Last week, I talked to L. Marie Wood about her vampire fiction and how she finds balance between life and her many roles within the horror community. If you haven’t checked it out, I highly recommend it.

This week, I am very pleased to welcome writer, publisher and friend John M. McIlveen to Girl Meets Monster. If you haven’t had the privilege of meeting John, do yourself a favor and say hello to him the next time you see him at an event.

He is a father to five daughters, Editor-In-Chief of Haverhill House Publishing, and works at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory. He lives in Haverhill, MA with his wife Roberta Colasanti.

Three Questions

GMM: Welcome to Girl Meets Monster, John. Last week I asked L. Marie Wood how she balances all the hats she’s wearing on her head. Rumor has it that you only sleep 4-5 hours each night. Aside from catching fewer winks than the average human, how do you balance your work, family, writing and publishing responsibilities? Has the pandemic had an impact on changing some of your habits? How have you adjusted?

JMM: The rumor is true, I sleep about 4 hours a night, usually 12 a.m. – 4 a.m., no alarm clock. I’m at MIT between 5-5:30 and home by 3:00 p.m., work on the house/yard until dinner (about 6-6:30 pm). I typically settle down to write and/or publish (wherever the spirit leads) aroud 8:30 p.m. to midnight. Lunch hour at work is my window for reading. As for family, four of my five daughters are grown, out of college, and forging ahead with their own lives and families (which may be, in retrospect, why I started publishing). Just Roberta and me at home, now, for the most part.

The pandemic has changed few to none of my habits. My job at the lab is considered essential, so that schedule hasn’t changed. Now, the house fire we had on March 7 destroyed our house and most of its contents and backed Haverhill House up at least eight months to a year. A year will likely pass by the time our home is rebuilt, and though we have managed to still get sit titles out so far, and are in line to reach ten, which, although it’s half the original plat, isn’t all that bad, considering the amount of time we have to dedicate to getting things on track again. Still, we had to push ten or eleven titles down the road a year.

GMM: I loved your fragment and look forward to reading the complete story. Those last two lines of dialog really spoke to me:

“Why do you keep changing?”

“Is there a specific way a girl is supposed to be?” she asked.

Whoever this child is, she has some very progressive ideas about identity and its intersectionalities. And, I’m dying to know why she does keep changing. Traditionally, male writers haven’t always been particularly skilled at (or concerned about) writing believable female characters. They often exist in a story as window dressing, or to serve the needs of the male characters. Eve strikes me as a very complex character. What experiences in your life and as a writer have impacted your ability to create realistic female characters? What inspired this story?

JMM: Females have always been front and center in my family and my life. Five daughters, two step-daughters, sisters, nieces, a very strong-willed mother, and my wife, Roberta (we’ll leave the exes out). I have lived with an array of these beautiful, quirky creatures and have witnessed so many personalities, styles, emotions, shapes and sizes, cheered their succeses, dried their tears, the list is quite extensive. All said and done, each one of them have made me a better and wiser man, father, writer, husband, protector, etcetera. They spill over into my writing on every level, and as with my life, female characters tend to be front and center in most of my writing. In my novel Hannawhere, twin sisters Hannah, Anna, and social worker Debbie Gillan are my three main characters. In my second novel Girl Gone North, sisters Emma and Thalia Holden are my main characters. When I run into a situation with one of my female characters, I find I usually don’t have to reach far into my memories to find a daughter, sister, or other close to me who has been there. These characters are often based on the women in my life, and on some occasions, the merging of a few (Hannah and Anna Amiel had certain traits from all of my daughters). In my collection Inflictions, the story “Smokey” is a tale of a horribly neglected toddler named Cassie. The story was prompted by a picture of my then-toddler daughter Kayleigh. As I wrote, my character became Kayleigh and by the tragic end of the story it was about 3 a.m. and I was emotionally shattered. I had to lift my sleeping Kayleigh from her crib and sit holding her an hour or so until I calmed.

GMM: Aside from your collection, A Variable Darkness, what else are you working on right now? What projects are you most excited about? Are there any projects you’re looking forward to publishing at Haverhill by other writers?

JMM: I’m not writing nearly as much as I should be, but I am putting the final edits on my crime and suspense novel Corruption. My children’s book Owen and the Apprentice Troll is nearing completion but has taken on a life of its own. My YA novel, The Elephant in the Endzone, which deals with teen depression, is about half done. And my Horror novel Are You Experienced? is about 1/4 done, but is starting to come together.

Haverhill House…where do I start?

On the burner and coming soon:

• A children’s book, Milk, the Cat by Meghan Arcuri-Moran and illustrated by Ogmios
• Souless by Christopher Golden

I have to make a timeline for all the titles pushed out this year, foremost Cyclops Road by Jeff Strand and illustrated by Lynn Hansen.

Exciting look forward:

• Tony Tremblay delivered his follow up novel Do Not Weep For Me
• J. Edwin Buja delivered his sequel to King of the Wood, titled The Consort
• And a certain lady asked to talk about the sequel to her Stoker nominated novel Invisible Chains

Plus, a staggering slush pile.

An excerpt from the short story “Eve” from the forthcoming collection A Variable Darkness by John McIlveen

Around him lay only forest, flat and dense with trees—endless oaks, birches, locusts, and maples in every direction, rising skyward on thick trunks… and one smashed up Escalade.

Guy knew this wasn’t possible, but denial dampened his reaction. Hills don’t simply disappear. There had to be a logical explanation, like shock, or maybe delusions from hitting his head. That had to be it, because he thought he could also see a young girl moving among the trees, about a hundred yards deeper into the woods. He refocused, and sure enough, there she was, dressed in light blue overall shorts, long strawberry-blond hair falling halfway down her back. She appeared to be writing or scraping something onto the trunk of the tree, but it was difficult to tell from such a distance. He took a few hesitant steps toward the child and stopped.

“Hey, little girl!” He called. “Hey!”

She looked over at him with indifference and dutifully returned her attention to whatever it was she was doing. He started to walk towards the girl and when he had cut the distance in half, she moved to a tall elm about a dozen trees away from him. She deftly climbed the tree and propped herself at the crux of a branch some sixty feet overhead. There was nothing natural in it, the way she had ascended with the dexterity of a squirrel; Guy had never seen anything quite like it from a human. He watched her for a few moments, wondering if she were avoiding him, but she just as deftly climbed back down and headed in another direction.

“Wait a minute!” Guy said.

The little girl stopped and watched him expectantly. She looked about nine years old, thin-limbed, and fawn-like, with vibrant blue eyes. Under closer observation, he realized her hair was dark brown, not strawberry-blond as he had first thought, and attributed it to the play of sun through the trees.

“I got in an accident,” he told her. “I can’t find my way out of the woods.

“I know,” the girl responded, her tone neutral. She resumed walking.

Guy followed, equally concerned for his and hers. He asked himself why such a young child would be alone in the deep woods. “Are you lost?” he asked.

“You’re lost,” she said, in the same impartial manner. She looked at him, her alert brown eyes reflecting him and the surroundings, and walked over to another tree.

Brown eyes?

Guy felt prickles of unease run through him. There was no question that her eyes had been a striking blue before she’d climbed the tree. He looked back at his Escalade, trying to get his bearings so he could get the hell out of there, but the SUV was no longer in sight. He ran a few steps in the direction he thought he had come from, but stopped, uncomfortable with the idea of letting the girl out of sight. Everything else he had looked away from had disappeared.

He returned to where the girl stood. She now had rich ebony skin, but the same light blue overall shorts, which he found more disconcerting.

Isn’t it the clothes that are changed, not the child inside them?

She seemed unconcerned, giving him the impression that she wasn’t lost, which meant she was faring better than he was. Again, she scribed something onto the tree.

He stepped beside her, feeling as if he’d fallen into the rabbit hole. “Something’s going on here that I don’t understand.”

“Something’s always going on,” she replied, matter-of-factly.

He couldn’t tell if she was being disparaging, or just answering him the way most children her age would, but she was making him feel dense. Frustrated, he asked, “Can’t you give me a direct answer?”

“I can,” she said, pinning him with glimmering green eyes. She skittered up the tree, spent five minutes up above, moving from branch to branch, and climbed down.

He followed her thirty yards to a huge, majestic oak. “What are you doing?”

The girl, now with shiny, waist-length coal-black hair, started writing on the tree with what looked like a simple wooden stick, but as she moved it, the name Joey Wilkerson appeared as if engraved. “Writing,” she said.

“Writing what?”

“Names.”

“Who is Joey Wilkerson?” Guy asked, understanding that his questions would have to be precise if he wanted precise answers.

“A broken heart,” she said, but offered no explanation.

She climbed the tree again and moved from branch to branch. Meanwhile, he inspected a number of trees and saw that most of them had names engraved: Dedrick Aaldenberg, Luis Rosios, Peter Craig, Hirohito Ishushima, Glenn Levesque—and hundreds, maybe thousands more. She descended, now wearing a mane of tight auburn ringlets.

“Are these all broken hearts?”

“Yup,” she said, the simplistic word making her, for the first time, sound her age.

“Why are they all men?” he asked, as he followed her to another tree.

“Boys, too… mostly boys,” she said. “There aren’t enough trees for girls and women, their names are on the leaves.”

Guy thought about this for a while and asked, “Why so many females?”

She looked at him and smiled sadly. “Thirty-one years,” she said.

“How do you know how old I am?”

“That’s how long your eyes have been closed.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I know. You will when you have to,” she said, rubbing an almond-shaped eye with the back of her hand.

“Who are you, Confucius?” he blurted with frustration. “What little girl talks in circles like this?”

“Me,” she answered. “You are angry with the wrong person.” She engraved the name Abubakar Kwabena.

“You’ve already written his name,” Guy said, noticing the name was already on the trunk once, and again. “Twice.”

“A heart can break more than once. His has broken three times.” She looked around and held out a pale arm. “Girls, women, they grow another leaf. Some trees have many names; some names have her own branch.”

He followed her gesture and looked back at the pale-skinned girl with Afro hair and Asian eyes. “Speaking of names, what is yours?”

“I was never named,” she said. “What would you have named me?” She seemed so sincere that he seriously considered it.

“Eve,” he said.

“Then, for you, I am Eve.”

“Okay Eve, why are you writing the names of all the broken hearts?”

“Broken hearts deserve recognition.”

He chuckled and said, “My name should be written here somewhere a dozen or two times.”

“You are here…once,” said Eve.

“Once! How is my name here only once? I’ve been trashed by more women than…” Guy quieted when he noticed the way she looked at him. Her smile was much too knowing for the Samoan child’s face that wore it.

“A wounded pride is not a broken heart.”

Guy’s indignation was defused when Eve took his hand. She led him a long way into the woods, during which her features changed numerous times.

“Why do you keep changing?”

“Is there a specific way a girl is supposed to be?” she asked.

Do you have a fiction fragment? How about your friends? Would you like to recommend someone to me aside from yourself? Drop me a line at chellane@gmail.com. See you next week!

Guidelines: Submit 500-1000 words of fiction, up to 5 poems, a short bio, and a recent author photo to the e-mail above.