ISSUE #10 | An Interview with Sam Rebelein
SAM REBELEIN holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College. His work has appeared in Bourbon Penn, Shimmer, Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year, and elsewhere. He lives in Poughkeepsie, New York, and on Twitter @HillaryScruff.
PLANET SCUMM: Watcha reading?
SAM REBELEIN: Sleepovers by Ashleigh Bryant Phillips, and Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir. Also just finished up Later by Stephen King. Gooood stuff.
PS: Do you look at "Hector Brim" differently now than when you first wrote it?
SR: My first draft of "Brim" was written in 2015, and I'm pretty sure it was the first story I submitted anywhere. So my short answer is yes! The story now is almost entirely different than that first draft, but there are still some things I'd change. Looking at it now, I'd love to give Natalie more to do, and I'm much more curious about Brim's family history than I think I was when I first wrote about him. He's based on a tour guide I met at the Theresienstadt concentration camp outside Prague, who seemed physically weighed down by the burden of these stories he kept telling, day in, day out, about the horrors that happened there. Seeing the ways that emotional weight can twist people, especially those who have access to/power over magic, for generations, could be interesting. You could spin a whole YA series out of that.
PS: How are you coping with the pandemic?
SR: This is probably true for a lot of people, but I've been revisiting a lot of older works that I love, rather than just exploring art that's new to me. I've been re-reading a wide variety of stuff: Goosebumps, Dinotopia, Catcher in the Rye, Harold Pinter's plays… I've also replayed older video games like Myst and the Arkham Asylum series, and revisited movies like Jurassic Park, O Brother Where Art Thou?, Scream... The nostalgia factor just helps me feel safe, and from a writing perspective, it's been great reminding myself of what I love, as well as how/where/why I fell in love with it.
PS: Does a certain place, activity, or routine help you create?
SR: So many people say they write best in the morning, but that's just not true for me. I write best at night, when I can turn on my desk lamp, create a little bubble for myself, and tune everything else out. Even having the sun come in through the window is distracting (haha, I'm like a kid who doesn't want to be in class). But at night with a glass of wine? Light a little incense so I can watch the time burn? That's my jam. I can pretend nothing else exists, put on some Spotify (I make a new playlist for every major project I do), and write, write, write.
PS: Tell us something about the most experimental story you've written.
SR: At the beginning of the pandemic, I pulled together a lot of older pieces that I'd never sold or never finished, and put them into a collection titled Fifteen Smells for $12.99 that I self-pubbed on Amazon. The last piece (the last smell) in there is a survey of all the unfinished documents I found on my laptop and what they've meant to me over the course of a few years. But the most experimental smell in that book is about two different experiences I've had: one night in Barnes and Noble, and a school nightmare. I couldn't decide how to weave those two narratives together, or which should come first. So I just pasted them into two distinct columns on the page, so that their symbols function simultaneously. I don't know if it totally works, but I think it does??
PS: If a sophisticated gas-based alien life form was running for president against a safe-guarded AI stored in a gigantic computer, who would you vote for? (All third party candidates have been incinerated).
SR: Probably the gas. I just hope the campaign slogan would be something like, LET'S HAVE A GAS IN 2024.
PS: Do you have any tips for revising a story?
SR: Trust your gut! I used to read over pieces of stories and think, That sentence (or whatever) doesn't quite work but I don't know why... Screw it, it's probably fine. It took me a year or two to stop saying "Screw it" and to actually spend time with anything and everything that doesn't quite work. If you ever have that feeling, it's not just because you wrote a bad sentence (or whatever) and you're a bad writer. Your gut is telling you there's something there to fix and you should listen!
