Sam Reed is a born and bred
southern girl who grew up reading Toni Morrison, Archie Comics, Christopher Pike,
Octavia Butler, Dean Koontz, and Stephen King. When she’s not thinking of what
to write, she is napping or eating, going to church, wishing she could sing,
trying to perfect her Grandma’s biscuit recipe, watching A Different World
reruns, sitting in the sun—or reading a book.
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Velma had lived two lives: her first as a former foster
kid, and her second as an unlikely recruit into a secret order that
satisfied her need for retribution. Her fifteen-year-old self had given up
on hope, but
That is, until she is surprisingly named Kachina, the
fabled chosen empowered to fight the last battle for the fate of the
world. Having to kill someone she loves was never part of the bargain,
even if it means saving everyone else from damnation.
Building a normal life free from the pull of the
Taram—seems like the only answer to her prayers. Except her best friend,
the other Kachina, is coming. The legend is clear that one of them must die.
Velma will have to weigh the cost of her life against
a world that’s constantly betrayed her and quite literally decide if
she’ll be damned in dying, taking the whole world with her.
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Tell us
a little about yourself.
My name
is Samantha but nobody ever calls me that, I’ve always gone by Sam. I’m 38
years old, I’m a proud southern girl born in Pulaksi, Virginia (don’t feel bad, nobody has ever heard
of it), but I’ve lived in Maryland, Washington D.C., Chicago & New York. I’m a horror movie and book fanatic,
I’ll take sour/salty over sweet any day (salt is probably an obsession, I drink
olive juice and pour extra salt in my bags of potato chips…it’s a problem, I
know.) I went to Williams College and for the longest time thought I was going
to be a Clinical Psychologist, (though the psych degree does come in handy for
writing characters), I also have a baking and pastry degree, and spent a part
of my life making custom wedding cakes, which was a job that I adored. But
books were my first love and I’ve always wanted to be a writer. It just took me
30 some years to believe in myself enough to make it happen.
When
did you begin writing?
Oh man, I’ve been writing almost for as long as I can remember.
Snippets of things, poems and short stories. I’m pretty sure I got started
writing by reading. Books were the things that made me feel the most okay.
Internally, I felt like a strange kid, I don’t know if I actually was one, but
I often felt on the outskirts of things. Words on pages that I could hold were
the places where I saw reflections of myself - characters I could relate to,
situations I could be invested in and my reactions were my own - meaning
however I felt while reading, was ok. So then, for me, writing became a natural
outlet, I felt safe on paper, I felt like the truest me on paper, so writing
was where I got to learn myself. First, it was just journals, and then,
probably again, because of the reading, my crazy imagination started leaking
through and it became about telling stories, trying to make sense of things I
didn’t understand by giving them fantastical foundations, by writing characters
who were strong where I was weak and who lived and saw and grew in the ways I
wanted to, or even the re-telling of things, reworking the past into something
that if it was negative, would no longer have any power over me, and if it was
positive, that could be made gloriously larger, worth sharing and celebrating.
So I guess, if boiled down to the basics, for me, writing started by not just
falling in love with words, but in realizing I could trust the world words
allowed me to live in and create.
Describe
your writing process. Do you plot or write by the seat of your pants? When and
where do you write?
Aww man, if only I had a process, that would probably help, lol.
I feel like most writers are probably better at answering this question, that
they have a set time and location and certain rituals that help them get into
their sort of writing zone, but I don’t have any of that. My first reason for
that is an unconventional schedule, since I’ve been acting as a caregiver for
my mom, but the truth is, even if I had no obligations, I still probably
wouldn’t have a process. What I do is squirrel time away when I can and then
just sit down and start writing. Sometimes I have an idea that got sparked in
my head and I’m trying to work it out, but mostly it’s me sitting in a coffee
shop or on my porch or kitchen table, staring out the window and then putting
my fingers on the keyboard and letting them fly. I have tons of these ‘starts’
on my computer, some are garbage (but I still can’t get rid of them), some of
them have something and I know that I can develop it further - those are the
ones I hope I can turn into a book.
Can you
tell us about your most recent release?
Sure,
Fair to Hope is a diverse YA urban
fantasy about two groups secretly waring for control of souls. Velma (my main
girl) has to decide if she’ll save everybody from damnation by killing her best
friend before he kills her. I wanted to write this book because it was the kind
of book I was hungry for when I was a young girl, sort of searching for
representations of myself and the world I lived in, in the books I read. I’ve
also always been a fan of anything involving the supernatural/fantastical to
any degree, but I wanted to see if I was able to do something different. To
create a world where things were happening behind the scenes that had real
consequences for real people, and the folks controlling this, the ones choosing
to do this thing were just like me and you, they weren’t werewolves or vampires
or witches, they didn’t have some special thing as part of their DNA or
experience that made them capable – some thing that you (as the reader) could
never have and so could never walk in their shoes. These people would be people
who would just make a choice, and that choice would have the ability to
reverberate around the world. And I wanted these people to look like me, like
the world I live in, where the main characters and not just one character, or a
side-kick character, were people of color. It can seem like such a little
thing, but it’s not, at least it wasn’t for me. When I was growing up, the
girls to love in books were blond and blue eyed, or raven haired with fair
skin, and all the book-boyfriends were about the same. When and if I found
myself on the page, at best, it lasted for a handful of sentences. And these
were stories I loved, and would re-read and re-read. In many ways those books
built me, but didn’t reflect me, and I wanted to be able to create something
that would allow that not to be the case for anyone who picked up my book. It’s
diverse not just because Velma is a black girl and Josh is a black boy, but
because the people she interacts with, in substantial ways span the spectrum.
If it’s not obvious by this long winded answer, that was extremely important to
me.
Which
authors have inspired your writing?
My mom, she was a writer but let it go when she had kids in
order to provide for us. But she had notebooks of short stories and poems and
reading them was confidence for me, because they were good, and I would think,
some of that lady is in my DNA - so I should be able to do that too. And then
all the writers who I felt like were amazing at showing the subtle savagery of
people coupled with our unbelievable ability to rally and hope and show up -
folks like Stephen King, and Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison, Dean Koontz,
Christopher Pike (his young adult books for me growing up were epic, always
such strong female characters that had very little to do with a girl navigating
a life around a boy, which was prevalent and still is in some sense, that
‘relationship’ defines you - you weren’t okay until you met him, you won’t be
okay without him, that is so short-sighted for not just girls but boys too -
relationships are beautiful, love is a blessing, but love yourself first),
George Orwell, Zora Neale Hurston, Walt Whitman Leaves of Grass. In high school
I read 1984 and The Invisible Man and was struck by being pulled along by the
hand towards the evolution of something…does that make sense? Watching this
thing unfold, often tragically, and being so invested that it becomes more than
a story, it becomes something that shapes how you view life in general. Beloved
did that for me as well, Stephen King’s IT was the first book to truly scare
me, and I grew up on horror movies so it was unexpectedly exhilarating,
everything by Toni Morrison, literally everything, shaped how I categorized
myself as a black woman, but perhaps no novel more than Zora Neale Hurston’s
Their Eyes Were Watching God, I read it as a young southern teenager who’d just
moved to the ‘big city’ and it gave me all these new definitions of love and
security and self awareness, vulnerability, strength, carelessness and hope.
Though my favorites list is always revolving, that book stays in my top 3. My
favorite setting is the South, it’s in my blood, I love the slowness and the
sly calculation of the people and the observations, the food, the heat, heat
can be a character in and of itself, when it’s hot enough, people are inclined
to do crazy things! And food too, what a person eats, how they eat, the
memories surrounding what they use to nourish themselves can be one of the most
telling character traits.
What
advice would you offer to new or aspiring authors?
Be one. That seems like easy throw-away advice, but it’s the
truth. Just be one. Commit to it like you would anything else. You’ll see
things that say write everyday, and that’s good advice, because as a concept
being a writer is romantic and artsy but that makes it easy to forget that it
is also a job, one that requires some dedication and routine, you must write to
be an author, you must write enough words to make a book, and most likely
you’ll have to be able to do that over and over again. That said, I don’t write
everyday, sometimes I can’t, the words just won’t come, and so I don’t beat
myself up about that, I take it as a day of inspiration, I look around me, I
pay attention, I watch people, I think things out and now when I get back in
front of the page, that bank of ‘prompts’ will help the words come…and when
they do, it’s usually a long winded tumble of things that need to be edited and
rearranged and completely reworked and that’s ok, the most important thing is
to just get it out - get the words out, then as you start to work with them and
mold them into a story they’ll work with you, it’ll be a partnership and that’s
when the magic happens.
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