Mehitobel Wilson
Mehitobel Wilson has been publishing horror fiction since 1999. She is a Bram Stoker Award nominee, and many of her stories have been granted Honorable Mentions in the Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror series. If you can’t pronounce her name, “Bel” will do just fine. 
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Bel’s been a dog groomer, an industrial painter, a runway model, a belt worker in a factory, a cigarette girl at a movie theater, an audio/visual technician, a Latin tutor, and a waitress, among other things. She’s lived in the backwoods and on the streets. Now she lives (in a house) in the Deep South, prefers Jack, beer, and Marlboros, and inflicts Hong Kong rap music on whomever comes in proximity. She lives with two German Shepherds, two cats, one cockatiel, one ferret, four video game consoles, many Asian ball-jointed dolls, and one bartender/blacksmith/musician/tattoo artist/pool shark/hunter/bouncer.
DBJ: The characters that inhabit your stories are very private, and very intense. They seem to walk on extreme edges, and there are absolutely no punches pulled. The cliche question would be, how much of them is introspection and self-revelation, but I never take the easy way out. It occurs to me that to write such a character, more so than with more mundane characters, you have GOT to be in their heads. How intense is the writing experience for you? How invested are you in the work when it’s happening?
BEL: I was really taken aback by this question, and got all crooked in my chair, trying to see around the question’s corners. I’m still, after a few days’worth of percolating, not sure how to answer it.
My characters are very normal and “mundane,” to me. They’re the people and mindsets I know - well, the starting points are, anyway.
I guess the writing experience is pretty intense, in that I’m in a heavy fugue state. I spend a few weeks (or more) half-assedly thinking about the story, who’s involved, what’s going on, and then the deadline looms and I have to sit down and cough it all up right away. I tend to write stories in one sitting, no more than two. Finishing is like waking up, and editing is really easy for me, and the most fun, because the stuff on the page is pretty much new to me, too. I know how weird that sounds, but I think some other part of my brain that I can’t access any other time is completely in control when I write fiction.
DBJ: Most writers I interview, and most writers that I know, are so wrapped up in the words that they can get physically ill if they don’t write for a long time, or if they let it go completely, they seem to sort of “grey out” and are never quite the same. You don’t write constantly, and yet the vision and the “voice” never waver when you come back to it. Do you see yourself as a writer, foremost, or is writing something you do along with everything else in your life? I guess what I mean is, do you feel the draw of the words pretty much all the time, or is it different somehow?
BEL: Absolutely. When I was in college I had no time or inclination to write, and found myself going crazy. I didn’t connect the two until I finally did start writing again, and I felt like I’d been absolutely… corrected. Righted from a hard tilt.
Even when I was writing fiction more frequently, I still can’t do the “ass in the chair, 200 words per day” thing, just because of the way I write. I can’t even stick with writing a personal journal (not to mention, I just don’t care enough about my deep inner thoughts or whether I ate some awesome spaghetti, or whatever.)
Seeds for stories tend to be planted when I get really pissed off about something, usually when seeing people behave like idiots. Idiots just don’t seem to get under my skin any more, so I’ve got to find a new launching point!
About six months ago, I finally accepted the oft-given diagnosis for clinical depression that I’ve refused for years. I couldn’t be depressed, I thought: I wasn’t bummed out about anything, I wasn’t sleeping all the time - rather, I had fucking berserk insomnia that was killing me. I’d sleep maybe two hours a night and be a shambling zombie during the day. I didn’t even have the energy to eat. I’d take my dogs and just walk around for hours, hoping that I’d tire myself out enough to sleep, but it just wasn’t happening. (The dogs dug the walks, though.)
At times I’d think, well, maybe this shit is because I’m not writing, but I was SO fucking braindead that I couldn’t write if I wanted to. I couldn’t correspond in email; I sure as hell couldn’t access that magic fugue state.
Eventually I decided to go in for a bunch of bloodwork and stuff, and everything came back marvy and good. Not a thing wrong. I spent a good bit of time with doctors, and eventually capitulated and agreed to try a brain-chemistry approach. And holy shit, it worked. My personality is back to where it was five years ago, as is my energy, and my general excitement to engage, whether it’s making friends or fucking with fools.
The energy and engagement made finding the fugue state incredibly easy again, and that itself has gone a long way toward righting that old tilt.
DBJ: Your work has deep veins of eroticism running through it. It doesn’t seem forced, and it doesn’t seem out of place, as that sort of thing so often does. I guess what I’m saying is that it’s very “authentic’. I wonder if you’d talk a little about the marriage of dark fantasy and eroticism. Some writers slap their fiction full of it in the hope people will ignore bad writing - but in your prose it’s a seamless integration, and so I wonder what you think about the way sensuality and sexuality work as tools in fiction.
BEL: Oops, you threw me again. I don’t really have an interest in erotic horror. I did when I was just starting out, for about three months. For SINS, John specifically wanted erotic horror, so I had to go back ten years to find “The Wild” for him. That was the second story I ever published, and it shows.
If you’re writing about a time frame in a specific character’s life, even the course of a couple of days, sex is likely to come up, and I let it. But I don’t aim for it. It’s not that I don’t think sex is interesting, it’s just not my focus in reading or writing fiction.
I’m not a romantic or soft person. That shit irritates me, in fact. My mom thinks I should write romance (mainly because that’s what she reads, I think) and I just recoil at the thought. The other night I set out to purchase a romance book (after HOURS of research - I wanted to get one that I had a good chance of actually enjoying) just because romance is the one genre that I blindly malign. And I am actually having fun with it. No romance has actually happened in it yet, though.
So when it comes to fiction, eroticism is an organic sidebar that makes sense for the character or the story. It’s never at the forefront of my mind unless I’ve got one hell of a horny character, which has happened once. (I had her in mind, but had no idea what to do with her, so I just got her laid. Everyone involved was cool with that.)
As far as sensuality and sexuality being tools in fiction, they’re great tools for horror, being so easily connected with obsession, distraction, physical sensation: flesh and emotion, that’s what we’ve got there. Pretty damn fundamental, for sure. They’re in my arsenal, just not my tools of choice - but I do love to see them used well in others’ work.
DBJ FOLLOW-UP: I have to say that the tension and intensity in all of your work that I’ve read still seems to have a sensual edge to it…not straight erotic horror, but still…that edge seems to be there to me. Could be I’m reading into it.
BEL: Nah, I believe it - it’s not like I don’t want it there, or avoid it, it’s just not the initial road I take to the story/characters, does that make sense? And I do try to express character both through physicality (gesture) and through reactions to those gestures - a shrug can express one thing, but another character’s noting the shrug can reveal something about them both. Not that any of this is particularly conscious in the writing - those notes sneak in during the editing. But body language is important to me, more important than dialogue, and because of that, I expect a level of sensuality is present whether I’m really aware of it or not. Unless I’m writing about a hand job, in which case it’s there for sure. I hope.
DBJ: You’ve told me that, as a reader who’s run out of shelf space, you have an interest in electronic books and dedicated reading devices. I have my own misgivings about these, but find myself reading a lot of things on the computer screen just the same. How do you see this sort of media evolving, and is it a good thing? What would you LIKE to see it become, and why?
BEL: As much as I adore paper, the entire aesthetic of books, the motion of turning the pages, the feel of the book in-hand - I HAVE run out of shelf space. Because, see, I’ll read just about anything, and I don’t get rid of books, ever. I’ll grab a random thriller from the paperback rack every time I go to the grocery store (or gas station, or anywhere there’s a rack!) Sometimes they’re great; most times, they’re good for one read. At this point I can’t afford the space for those one-read books. We moved from a 3000+sf house to an 1100 sf house (with a huge yard for the dogs, yay!) - and built shelves wherever we possibly could. We have doors that won’t fully open because I required bookcases behind them. I could build a new house out of books.
So, there’s that. Add to that my love of gadgets, and yeah, I’m all about dedicated e-readers. For a while, I suffered through reading books from Mobipocket on my Palm, but the screen size was awful, and I read a lot in full daylight, rendering the backlit screen a point of suck. I’ve been stalking E-Ink tech for years with great excitement, but the available units like the iRex Iliad weren’t what I had in mind. The Sony Reader looked great, but I held off for a while until finding the FCC specs for the Kindle, which drove me right to buying a Reader - PRS500 (first gen. Second gen looks better, but not worth trading up, in my opinion.) E-ink lets me happily read in full sunlight, which is a crucial point for me.
The Reader is great for my needs: I can use software like Book Designer to doctor files I already own, or Project Gutenberg classics, and carry them with me. Or, I can buy bestsellers and the kind of books I could snag at the grocery store from Sony’s store, read them once, and not have to find shelf space for them. If I love the book to death, I’m likely to buy it as a paper book, too, because it deserves shelf space and can be loaned away.
The various e-booksellers really need to agree on a format, though. I know most proponents of ebooks are opposed to DRM, but few of them are writers. I do think DRM of some kind is necessary to keep a single purchase from being broadcast freely to everydamnbody. People don’t buy books out of the goodness of their hearts or in order to keep our dogs fed, they buy them because they want to read them whenever they’d like, as many times as they’d like. It doesn’t hurt to be able to loan them to friends, or resell them, if that’s your thing.
However, I can’t read any of my Mobi purchases on my Sony Reader without doing nefarious things, then reformatting. I can’t buy any Kindle-ready books, and if my Reader shit the bed and I opted for a Kindle, none of my Reader purchases would work on that device. None of my Reader purchases work on my Palm.
Places like Fictionwise offer various locked formats along with open multiformat books, but, come on, at this point they’ve got to offer books locked in: PDF, Sony Reader, Palm Reader, Rocket Reader, Franklin Reader, Hiebook, Microsoft Reader, Isilo, Mobipocket, Kindle, and OEBFF. Are you kidding me? Every device launched has a proprietary DRM and file format, and that is what’s hobbling the whole dedicated-reader venture.
If all the damn hardware manufacturers would understand that the *content* drives the purchase of a dedicated device, and then agree on a cross-device DRM, people would buy a lot more of the hardware, because they wouldn’t have to waffle about which has the best content. We’d buy the hardware based on the features and delivery of content we liked best, and likely develop brand loyalty almost immediately, rather than be forced into following device ventures that end up failing completely and eating all of our purchased content. And once we had our gadgets in hand, we’d buy the FUCK out of content, because we want to play with our toys.
I thought Amazon would understand this, until I read the FCC filings. When I realized the Kindle wasn’t even going to read Mobi purchases (and Amazon owns Mobipocket) I had to throw my lot in with Sony.
That romance book I mentioned earlier was a purchase for the Sony Reader, by the way. And I specifically sought a book that I could buy for the Reader; I didn’t want to go to the store or bother with mail order for my one experimental foray into reading romance.
DBJ: Final, stock question. You have one day to come up with the inspiration for a new story, or novel, or project. You can spend it in a library with access to all the books of the world - or in a studio with access to all the world’s music - or you can have a car that can drive you to any spot in the world for the day. Which do you chooose, and why? If you choose the car, where would it take you? Why?
BEL: I would choose the car, and I would drive it to a crowded, skanky bar in a place where I understood the language. I’d watch people and eavesdrop all night, and come home with plenty of story fodder. Trust me. Works every time.
