Tags
character development, chase, flammable, heartbreak, insignia, marketing techniques, must read, on the run, triggered, writing advice
If you haven’t heard of my new project, the On Fire anthology over at Transmundane Press, this mini-interview and excerpt series will showcase the amazing authors I get to work with and their writing. Meet Megan Dorei.
How long have you been writing?
Since I could hold a pencil. Before I actually learned how to write I drew stick-figure stories with crayon, then stapled them together to look like books. Stacks and stacks of them. A third of the structure of our apartment was made of makeshift paperbacks.
How do you choose your character’s personalities and names?
Occasionally a character will come to me before the story, but most of the time it’s the opposite. Molding a character has a lot to do with the plot, what it will require of them, how it will push them. It’s probably my favorite part of the process.
What marketing techniques do you find most effective?
Unfortunately for me (a self-proclaimed hermit), networking is a great one. It always makes me nervous trying to find a balance between plugging and spamming… Plus, you know, the whole human interaction thing.
From “Chrysopoeia” by Megan Dorei
Holding her breath against the beef-thick air, she readied to head back to her booth when two men came in from outside. Familiar by their finely-tailored suits, though she didn’t recognize the faces. Bearing the insignia she’d helped create on their lapels. She stopped so suddenly, she bounced back a step.
Of course, they were looking for her. She was stupid for not thinking of this.
Her mind raced with the same bleak friction as one who runs despite an approaching dead end.
No way out the front entrance.
Assuming the back door was through the kitchen, she would have to make it past the men either way.
No windows in the women’s bathroom, and probably none in the men’s.
Saliva thickened to flammable jelly in her throat. The Flame burgeoned at the bottom of her belly, stretching to hook a claw into her esophagus. She shuddered with the fruitless effort it took to cage it.
As the men surveyed the diner, recognition lit their faces. Her heart slunk into her belly and was devoured by flames.
She knew of one way out.
Their hands twitched to their belts in synchrony, and the guns tucked there flashed like eager stars, the cold fire Ayden harbored in her own chest. But the rest of her was alive with heat, desert fumes that writhed just beneath her skin, and she ached to let it out, she burned.
“Ayden, get your hands up.”
Resentment sparked. They called her by her first name like they knew her, like they were old friends…
Her body clenched, and the men were too late to pull the trigger. The screams of the diners cut off in a nebula burst. Incineration. It rushed out of Ayden’s pores like volcanic spew, blistering, bittersweet agony that shook her to her bones.
Spent, she fell to her knees. The flames towered above her, triumphant beasts licking the ceiling. The bewildering heat didn’t burn her—a dire vessel with the coals set free. Too cold to burn.
Megan Dorei is a part-time housekeeper who spends her free time writing, thinking about writing, and listening to music to reinvigorate her writing. She is a horror devotee, beer enthusiast and lover of all things retro. She has been a contributing author to Sirens Call Publications’ Bellows of the Bone Box and Mental Ward: Stories From the Asylum, Storm Moon Press‘ Big Damn Heroines, Dark Moon Digest #14, Flame Tree Publishing’s Gothic Fantasy: Dystopia Utopia, and most recently in Mad Scientist Journal: Summer 2017. She lives in Lawrence, Kansas with her fiancée and a ghost that insists on hiding their remotes.
ON FIRE is available now: Amazon, Nook, Kobo, and the Transmundane Press store.
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