hika.

Szostak has submitted two short stories: “Harbinger” and “Vendetta.” Her story, “Harbinger,” won this year’s Spooky Stories contest, marking the second year in a row that Szostak has won. Her stories will be included in our Fall Preview, coming out later this semester!

Can you describe your writing process for these particular stories or just like your writing process in general? 

Yeah. The ones (Vendetta and Harbinger) from this year follow more closely, my usual writing process, which is I am a big fantasy and sci-fi, like writer. I also play a lot of D&D in these same settings I write in. And so, my favorite part of writing is world-building. And so I kind of just am constantly doing that. And then occasionally an element that I’m thinking of just to put the world or like to use as a monster in D&D, I will realize like, oh, this could be a short story. And that’s what happened with “Harbinger,” my (winning) submission for this year. Last year was a little different. I know I wanted to submit to the Spooky Story contest and it was Parents’ weekend and I was like, well, it’s, I don’t really have anything (to submit) and it’s going to be due Monday or whatever. I’m like, yeah, I’m probably just not going to write something. Unless I could just have an idea and write it tonight. And then I was driving around with my parents, I saw a well in someone’s backyard and was like, you know what, I can make that spooky. And then in just kind of a feverish haze, (I) wrote it all that night and submitted it the same night and just like, that was a unique, level of divine inspiration that usually does not accompany (me). The funny thing about “Vendetta” is that I actually wrote that a few years ago, like before AI became big. And so, like, rereading it for this thing, I was like, you know what? If this is going to get published any year, it’ll be this year. 

Do you prefer to write more fantasy or sci-fi? Do you like to write more spooky stories or stories related to what you’re interested in? 

Yeah, I like sci-fi and fantasy, and I have an ongoing, overarching setting in which I have several subsets that are all like canon to each other in weird ways. And I like to mix sci-fi and fantasy, but I’m very much a– you know– like genre writer in that respect. If I’m writing, it’s almost always going to be one or both of those. But then also, just looking through my completed short stories and thinking about what to submit, I kind of realized that these days pretty much everything I write has some level of spookiness, just because I think just because I like to write a lot about like, you know, monsters and whatever; especially in their own of sci-fi and fantasy, noteworthy, stories, like deserving to be written about, are often harrowing experiences for the people experiencing them. And so it’s like, kind of everything I write, even when it’s more like, you know, high fantasy or whatever.

Do you like to read? Have you read any works of fantasy or are you more so you like to write them but not necessarily read them? 

I don’t read as much anymore. When I was a kid, I would just devour books, mostly fantasy and sci-fi. I definitely did read a ton of fantasy; it’s much harder to do with the current schedule and such. Especially as an English major, so much of my homework is reading that when I’m done with homework, I kind of am out of battery for reading in particular for sure. 

Since you mentioned that you are an English major, are you focusing on literature? Are you intending to do the creative writing emphasis?

I’m intending to do creative writing. So far, the only class I’ve taken that’s the creative writing focus is that was the like 100-level, I forget the number, but intro to creative writing. I got into English major a bit late, because I thought I was going to be a Physics major. Physics and English are kind of my two, like, favorite subjects. But then getting into physics…I just…the math kind of outpaced me. And so I was like, you know what? And then I talked to my advisor and I was like, at the time I had that like realization, he was like, well, if you complete this semester as though you’re just going to major in Physics, you’ll get the Physics minor and then you can just go major in English and I was like, you know what? That’s what I’ll do. So I have not done much creative writing classes yet. That’s the thing with my new advisors, we’ve been really trying to figure out the particular path I need to take to get the English major and especially the concentration in the next two years. But, I’m on the path. I only need to take two English classes per semester for the rest of the time, which is totally doable. The problem is like, I need to not miss a single requirement among those. I need to get the classes that I need. I can’t repeat any requirements or I’m kind of in the hole, or I’d have to do three English classes in one semester, which my advisor heavily advised against. And I also like Physics; it’s my favorite science in general. There’s also that heavy impact on, like my writing. A lot of times I will take inspiration from like a physics concept or whatever and be like, oh, that could be an element of the fantasy or sci-fi. And so that happens a lot. So they’re not as disparate as they might seem, at least to me. 

Was there an underlying theme in both “Harbiger” and “Vendetta” that you intentionally created on purpose?

They are both written for two different settings that are both technically in the same setting in the sense that, like, pretty much every setting that I write in and I do like coming up with settings. I have world-buildings, like my favorite aspect of it, are all like events all taking place on different planets, but they’re all in the same universe instead of like the magic system in particular, is the same across all of them. And so like in the sense, they are united by that, but they are very different settings. I mean, “Vendetta” is probably the furthest, like from anything else I write setting-wise in that it, like that particular part is near-future Earth. So it’s like, you know, way different than the usual sci-fi fantasy and stuff I usually do. But I mean, I wouldn’t have thought of them as really connected, but now that you’ve kind of mentioned it, both are kind of like about something being taken over by a malignant external force, and yeah. But yeah, no, when I wrote “Harbinger,” I was definitely not thinking about “Vendetta.” I only submitted them both because I thought they were both good horror-oriented stories for the Spooky Story contest. 

Typically, how long does it take you to write one of your short stories? 

That’s really hard to answer because “Runchy,” “Venetta,” “Harbinger,” “There Is A Well,” are kind of all along the spectrum of like my writing speed, which is very much just sometimes I’ll be consumed by an idea and I sit down and I will like just blow through it as, like the words just start tumbling onto the page. Sometimes I just like to have a normal idea and it is kind of like I have to think about it a bit more, but I do like writing it. And then sometimes I struggle to just get words on a page. And I think “Vendetta” was one of those, like, even though it’s not a super long story, it took me, I think several settings to write just because it just depends on the day, I guess. Because in the past, I know during quarantine, like every other weekend or so, I would write a chapter of a novel that I was writing and just do like 4,000 words in four hours and just like, knock it out. And I don’t know how I used to do that for such long sittings. And I wish I could conjure up that energy now. So I don’t know if I can give an average because it’s so wildly varying, at least for me in particular. 

What is your favorite part from each story and why? (“Harbinger” and “Vendetta”)?

With “Vendetta,” I remember I had a lot of fun just writing these gory scenes, like trying to describe the way that the AI was puppeting a corpse. I definitely enjoy writing, like, like gross-out stuff. Not like for its own sake, but I do play up the blood and guts aspect of a lot of my writing. And that was a particularly fun one of like, okay, how do I convey this isn’t like necromancy? This isn’t a zombie or anything. It’s just like physically, if you take out the brain, but then shock the nerves in the right way, a body will move, and like, trying to describe that, I had a lot of fun with. And then in “Harbinger,” I think just like, the, like figuring out the pacing of how to build up, because I knew where I wanted to get to, because “Harbinger” is an example of me creating a monster for D&D and then writing a story about it. I had to get the pacing down of this slow infection as it was getting worse and worse and just kind of like the horrid details just kind of being revealed one at a time; it was a very fun to just plot out and then where if I got to the end, the like kind of big reveal because I definitely left it very vague. “Harbinger,” also, is one that I occasionally like because the climax is not very climactic. It just kind of is a thing that happens and it isn’t like really any big action. And I feel like that it was kind of fun to try and do something like that for a change when I’m very much usually a very action-focused writer.