Nelly Geraldine García-Rosas

Goldfish Grimm: If we could peek into your office (coffee shop, kitchen table, wherever you write), what would your writing process look like?

Nelly Geraldine García-Rosas: Chaos.
I used to have a desk where I used to write for about half an hour at night. I recently moved and I don’t have a desk anymore nor a routine. Nowadays my writing process is like me on the bed with my laptop trying to make up words while my cats are acting Lord of the Flies and my brain is having a battle against Twitter. Twitter always wins, of course.

GFG: Was there anything in particular that inspired “Squirrels”?

NGGR: A year or so ago I was “attending” an online workshop on children’s literature. It was called “How to write for children and not to kill goblins while trying”. We had some discussions that made me think about how kids can be quite scary sometimes and how we as adults don’t pay enough attention. Something like what Maurice Sendak said in a conversation with Art Spiegelman: “I remember my own childhood vividly… I knew terrible things… But I knew I mustn’t let adults know I knew… It would scare them.”
“Squirrels” was born trying not to get a goblin killed. I’m still not sure if I succeeded.

GFG: Do you have any interesting real life squirrel (or other unusual animal) tales?

NGGR: My brother told me that he had a flying squirrel as a pet before I was born. It was called Pancho and would sleep inside a coconut shell. As far as I know Pancho could have been inside my brother’s head. Who knows.
But I have a better story that happened to me: the night my cat became the Canterville Ghost (well, the Toluca Ghost, since we lived there). A red ball of yarn that came from nowhere appeared by the door of the bedroom; yes, at night. It was weird but I picked it up. Then a blue one appeared on the same spot. I started to feel scared. I looked away for a second, and another one was in the same place I had just picked the second one up. Was it time to panic? We caught the cat red-handed when he was, stealthily, trying to sneak a fourth one in. I had already panicked anyways so it wasn’t weird for me that there was a box full of balls of yarn that I hadn’t seen before.

GFG: What are you looking forward to in 2014?

NGGR: To play Diablo III’s expansion till my fingers bleed! *is handed a note* Ah, writing stuff… I have a couple of projects to write in Spanish, one of them is a YA novel. But I really want to keep on writing in my broken English till my fingers bleed (maybe a little less messy, though).

GFG: Do you have anything you’d like to plug or promote?

NGGR: Sword & Mythos, an anthology of sword & sorcery with a lovecraftian twist, is coming this April published by Innsmouth Free Press. My short story “In Xochitl in Cuicatl in Shub-Niggurath”, translated from the Spanish by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, will be part of that book. So if you dig for aztec-lovecraftian lore, it’ll definitely be a nice read for you.