Meet Christine Morgan

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Christine Morgan. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Christine below.

Christine, thanks so much for taking the time to share your insights and lessons with us today. We’re particularly interested in hearing about how you became such a resilient person. Where do you get your resilience from?

Didn’t have much choice; life’s not been the kindest and I’ve just had to weather the storms. Had my first bout with cancer (thyroid) during my last year of college, somehow still managed to graduate. These past eight years in particular have been one blow after another, including another bout with cancer (sinus) resulting in several more follow-up surgeries and lasting disfigurement, some sudden moves and life-upheavals, being my mother’s full-time live-in caregiver, dealing with the mess of probate and her parents’ estate … but, like they say, when you’re going through Hell, keep going! Because, really, there wasn’t much else I could do. My primary support system has always been my online friends and community, which does wonders for lifting the spirits. With all that to deal with, my writing was both escape and solace, whether it was financially successful or not. And still is.

Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?

I have finally reached a point in life where, after weathering all those aforementioned storms, I’m in a place of sanctuary where I can heal and rest and recover from the stress of the past several years. I can spend my time writing, crafting, doing freelance edit gigs, reviewing; not having to deal with a day job and tons of familial obligations. My writing ranges across multiple genres; I love historical settings, am a longtime mythology buff, enjoy doing odd mash-ups. Sometimes it’s classy, sometimes it’s smut. The language, having fun with the language, is always my favorite part. I have been fortunate enough to work with, and be allowed to play in the universe of, my fave author Edward Lee, and am devoted to my community of extreme horror, bizarro, and splatterpunk weirdos. I’ve written Vikings, westerns, aquatic horror, cosmic horror, fantasy, steampunk, twisted fairy tales … for me, it’s all about what I can really explore and enjoy.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

When I was in high school, I fully expected to follow the usual writer path of majoring in English, becoming a teacher, and doing my writing on the side. All that derailed when I took a psychology class and found it much more interesting … understanding people, personality, motivation, how we think, why we feel, why we fear, what makes us tick. It seemed to me a much better way of creating characters and storylines, so I majored in that and it has indeed served me well. It also let me land a job working residential psych, which I did for 30 years … mostly on the overnight shift, when I could, during quiet times, write on the company clock.

I’ve also always been an avid reader of all kinds of different books, fiction and non, fascinated with language and rhetoric and wordplay. It really helps bring layers of depth and complexity to my own writing in terms of voice, style, word choice, and even what I think of as “mouth feel,” to borrow a term from the cooking channels … the way something works when said/read aloud and heard. Through most of our history, stories were passed along that way, in the oral tradition, from Homer and the Viking sagas to our oldest fairy tales and nursery rhymes; we’re storyTELLERS, so it’s not just what is being told, it’s HOW.

For my third, I’m going with tabletop roleplaying games, which I got into as a young teen in the early 1980s, and was usually the one running the campaigns. Worldbuilding, descriptions, character, having to improv on the fly when something unexpected crops up, the underlying structure and rules of a setting … all very useful in writing.

How would you spend the next decade if you somehow knew that it was your last?

TOO MANY PROJECTS!! Which is not at all a bad problem to have, but can be a bit daunting. I tend to write in a way that lends itself toward sequels and continuations (I blame/credit the gaming for that, too; you always gotta have the next adventure seeds planted!), so I have a hefty list of follow-ups I want to do, as well as new ideas constantly coming along. I am a total sucker for themed anthology calls, because I love the challenge and they tend to get me thinking up stuff I otherwise might not have considered.

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Erin Shaw

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