Book Name and Description: All 2018 releases:

1. Thr3 of a Kind (Morbidbooks)
2. Dual Depravity 2 with David Owen Hughes (JEA wetworks)
3. Ketamine Addicted Pandas (JEA wetworks)
4. The Crack House in the Desert (JEA)
5. 56 Seconds (Nihilism Revised)
6. Sparky the Spunky Robot (Journalstone Bizarro Pulp Press)

Interview Questions:

What gave you the idea for? What got you into writing in this genre?

1. Th3 of a Kind: Three short stories one book.

Lala. I wrote this while I was trying to write myself out of a dark tunnel at 5am, in secret. People didn’t like to view me as a person with goals and dreams and thoughts and opinions of my own. Anything I wanted to do was dismissed, but people have tried to hound/manipulate and outright take things away from me, which included writing. Following some medical advice in 2014, while I sat around waiting for therapy to deal with the amount of stress these people were causing in their attempts to
erase my entire identity and replace it with what they saw a single mother should be, I started writing gossipy stories about some of the people dumped into my path when I should have been working on my own problems. I was too stressed out and too tired at the time to take a deeper look at where my stress was coming from and being surrounded by gossips and generally shallow/empty/miserable people, I did the best I could to write an entertaining story. Surface layer story. Nothing deep. A bit bitchy. I knew I needed to write. Write myself out of it and away from these people and their problems so I could address my problems. And so I did. Lala was dumped in my path to mould me into a jealous and insecure person and for a time, it worked. I didn’t like feeling that way as it isn’t me naturally. Yet another projection of someone else’s problems onto me. I wanted to write about her for years. I didn’t know much about her, only she was the other woman. One of many, I later found out. I’m also not too fond of Monopoly, so I added that in there. Or, inside Lala where the pieces can multiply.

Suburban Invasion. Going through an old notebook and the miserable prototype hipster boyfriend I mention in other interviews was convinced aliens were going to abduct him. The girlfriend saves the day for her pathetic boyfriend from what are essentially space pugs. Another story written in secret at 5am. I will one day write a full-length space pug invasion story because that sounds like it might be fun.

 

Body Swapping with a Slimmer Man. Some people can lose weight and look like entirely new people, which is where I got the idea for a story from. Some people lose a lot of weight very quickly. Especially after spending two years very slowly losing the weight I gained when under immense stress (it was less comfort eating and more not having the time to cook because I was dealing with too many people and their problems and/or projections).

Th3 of a Kind was released at the beginning of 2018 without any fuss. I recommend it for people who enjoyed Satan’s Yeast Infection in the Strange Behaviours anthology. It covers a combination of horror, sci-fi and bizarro.

 

2. Dual Depravity 2 with David Owain Hughes. This contains two stories from me and
   two from David. My two novellas are The Previous Plastic Surgeon and God’s Fleshlight.

The Previous Plastic Surgeon is a body horror story following Jerusalem as he looks for the ugliest woman he can find. He likes to perform plastic surgery on his girlfriends in his flat. I once had a boyfriend who would tell me in graphic detail about the women he slept with in the past, who he was sleeping with, details of what he wanted to do with other women. He would openly pick up other women in front of me. And use my wifi to talk to other women right in front of me. It created an unnatural insecurity and jealousy, which erased part of my identity for a while. He also projected his ex-girlfriend’s problems onto me. He justified this by saying me and her had gone through some similar events. It isn’t the events that create the issues but how they are handled by the individual. He seemed to grasp that and then went right back to doing the same things. The Previous Plastic Surgeon was my way of dealing with it. I didn’t enjoy being so insecure. It isn’t healthy. I’m also not a naturally jealous person. What other people have, typically isn’t what I want or need for my life. The fact he managed to manipulate me to such an extent that he made me jealous of other women really pissed me off. A lot of these women he would throw into my path didn’t have anything going for them. Really shallow, narrow-minded, etc. and it would show in their appearance and how they carried themselves. It wasn’t so difficult to take ugly personality traits and turn them into
ugly physical traits because in these women, it already showed. By doing that, he showed me what his opinion of me was. Lesson learned, don’t stay with someone intent on creating artificial competition. It is even worse when having nothing in common with the competition. I have been revisiting some of this stuff for Queen of Filth Era Two, also known as Tainted Love/Push the Button in my social media postings. I will discuss the evolution below.

 

God’s Fleshlight was my first attempt to go a little deeper in my writing in years. I had written “Gingerbread” for the Splat 3 anthology. At the time, I was so stressed out, I didn’t think I had written anything good. I didn’t say what I wanted to say at any rate, upon reading “Gingerbread” when I received it back from edits, I loved it. “Gingerbread” was written after too many years of being on the receiving end of cyberbullying from some of my competition. I was hurt and frustrated. The boyfriend in question wouldn’t get the woman in question to stop. She obviously took immense empty pleasure in it and getting under my skin. It goes a bit deeper than me taking a bit of creative revenge against a situation I felt powerless to stop. I doubt his friends would have cyber-bullied me if it wasn’t for his total lack of respect for me and everyone else and the infantizing. He would try to help me to the point I ended up creating stuff for him to do so I could get something done, or prevent me through drama from doing something, or say “We haven’t been taught”. Health and Safety regulations go a bit overboard to the point of infantizing the general population. In “God’s Fleshlight”, it would be better if someone rounded up the monkeys and climbed the trees to remove the toilet roll, despite any risks (broken bones from falling out of the trees, etc). They aren’t allowed to. Healthy and Safety doesn’t allow it. The very basic things in life aren’t allowed because someone could get hurt. Without the infantizing of society in both “God’s Fleshlight” and real life, there would be less Stacey’s in the world. Bizzaro is the only world Health and Safety overlords can operate in. Some of the regulations I’ve come across over the years range from the bizarre, the dangerous and the outright stupid. Obviously, some regulations are good, but they get lost beneath all the ones that make no sense.

 

3. Ketamine Addicted Pandas. Extreme. Pointless. Violent. Pandas escape from the zoo. It isn’t bamboo they’re interested in eating. It is baboon brains. While high on ketamine. And dressed as Nazis. They listen to techno but play in a black metal band. Actual Nazis residing in Hell take offense about the acts carried out while wearing their uniforms – authentic ones, stolen off the backs of the neo-nazis the pandas killed. They bust out of Hell and are in hot pursuit. Demons follow them and help the pandas. A few things came together to make this book possible. I was asked to write a short story about humans being the endangered species. The World Wild Life Fund set an email saying pandas had been removed from the endangered species list. Black metal band Immortal appeared as a meme on my facebook timeline. I wanted to rid my life of the toxic people, most of which haboured some very extreme view points. This was also the first time in many years I really started talking about what I was writing. Talking about how excited I was for this story and how it didn’t have any deep hidden meanings drove away the bulk of the toxic people. They realized I wasn’t one of them. I have much better things to do than sit around gossiping and complaining and trying to out-do them on social media. Those aren’t the sort of people I want in my life. I actually do listen to black metal. There’s a lot of rumours about it. As well as the various things black metallers have been arrested for and convicted of, including murder and arson. Plus, with me listening to black metal, people would assume I myself habour these extreme viewpoints. I wanted the extreme people with their extreme points of view to get away from me. They wouldn’t listen when I told them to do so, so I turned black metal into a mockery. I had fun with it. I hope true black metal fans enjoy it and the humour in it. That’s where the extreme comes from. Due to the lack of anything deep and meaningful in this story, the only thing I looked up to write it was information about ketamine. I still don’t know why I bothered. They’re pandas. It isn’t going to work like a party drug for them. I do plan on writing a second one and probably more. The world needs entertainment.
4. The Crack House in the Desert. This is probably the hardest book out of the six for me to write about. I wanted to write a sci-fi body horror that was in no ways like HP Lovecraft’s The Reanimator. Every attempt I made to write this book was too much like The Reanimator. Then I received some positive feedback about a story I wrote that included walking cactuses (I think it is in the Sparks anthology). I don’t remember anything else about this book, even after reading it again for edits. And again for a back of book synopsis. My post traumatic stress was so badly purposely triggered my entire world came crashing down. Also, a physical object I need to create was taken from me by the same person who made my world come down. The only way to move on was to finish writing this book. I was shaking. I couldn’t sleep. Tears constantly poured out of my eyes. But I did it. And I felt better for doing so. I knew I was happy when the story finally started to click into place and that must have been what upset the person who purposely triggered the post traumatic stress. Again, this is an issue that is being explored in Tainted Love/Push the Button.
5. 56 Seconds. 56 seconds of love/lust lost on the sheets. This is the second story in Tainted Love/Push the Button and the first to be published. I once had a tinder account (I don’t any more). I was once sent 56 seconds of jerk off footage. This inspired the first story in Tainted Love/Push the Button, which was the first thing I wrote after writing The Crack House in the Desert other than notes for Smothered Hope and Dream Princess (see below). During the week after finishing The Last Human (the first story of Tainted Love/Push the Button), I didn’t feel like I had really explored the jerk off footage. And I wanted to get better. Given how my post traumatic came about, I really shouldn’t have it. So I decided to start merging reality with fiction and really pulling in outside influences, whether it is something I’ve read, watched or listened to (check out my facebook page facebook.com/danibrownbooks where I try to update this stuff). I started with the jerk off footage. Not by any means traumatizing (DO NOT SEND ME DICK PICS OR JERK OFF FOOTAGE, ONCE IS ENOUGH) and the guy who sent it seemed really sweet. I started to explore why someone might do that. Adding in the borderline personality disorder my mother probably suffered with, my son’s father had a diagnosis of, and I suspect an awful date that turned into three months of Hell had it with co-morbid conditions, and I suspect someone else I had been close with in the past has quiet borderline. I’ll discuss more of that below. Then I added in some Aleister Crowley. And a lot of repetition. The dive bar comes from a literal dive bar. I was at an EBM night. No one was there but the DJ kept adding fog to an empty dancefloor. I took a picture. The DJ looked sad. Sad in a pathetic sort of way. And had a vague resemblance to the guy of the jerk off footage. This story fell out in about two weeks. Through all the years of waking up at 5AM to write in secret, I knew that if I kept going, I would one day reach the old writing highs I had. I did it with story. This is the story where I really start to bring in all sorts of different influences, become aware of them and talk about what they are. There’s even eyeball licking because around the time I had the tinder account some creep found my Instagram account and felt the need to comment on every post. Of course I took some screenshots and posted them to facebook before deleting. One of the comments was about my “kissable eyes”. Of course, facebook somehow turned that into eyeball licking. While writing this story, I started to write notes for some trauma I had undergone which was weaved into other stories in Tainted Love/Push the Button.
6. Sparky the Spunky Robot. My last release scheduled for 2018. My favourite story. My favourite character. The first time I actually say something important in a non-bitchy sort of way. Born of sarcasm. I wrote a story about a robot. Positive feedback (it has yet to be published) from the editors. I also write the Chester and Lester series of erotic bizarro stories (for free on my website). Readers absolutely love those. They love the rejection letters Burdizzo Books sends me for them as much as I do. Rather sarcastically, I took a picture of my son’s toy robot that inspired the first story, posted it on facebook and said I was going to write a story about a robot powered by cum. After a few false starts, they sounded too much like the first story, end of the world, couldn’t find enough cum, two things happened: my ex-boyfriend was talking about the keytar he wanted and a friend messaged me about Depeche Mode. Also, I had an idea way back in 2013, when the things that lead up to my post traumatic stress were becoming so intense instead of going away became worse. People were hounding me into giving up writing. No one around me could accept that I knew how to make myself happy, didn’t want to compete with others, knew what I wanted from life, etc. Things were getting bad. I wrote this in 2017. It took that long and two rounds of therapy for things to let up a bit. There were still toxic lurkers around when I wrote Sparky. I wondered what sort of things would motivate people to go out of their way to tell someone to give up all the things that made them happy and then hound them when they refused to the point the person on the receiving end ends up with a mental illness. No sane functional people would do such things. In Sparky, it is for the increased status higher tier garden decorations offer. All ambitions and dreams in life get sent to live out in garden sheds. In Matthew’s case, he wanted to be a popstar. His band found success without him. He keeps his keytar in the shed. His emotionally abusive wife nags him to get rid of it. Matthew can’t. He jerks off over it. But can’t cover it in too much cum because it’ll break. He builds a robot. The robot comes to life with Matthew’s spunk (hence the title). Sparky doesn’t have a voice though. He needs a voice so people will listen to him. He breaks into the garden sheds and uncovers the lost dreams of the residents in Suburban Hell. Sparky is a cum powered robot, it wasn’t going to be anything other than bizarro. The toy that provided the inspiration is now tattooed on my arm. I hope to get Sandy, the evil robot, tattooed on me in the near future. The robots can be good or evil because they take on the emotional makeup of the man providing the cum.

 

xxxx

How long have you been writing?

I started writing beyond essays and journalism during university. I was enrolled on a creative writing degree after all. It wasn’t until my second year when I developed some confidence in doing so. I had the flu and an assignment due. By the end of the third day, I was well enough to write. I started to look around my bedroom for inspiration. The only thing that stuck out was a copy of “The Chronicles of Narnia”. I wrote a story with talking animals. A dark story. It’ll always be emo-Narnia in my head. It is on my website.

Tell us about your past books and stories?

I obviously have a lot of published material. Too much to cover here. For information on my back catalogue, please see my website.

What is the writing process like for you?

Way back when I was writing Broccoli (2009-2011), it used to feel like getting high in the best possible way. I know I’ve mentioned that in previous interviews. I was also working on my continued WIP “Seth” at that point. Both were written in different ways. Seth I was trying to be as emotionless as possible. And being a prude, I had taken to the internet for all the bizarre sexual daydreams in the story as not only do I not have a cock, I have no experience in any of the things Seth gets up to. Broccoli had no research. It was a difficult one. I had tried to write it in both third person and first, but neither worked. One day, my friend sent me a list of writing rules to break. It worked in second person present tense. Then things changed. Things were bad while writing Broccoli but not bad enough that I couldn’t escape for a few hours and feel good about myself and who I am. I thought with the degree in creative writing, people would leave me alone and let me be the person I am. People wouldn’t leave me alone to write. I need a clear mind to get stuff done. People kept dumping their stresses on me and their mental health/personality disorders. I’m a woman. And a creative. And a single mother. In too many people this translates as not knowing what I want in life, low intelligence, lack of ambition, and a bunch of other negative things that are one hundred per cent untrue. With all the problems and drama around me and being taken out on me, I wrote in secret at 5 in the morning for a few years. I was exhausted. I was broken. I don’t know why people wouldn’t back off. It wasn’t just one or two people, it was everyone, right down to my child’s school. The people claiming they were helping were a bigger hinderance than the outright toxic people. I kept writing. I have hardly any memory of what I wrote during those few years. A lot of what I completed was published. With the stress and drama, I didn’t complete everything. I knew that writing would one day pay off and I could develop into the author I wanted to be. Obviously, my writing process changed once I cleansed all the toxic people from my life and I was left with the pieces to pick up plus my original problems I had ten years back when I graduated university. With post-traumatic stress but no additional stress, I’m able to better take in outside influence and go a bit deeper with my stories, on both a personal level and on levels about society. If I get a creative block these days, I relax, have a few drinks, watch some TV or go to some parties knowing it’ll come back, sooner and better if I chill out. In the past, I would try to hide it knowing I would be mentally pounced upon and hounded to do something with my life as apparently being a creative isn’t doing something with my life and I must be as mentally unhealthy as the people hounding me.

What is your writing day like?

I’ve already extensively covered what the writing day used to be like, in this interview and others. It is different now. These days, I wake up before the school run. I may or may not write notes in my notebook. Sometimes because I’m not exhausted, I wake up in the night with an idea for something in my notebook. I no longer write in a linear fashion. I have about ten stories in this notebook at this point in time, all with a paragraph here and there, notes in the margins, post it notes covering it. I let the creativity carry me. I’m writing as I imagined I would ten years back. Over the summer, I’ll be trying to claim back some of the other creative skills I used to have so I can make some of my stuff multimedia and hopefully, to follow after that, interactive. Basically as I planned during my second year of university. I still have to work a non-creative day job, which I’m resentful as Hell over. One of the people hounding me cost me not one but two creative businesses. I went to therapy after the first one to cope with working a non-creative day job which is like a little piece of me dies every time I go in. That wasn’t good enough for him and his family (toxic people will always claim your problems come from the past and not what they are doing in the present). What was covered in therapy hasn’t come back with the last of the toxic people gone, but I do carry index cards with me when I have to go to the day job. Sometimes I write notes on these and have a good day, other days, not. I don’t have to work as many hours now, so I try to focus on being home and creating and letting the stories flow through me. When I can get into that frame of mind, I’m the happiness person in the world regardless of how much I wrote that day. I used to stick to a minimum word count to ensure I got stuff done. I don’t do that anymore. There’s no need. Not with the toxic people gone. And hopefully as I continue to work in this way, the post traumatic will stop flaring. I’ll be able to get away from Liverpool and continue along the path of recovery. I used to not allow anything from my life or my emotions into my writing. These days, I don’t care anymore. Let it come. Let it out. Let it go. It was advised by a doctor many years ago, when it was obvious toxic people in the present were causing my mental health problems and there wasn’t anything wrong with me despite coming from a bad background.

What have been the biggest influences on your writing?

I don’t know how I did it in those dark years. From Middle Age Rae of Fucking Sunshineuntil God’s Fleshlight. I wrote about the toxic people, excluding Welcome to New Edge Hill, Dark Roast and the to be published Stef and Tuckerseries. I would have on music while writing, but it was the music the people around me listened to even alone at five in the morning. Music did play a large role in story creation. These days even more so, I let the stories dictate the playlist. What I’m watching. What I’m reading. Something I find interesting (could be a toy or an advert – I keep my facebook ads on for a reason). A conversation. I let everything flow through me when I’m in the right frame of mind, distort it and let it fall out on the page. I’m a much happier, much more relaxed person doing it that way.

What is your favorite book (other than your own book, of course) and why? What book disappointed you and why?

My favourite book remains The Dark Tower. As I’ve escaped the bad background and the toxic people, but I’m still getting my life caught up to where I wanted it to be when I first made the leap out of the bad background and into the unknown, I’m starting to understand the process that went into writing that series. Stephen King included a lot of outside influence in it. I fell in love with the characters when I first started reading it and the way they were developed. None of them are saints, but with only a handful of exceptions, none are pure evil. Being around people that only see things in black and white or good and evil, it was refreshing to read that the first time. Obviously, I was aware the vast majority of humanity operate within grey areas of thought but the people with the very extreme viewpoints kept a barrier between me and normal people. I’ve read it a few more times since then. Most recently, when I was down to only the last few toxic lingerers in my life and that’s when I started to appreciate everything in it and every outside influence. The end of The Dark Towerhad a major influence on the end of Strip/Becoming(currently sat on a slushpile), along with a Placebo song. I really like the Man in Black. I think it was in The Standwhere the killer woke and put his boots on, like The Doors song “The End”. Roland is pursuing the Man In Black across the desert when The Gunslinger opens. Most of my desert stories are because of the influence The Dark Towercontinues to hold on me. I still say Stephen King read Lord of the Ringsand wrote The Dark Tower, I read The Dark Towerand wrote “Seth” (which will remain unfinished until those problems, my original problems from ten years ago are dealt with, mainly stuff like buying a car, improving my living environment and everything else I require to fully explore my creative mind as I didn’t have and still don’t have mental health problems related to coming from a crumby background regardless of what certain toxic people may like to say). “Seth” character was very influenced by both Gollum/Smeagol and Odetta/Detta/Susannah. Gollum/Smeagol and Odetta/Detta are representative of the people I spent so long trying to get away from. They don’t really merge in Gollum/Smeagol. He still debates with himself despite the patience Frodo shows him. In Odetta/Detta the two extremes become someone new but can call on the extremes at any time. Everything about these stories, I love. I’ve read the bulk of Stephen King’s other books and seeing how so many of them tie up in The Dark Towerwas something I used to enjoy and still would if I had the time. It is like what I’m doing with Era Two, also known as Tainted Love/Push the Button although my tie-ins will stay within a specific group of stories. King’s expand his entire career.

 

I don’t usually pick up books expecting to be disappointed. I picked up Ready Player Oneexpecting it though. I wasn’t. Although I doubt it is the only source of this 80s being the in-thing. I actually rather enjoyed it and it brought up some deep ideas. Some of which I touched on in Broccoli. Minus the 80s bit, I think a book I was curious about but expecting to feel a bit bored and disappointed by, might influence Queen of Filth Era Two (Tainted Love/Push the Button), in particular the Dream Princess and Last Human stories, which merge more than the other stories within the group.

 

I had high hopes for 50 Shades. Erotica had it the charts. It wasn’t erotica. An abusive relationship marketed as erotica would be a better description. If it was marketed that way, I wouldn’t have read it. I was expecting something pleasant, instead, I read something with too many similarities to my own truly awful characters. If it was marketed differently, I’m sure a lot of other people would appreciate it. I haven’t read any other ‘mommy porn’ stories, so I don’t know if they’re all like it. Other authors who do appreciate it, do mention the bad marketing in conversation. I can relate to that, Disney’s Pocahontas is my favourite princess and I get loads of shit for it not being historically accurate. Really, Disney should have given the princess a different name. I should give another mommy porn story a chance.

How do you think you’ve evolved creatively?

 

It is hard to say. Obviously, I didn’t get to experience a natural creative evolution due to extreme levels of toxic people and their negative influence. Ten years ago, I had a random selection of other creative skills and planned Broccoli as a multimedia project. Over the course of the summer, I’ll be buying equipment and seeing what comes back. By autumn/winter, I hope to have something that is multimedia from Era Two. I’ve already covered what impact the toxic people have had in this interview, other interviews and on my website. Within the next few years, I hope to solve all those problems I had ten years ago, mainly my lack of a car and resources I need to create. From there, hopefully, I’ll have a much more natural creative evolution, especially as my mental health improves. It is like a circle, buy something I need to create = better mental health = can buy more things needed to create = clearer mind = can create and market on a smaller budget. So, basically, the opposite of the past ten years. What the past ten years should have been.

 

What tools do you feel are must-haves for writers?

An extensive music library away from the computer. Records, cds, cassettes. Whatever your format choice is for a hard copy. Cover a vast range of music. Like an album cover, buy the album. It doesn’t matter what type of music it is, it could have a bigger and better influence on what you write than your normal tastes. A notebook. Pens. Post it notes. Something tiny to shove into a bag or pocket so you don’t end up running down the street in a quest to get home quickly where this stuff resides, like my fat goth ass did a few years back, or ducking into a shop with overpriced notebooks and pens.

What is the best piece of advice you ever received from another author?

Just write. Don’t worry about editing or the way the words sound on the page, that can be fixed later.This saw me through the dark days and early mornings on little sleep. Along with don’t worry about saying anything.

How do you market your work? What avenues have you found to work best for your genre?
How I market depends on the piece and what resources I have available at the time. Ketamine Addicted Pandas, I just did it online with interviews and social media. I started talking about it as I was writing it so people were well aware of it when it was published. People were looking forward to it. Broccoli I had a launch party where I did a reading. I do conventions and events. 56 Seconds might be my first multimedia project, but anything other than the story won’t be ready for release in August when the book is due out. With Sparky, it would be really cool to have a synthpop party, but I don’t think I can afford that right now. I do readings as well. I also post attempts of me trying to read on my facebook page. I’m dyslexic and have a lot of trouble with the spoken word. I do find it to be completely pointless to post endless links in facebook groups. When I do post links, I try to include a description or a review and I try to make it relevant to something else that has been released. When The Years Best Hardcore Horror 3 was released, I posted a review of Reptile, saying that if people enjoyed my story in the anthology, Reptile is the best place to start. If I get messages asking where the best place to start is in general, I’ll post a link to Night of the Penguins saying this is the best place to start. I always try to be flexible in my marketing but I have become much firmer with what I know doesn’t work for me. I am not going to waste my time proving to someone else that posting the same links over and over again in the same facebook groups doesn’t work when I can be spending my time doing something that does. Also, I’ve started to do a lot more interviews and posting more of my influences on social media. That is one way social media does work for marketing. Let people in. Let them see what you do in down time, or if you are almost always creating. When I’m creating a lot, I post pictures of my notebooks or index cards. I keep a relatively up-to-date list of links at the top of my facebook page. Also, talk about when things aren’t going right. Whether that is in creativity or in life in general. Pretty, social media curated lives form a large basis of Tainted Love/Push the Button. I will acknowledge I have post traumatic stress, where it came from and when it flares and why because it does have a huge impact on my writing.

 

What piece of your own work are you most proud of?
Sparky the Spunky Robot. I spent so long with the idea inside my head, not the cum-powered robot bit, but the people dragging each other down and taking their lack of aspirations out on others. I ended up having Sparky tattooed on me. I will have Sandy done next.

For those who haven’t read any of your stories, what story/book of yours do you think best represents your work and why?
Night of the Penguinsis the best place to start. It fully represents all the nastiness with the grossness. It has a bit of meaning. Most people can relate to having a job they don’t like, with or without the power hungry, status seeking boss. It has the weirdness and flying penguins.

 

Carla doesn’t like her job at the zoo very much. She works in retail which is bad enough. Management make the zoo even worse than it should be. Preferred employees get better treatment. Carla is so underpaid, she can’t afford to feed herself. She breaks into the zoo, looking for food. She finds it is cult induction night. Spores, the worst manager out of the lot of them, is being inducted. A hidden power surfaces in Carla.

 

I worked a job at a zoo through college and university, which I hated with such a passion I have been self-employed since. That’s where the idea came from.

 

What are you doing next?

Obviously,Ketamine Addicted Pandas 2 – Burn the Bible Belt(still a working title) is on the cards in the future. I’m not sure how far into the future. I’m wrapped up in a massive creative project, which I’m hoping to make multi-media at this present point in time. I’ve been calling it Queen of Filth Era Two or Tainted Love/Push the Button on social media. It started as one story and grew from there, changing my writing process and everything. I have a lot less stress in my life now than I did when I started out writing and then through ten very dark, horrible years. After what I hope is a final PTSD back with a vengeance at the end of 2017 and through until February of 2018, I broke out of it and away from the toxic people. Medical advice has been to write my emotions and experiences since 2014. I was a very private person before stress and toxic people claimed me (the toxic people would disclose personal information for the general public to consume, which I obviously found rather upsetting), so it took me a while to be able to write this way. But I’m doing it. There’s a lot of fiction in this group of stories as well, good to leave people guessing. All the stories in this group are merging together. In the past, my notebooks would have one or two stories per section, told in a linear way. For this group of stories, I’ve given up on that. My notebook is a disorganized mess. There’s post it notes and index cards. Because the stories merge, some of the lines are repeated in other stories. The characters are mainly the same. I don’t know how many stories this group is going to last. For every one I finish and send off somewhere, two more appear. Once it is done, I’ll write Ketamine Addicted Pandas 2 and pick up the stories I had started before the PTSD flare up at the end of 2017.

What advice would you give aspiring writers?

Don’t expect your friends and family to support you, but don’t expect them to hinder you either. If they’re causing drama or telling you to do something else, you need new friends and family. It is better to be alone than suffer serious mental health problems as a result of being around toxic people.

bio:

Suitably labelled “The Queen of Filth”, extremist author Dani Brown’s style of dark and twisted writing and deeply disturbing stories has amassed a worrying sized cult following featuring horrifying tales such as “56 Seconds”, “Night of the Penguins” and the hugely popular “Ketamine Addicted Pandas”. Merging eroticism with horror, torture and other areas that most authors wouldn’t dare, each of Dani’s titles will crawl under your skin, burrow inside you, and make you question why you are coming back for more.

Links:

Website https://danibrownqueenoffilth.weebly.com/

Facebook facebook.com/danibrownbooks

Twitter @danibrownauthor