VP Profile #11: Lisa Nohealani Morton

This week I'm blessed with two VP Profiles in my inbox. Lisa Morton writes with a quirky SF/folklore sensibility, and she answers interview questions with a quirky, off-beat sense of humor.

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Tamago: Where do you get your ideas for your stories?

Lisa: I think this is the part where I'm supposed to say Hoboken, right? They don't really come from any one place. Sometimes I start out wanting to write a story with a certain "feel", and work from there; other times there's a character or a situation that just won't get out of my head. One thing that holds true no matter where the idea comes from, though - working on one idea inevitably means that six shiny new ones will pop up, clamoring to be written.

Tamago: When and how did you decide you wanted to write?

Lisa: Oh jeez, about as soon as I knew how. I've been incapable of keeping my nose out of books since I learned how to read, and as far back as I can remember I knew that I wanted to be one of the people telling the stories. I started my first novel when I was nine or ten (It was about a carpenter who gets sucked into a fairy world. I abandoned it when my mother claimed to see Christ symbolism in it.), and started submitting stories (really, really terrible stories, I want to emphasize) to magazines when I was twelve. It's a shame that I didn't save those rejection slips; they were devastating back then, but these days I'd frame them as a badge of honor.

Tamago: Since your writing seems to cross genres, how would you describe your work to other people?

Lisa: Future fantasy? Fairytales with rocketships? I can never seem to settle on writing science fiction or fantasy by themselves - it's always post-apocalyptic futures with magic and elves with neural implants with me.

Tamago: Do you have a dream project that you would like to work on?

Lisa: I have this novel that's been in my head for a while now. It's a Gothic set in a creaky old generation ship. There's a deposed captain, an insane AI, and ghosts, among other things. I'm a little afraid of actually writing it, though, so it keeps getting set aside for other projects.

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Mirrored from Writer Tamago.