna Kingsley fans include Pulp Modern, Sein und Werden,Collective Fallout, and the Shadowplay horror anthology from Post Mortem Press, and I have work forthcoming this year in Gargoyle, as well as anthologies from Chômu Press, Dagan Books, and newcomer West Pigeon Press. My bibliography can be found at yarrowpaisley.com. My Zinna Kingsley bibliography can be found at -- you guessed it! --zinnakingsley.com.
I am already in the process of releasing my next Zinna Kingsley novel. This one, called Voidum, is even longer thanThe Lord of Dream and Metal, and I've decided to split it into three ebooks. (I'm discovering that perhaps the ebook format is kinder to shorter volumes.) The first book of the Voidum trilogy, Conception, has recently been released at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords, and books two and three should both be out within the next month or two.
I'd like to thank Kristi for Books N Beans. This is an awesome site, and I'm deeply gratified by the opportunity she offers for some exposure.
