First off, please tell us a bit about yourself. Have any super powers or secret talents?
Super power is perhaps passing exams … I have degrees in engineering and medicine. I’m a former R&D engineer, incident investigator, and current technical writer. That’s the boring CV stuff. On the exciting side, I love motorbikes, sailing, running, and anything that qualifies as going-on-adventures (Except for bungee jumping – I don’t do gravity-driven extreme sports).
Can you tell us a bit about what inspired your story in the anthology?
To be honest … I saw this movie called Burn After Reading, and towards the end “clusterfuck” appears in the dialogue. I hadn’t heard it before. I thought, fantastic – I want to use that in a story. So I started to imagine what sorts of situation might be described that way in sci-fi. I decided a spaceship captain, setting his craft to burn up on reentry qualified as a pretty bad sitch. Then I just had to write what had happened to put him there. The tone departed a bit from the inspiration, but that’s the truth of how it came about.
What have you been up to lately? Do you have any books out right now? Are you working on anything new?
Sure do. I have a new novel, which is Australian rural fiction (Crystal Creek). It’s an awesome story (says me), but not quite the flavour of LSQ, though, so if you’re after sci-fi, check out Phantazein and Use Only As Directed, two anthologies that carried two of my works last year – both my stories were nominated for national Australian awards. As to working on – my current project is an agricultural cyberpunk novel, that I’m aiming to finish and sub before the end of the year.
I’m always fascinated by where and how people work. What is your writing setup like? Any tools you enjoy using?
I’m a simple Word/Excel user – Word for manuscripts, Excel for scene lists – plus notebooks. I have a laptop on my desk with external monitor/keyboard/mouse for use at home, and another computer I use for research (or distraction) alongside. I take the laptop with me if I’m working out of home. I sometimes use Freedom/AntiSocial (less needed after a baby cut my available time). Otherwise, I back up to an external harddrive and dropbox, but I don’t like things to live in the cloud. I don’t like writing to music, or use things like Scrivener – they are time wasters for me.
Most writers are lifelong readers and books tend to be important to them. What books or stories have most influenced your life (genre stories or otherwise)?
The biggest game changers were:
Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton
Riders by Jilly Cooper (I’ve read it over and over)
Cross Stitch (Outlander in the US editions) by Diana Gabaldon
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang
Where can we learn more about you and your writing?
For my spec fic stuff, cenashauthor.wordpress.com For my main site/Australian novels, charlottenash.net @CharlotteNash79 facebook.com/authorcharlottenash
Thanks Charlotte! We’ll be sure to keep an eye out for your work!
If you’re intrigued by the inspiration behind “Deep Deck 9”, consider getting yourself a copy of “The Best of Luna Station Quarterly: The First Five Years” and read it for yourself, along with the other forty-nine awesome stories and gorgeous cover art by Julie Dillon.