A Few Questions with Cix & Vic Zander
Story in the Anthology:
Fulcra: Siren's ReMix
A Few Questions
What are some authors/books/events that have been influential to your work?Our work is primarily influenced by our dreams and meditation. We had ten+ years of a medical condition that altered our perceptions of reality and erased random memories on a daily basis. Dreams and reality overlapped and we often lost track of which was which. To survive that, we had to come up with many different ways of coping with re-discovering our world from scratch each morning while trying to stay consistent. This is likely what led to many of our personal philosophies being based on absolutes and infinite or eternal scales, having no context with which to process new information as the days went on. Coming out of that, we've found that our stories somewhat resemble Dr. Who, after finally watching it following many recommendations.
For better or worse, we have work experience with heavy construction, explosive demolitions, and global logistics as well as war planning in the US DOD. Along with that, we spent a lot of time scheduling and conducting deployment readiness field training. We've also volunteered and taken extra duties working with detective investigations support, anti-terrorism and physical security planning, and event planning and organizing for a joint women's leadership symposium—multinational event. We don't agree with everything that we've been told while working in these positions but we can confidently say that we've never done something that we felt ashamed of—our moral compass has always been stronger than any authority, and sometimes the authority noticed, ha. We learned how to lead from the middle.
Our personal studies have included in-depth nutrition research, world spiritual belief systems, and traditional magic systems as well as dabbling in folklore across the globe along with language familiarization, hoping to become more fluent. All of these things influence how we see the world and how we write in some way or another.
How do you see writing fitting in (or not) within the current world of books?
We've had a very hard time figuring out our genre. We finally settled on "Apocalyptic Multiverse Grand Opera" as a blanket for our stories. There does seem to be room for more of what we have to write, although we haven't had much time and energy for reading fiction. We'd be a poor judge to truly answer this question but we do think we're going to be making space for ourselves once we can get more work out there.
What are you currently working on?
Currently, we have a main series that will have several books released at once. We feel this is an appropriate way to release stories that run in parallel within a multiverse setting. The only book we have out now ended up being more of a prequel than a solid story. We'll leave it out there but we don't expect to get much traction until we get the next set out.
We're also working on a time-travel retelling of The Great Gatsby. We've been told we can write excitement into words pretty well, so we hope we can use that to do the story justice as a society locked at the far end of the timestream travels back to bring history's most famous performers to their parties. It's taboo to travel back on your personal event stream, for many reasons, but one particular party animal seems to have something strange going on that's making their events the highlight of every evening. A trusted few know the truth, but we're not in the know, yet.
What has/have been your proudest moment/s as a writer?
This would have to be when we help other writers bring out the potential in their works. We have truckloads of experience with technical and educational writing, and we can apply that, now, to help these creative workers all around us clarify their intent, highlight the action, and really hold up a clear lens for them to see how people will receive their work before it goes out there.
We can't tell you how far our professional audience has gone with business writing, but we can say that we know what many different minds from many different walks of life and different parts of the world will see when they read something and that we were able to format a lot of information in ways that everybody will know what's going on, so we can use that along with our educational experience to help writers tell the story that they really want to tell.
Our proudest moments are when our fellow writers win awards and gain a lot of great reviews.
What books/authors are you currently reading or really into?
Currently, we're re-educating ourselves about creative works and literature. We've got about four months of a working, consistent memory so far. Quite fresh, we're starting with classics like Dr. Frankenstein and Sherlock Holmes. The most consistent memories we have of any time before these four months are all linked to survival instincts, so any fictional stories have pretty much been erased. We'll be re-reading The Great Gatsby with a notebook ready.
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