hika.

What writers/artists find yourself looking to for inspiration? How do you feel they inspire your work?

I don’t know about particular writers or artists, like more just anything fantasy or sci-fi genre. But also the real world. The HIKA story that has just been published was based on a news article I read. It is about some scientist that took a dead spider and removed all its insides then used hydraulics to turn it into an organic grabber. And then, because I think it was close to Halloween, I was in the horror mindset. I was like, it’d be freaky if they did that to humans. And then that’s what the story would be. 

What’s your dream writing project to work on? Given infinite resources, like any possibilities, what will be your dream project?

So I like writing. I also play a lot of Dungeons and Dragons, and tabletop RPGs. So developing a tabletop RPG around one of the settings that I have written—that would be [my dream project]. But as far as a whole production, that’s the thing that would come to mind. Or a graphic novel, like getting someone to draw it, because I cannot draw.

Is that the medium that you like most, graphic novels?

Not in particular, it’s just that I think there are a lot of series and TV shows [and] I can see how many things that you can do with a visual medium that you can’t necessarily do with a written medium. And so since I don’t have much artistic ability outside of writing, that’s something I’d be interested to experiment with if I could get someone to draw for it.

Where did your interest in writing first start?

Probably once I learned to read, I was just always reading something. Like, I read a ton up until high school and I got busy. But then I just realized at some point, that it’s words on a page and that I could do the same thing—[creating] more of the stuff that I enjoyed to begin with.

What subject matter or themes are you most concerned with in your writing? And how has this changed over time?

Just like anything I find interesting. My favorite genres to write in are sci-fi and fantasy, so anything that [makes me think] this could be made more fantastical in some way, or this already is fantastical, but could inspire something else. So [it’s] kind of just smashing together the stuff that I read and see into more interesting ways. 

What was the process of writing “Faceless” like?

So it was actually a piece I wrote as a writing component for a scholarship. I didn’t end up getting the scholarship, and they didn’t end up publishing it anywhere. But I was just checking through the essays I needed to write and then I was like, “Oh, I could take a break and write fiction. That’d be more fun than all these essay-writing.” I struggled for a while to figure out what I was going to write for it. That’s why I left it to almost the last one. Then I saw that news article, and I was like, that could be a really good short story. And then I was like, that’s perfect for the essay for the scholarship.

How does this piece fit into your larger body of work? Is its style, themes, or content in line with your typical writing, or is it an exception? If so, in what ways?

It was very much an exception. I mostly do sci-fi and fantasy, and this is like, I don’t really call it realistic fiction. But it’s definitely more grounded sci-fi, like speculative fiction, which I don’t normally write very much. And also, it’s so much shorter than pretty much anything else I write. So it is very much an odd piece out as far as the other stuff I have written.

Could this piece be an inspiration for future work given its change in form from your previous work? 

Yeah, since then I’ve tried to write other things [that are] short like it. I’m trying to distill an idea down without removing fluff from it. I haven’t been very successful because I like writing fluff. 

I was curious when I was reading this piece, I feel like it could have fit into a much larger world of the story. Would you consider expanding this into something longer?

Probably not. Because I’m gonna be honest, with that one, I just had that one idea. It was essentially just a way to get myself to stop thinking about that news article because it kept bouncing around in my head. So I just had the one thing, and now it’s out and I can think about other things. 

This story was written for the Hika Spooky Story contest. Rather than be full of jumpscares and haunted houses, you took a psychological horror approach, with a slow-burning fear that builds up over the course of the story. What made you choose to take this approach? How do you feel Faceless reflects what you think the essence of fear is?

I have been trying to write horror for a while because it interests me on an analytical level. [I’ve been] looking at other horror fiction and why it works, as I want to try that again. I have not been very successful at it. And then with Faceless, I did it and I realized maybe part of the reason was this: in the last question I talked about how I write a lot of fluff, and the short nature of it—because I had  a really low word count and I had to meet for it—and also the more grounded nature of it helped. Because it accomplished two things. It distilled all of it into a really short period of time, so the readers focus entirely on the horror, like that’s the whole thing. And then also, the fact of it being more grounded means that like it’s more relatable and thus more scary. Because you know, fantastical horror works sometimes, but so much more often, horror, if not realistic fiction,  is closer to reality in the West. The best horror movies often have minimal supernatural elements, which are maximal in the rest of my attempts. I guess it’s also something that scares me—the idea that eventually, with the way that the world is going, the powers that corporations have could end up to that extreme. It is something that feels real and scary to me. 

Are there any specific horror movies or tropes that you really like or really bother you?

I’m actually not a big horror media consumer. I like to read about analyses of it and think about why it works. But the few horror things I have watched stayed—my mind is too overactive, so they just stay with me for way too long. And I get way too paranoid about it, so I just don’t really consume it. That said, one of my favorite expressions of horror is more of horror as an aesthetic in sci-fi and fantasy. One of the only horror movies I’ve watched, and also my favorite movie, Alien, where yeah, it’s a sci-fi setting, but it’s the horror grafted onto something else rather than the sci-fi grafted on the horror—I don’t know, that’s a whole essay on itself. But yeah, horror as it interacts with other genres is where I buy into it the most.

And I get this question is pretty related to what we were just talking about. But something that made this story especially chilling was that it doesn’t seem all that far from the world we live in. Even without being literally faceless, the narrator already seems to embody it. Do you feel that the concept of facelessness is a reflection of the real world? And in what ways?

Yeah, that was a part of the intention. You know, we’re pushing with the working conditions laws and such, and the rising cost of living is forcing people into the pipeline of putting all of their energy and time into doing jobs for corporations that don’t recognize them as people, [that’s] already faceless in a sense. And then the central horror was that companies would eventually be allowed to take it one step further: literally removing the face. But also, we use the term “cog in the machine” for the person that’s just working at a job endlessly without getting as much in return. The idea of eventually becoming a literal cog, a literal machine doing the work has appeared in tons of fiction, but I thought that [with Faceless] it was a scary approach rather than a depressing one, but I feel like it’s also kind of a depressing one.

What are your writing aspirations for the future? Where do you see your writing taking you?

I want to get a novel published. Actually, I’ve written a novel and self-published it. But [I want to] get a novel published by a publishing house with all the advertising or whatever around it—to have a novel that a lot that people other than my friends and family end up reading is kind of the goal.

Can you share more about the novel?

Prior to writing a novel, I’d written a few short stories. But the thing is I kept writing the starts to novels that I just kind of lost motivation for. And so this started as another one of those, and then I just managed to not stop on it. And then by the time I got to like 100,000 words, the full length, I was like, oh, you know,  I’ve done this, I might as well do something with it. And then the college applications were coming up. Now,  I don’t have a lot of extracurriculars or anything on my resume because I’ve been putting all the time into the novel. So I edited it quickly and got it published as a way to heighten the college stuff. It’s just like so many other projects that I’ve started and just not finished, except that I finished it.

What is it about?

So it’s set in a decently generic fantasy setting. It’s a setting that I’ve been working on for a while before I started the novel, where the main character is a villain evil wizard archetype who gets struck down from power and is trying to regain it, but along the journey realizes the error of his ways. It’s called The Spire’s Toll. 

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Cole’s story “Faceless” will be published in the 2024 issue of Hika and appeared in the Hika Fall Preview.