Interview with Ricardo Victoria

What’s it been like for you these last several months?

Relatively quiet. I’m working on a strange mish mash of horror, comedy, and urban fantasy for a stand alone and seeing if I can pull it out. I’m trying to get my short stories into shape to publish a couple of collections: one for SFF and one for horror. Other than that, it has been mostly promoting my Tempest Blades series and my book on sustainability explained through SFF.

Feel free to share your publication journey, discuss the amount of labor it took in regards to your project’s editing process, the delirious nature of third drafts, or that one late night you spent staring into a glass of wine, wondering if it’d ever truly come together. 

Long story short: I started writing in highschool, paused for years to get my degree and my PhD, meet people that wanted to write but like me were unsuccessful, so after a drunk chat we shared our skills and created a micro press to publish our short stories (got nominated to awards a couple of times for a couple of stories), while I worked on my first novel. Got a lot of rejections and through a mutual friend from a writing group contacted my current publisher, Artemisia Publishing, who decided to take a chance on this crazy mexican author who wanted to write a science fantasy novel and puts with my ideas while helping me to get the best stories I can write in my second language. Along the way, my wife has supported me, putting up with my loooooooong binge writing nights to get the series done, as well as my academic book on SFF and sustainability, and my mood swings derived from my chronic depression. Right now, I’m taking it slow and working on my next writing projects and my day job obligations.

Share freely any publication news you may have, and please include any links you’d like us to include.

At the moment I have no news yet, so I can only share the link to my Tempest Blades series.

And to my Sustainability explained through SFF book: link.

In two sentences, would you summarize your novel for us? 

I would summarize the whole novel series as this:

found family has to save a world where magic and science collide, while dealing with their individual personal issues… lots of issues.

You’ve mentioned in correspondence that mental health is featured throughout your novel. Was this something that you came into your project knowing you wanted to discuss? If so, did you set any parameters in place for yourself around how you wanted to approach this sensitive subject? 

Not really at first. When I started writing my first novel The Withered King, the mental health part was not on the horizon, just informed the way characters reacted to certain events, due their PTSD caused by the way they got their special abilities (they had to sorta die first, that certainly causes a lot of mental trauma). Because I put all I had into that novel–as I didn’t know at the time if I would have an opportunity to publish more– it reads as sort of a stand alone. When I got the blessing from my publisher to work on the whole series, that was when I started to put mental health as one of the central themes of the story. With The Cursed Titans, it became the main arc for the main POV character of that book, mostly because I was going through a serious bout of depression that was affecting my personal life, and it was the first year of the COVID pandemic. I had to start therapy and taking meds to get by and decided to add that to the book as a way to deal with my depression. In general, I have done that since highschool (when I started writing), because I’ve been suffering chronic depression for decades. So, one of my heroes in the second book onwards suffers from depression, has to go to therapy, take meds, and keep enough presence of mind to still save the day.

The main parameter I keep myself within is to present mental health–in this case, depression, in an objective and balanced way–as any other illness that can be treated; that it’s good to ask for help when it gets too much. Usually in SFF stories, mental illness has been coded as a shorthand for villains, or characters that need to be saved, which is unfair for those of us that suffer from them. Thus, this is why I decided to show that one of the main heroes (and possibly one of the most powerful ones of the cast) suffers from depression, and is the hero of that particular story (and the general arc of the series). I wanted to show that suffering from mental health issues and being the hero are not mutually exclusive. My guideline was to offer a positive representation of a character that suffers from mental health issues, which is not different from suffering any other chronic illness, and that it doesn't stop you from living a normal life–if treated–and certainly doesn’t make you the villain, or the one making awful decisions. 

What is something you’d like readers to take away from your work in regard to mental health advocacy, discussion, or criticism?

That mental health issues shouldn't be coded as a shorthand for villains, that you are not alone, that it’s OK to seek help, that things can improve, that suffering from mental health issues doesn’t stop you from being the hero of your own story, and that it’s OK to seek help. Also, mental health issues need a better, more informed representation and depiction in the media in general, specifically in SFF.

Anything else you’d like to share or for us to share on your behalf? 

Other than that, please buy my books, support indie authors, BIPOC authors, and small indie presses? Stay tuned for my next book release, and remember that you are not alone, and that it’s OK to seek and ask for help.

Drop any social media or website links you’d like us to link to in the interview.

I spend most of my time on Bluesky.

I also have a website/blog (that I need to update more frequently).

And I have a FB page as well.

Some Things in This World by Joyce Thomas

Historically, elegies to nature aren’t hard to come by in poetry collections, but very few achieve the prismatic symphony—the swell of image, concept, and perfectly proportioned reference—as Thomas’ does. Notes of a restrained, though well-loved and looked-after, romanticism crop up throughout the collection. The shocked delight of the lyrical is well-paced with other hardier, intellectual stoicism, serving to reinforce the treasure of Thomas’ softness when it does appear:

“the tarry darkness / of the future— / the future now / that is ours.”

The collection is erudite in its empathy; Thomas nurses an emotional congressing of ecological passion and scholarly affinity for her subjects: beast, terrain, topography, weather, and wildness. Blindingly so, in similar ways a bolt reaches earth—too fast for sound, only the deliverance of rudimentary impact. It’s the breaking down of matter into its most elemental, a sensorial reboot with the power to stop time, or in our case, speech. 

This begs the question of Thomas’ inspiration, its genesis and lean quality of power: something of the omniscient mythic resides in these poems; dually, the assured voice of astute scientist plays an equally pivotal role. The reader learns things. A schooling of both craft and inquiry. The osmosis that takes form in these poems is fastened with knowledge that alarms, shares space with galvanizing magnanimity, witty inference, and barbed ecological treatises that stretch the filaments of nature writing into something ecclesiastical. Such as in “Storm Warnings” when Thomas tackles the national memory of our most recent and deadly hurricanes:

“One thinks of omens and Holsteins, / the Second Coming, Of rough beasts bawling / like drowning saxophones.”

We come away cleansed and weather-bitten by the sheer expository collision of language; her grasp on the miracle of cadence is remarkable. 

Thomas’s collection shrewdly allows us glimpses at the titanium infrastructure of her poems, in the same way I’ve often imagined it feels to glimpse a vision or version of the divine: fast, unfathomable, with undeniable markings of the inspired. Her sophisticated grasp on the structure of language hard-fists elegance out of the commonplace.

“I imagine stillborns / soaring heavenward to God; / recall deft hands forming / faceless dogs, tigers, giraffes— / hear the plaints of latex / being twisted, see the bodies plumped / that too soon deflated.”

The language recipe of Some Things in This World holds holiness up to geological and natural thumbprints and announces them blood bound, while weighing the Penguin’s famous tuxedo and a beloved dog’s death in tandem with the inevitability of extinction. Thomas juggles an eviscerating eye for meter with equal generosity for the unbidden loveliness of off-kilter detail. Bloom of surprise on the page, and the sober delight of finding oneself enough lost, and exactly so, to give ourselves fully over to the guiding strength of her narrative hand. 

The reader oftentimes finds themselves in the outlands of space and time and history: primordial starlight, the baked lands of prehistory and bone, as Thomas does in “La Brea Tar Pits”:

“until only the trunk remains, / periscope up / as if to grasp the last breath of air.”

Behold, the sole camel grazing in Vermont pasture like Biblical beast—placed there as prophet—a partly esoteric pastime for deeper introspection: foreign and local diverge, leaving the reader breathless and uneasy with withheld knowledge. “Like the Cheese, the Camel” positions Animal on the page as both warning and savior, leaves us intentionally alone with the creature; we’re being taught a lesson, and it’s cruelly just, in the vein of Mother Nature. In the poem, Thomas leaves us with a philosophical image to chew on:

“While in Vermont the lone camel / stands knee-deep in grass and flowers wild, / dew-glazed dome crowned by the sun / as if to remind that beauty / incongruous often is.”

The poem forces us into a bizarre solitude in the found spaces of pasture and misplaced creature. In one of the collection’s most memorable poems —partly due to the brilliance of its title (which contains and maintains resolute pathos, while blithely navigating a special absurdity, a certain sweetness and simplicity that further remarks on its subject matter)—Thomas addresses the Penguin and his funny attire and impending extinction and the crucial, killer element of young life lost to nature. An everyday occurrence, but something, the poem argues, that still deserves proper mourning.

“Think of Penguins” is everything I want in a poem, and only further highlights Thomas’ dexterity with language and form: “the tusked elephants / trumpeting apocalypse” and “Think of the pale zeroes of their eggs”. 

I wonder about the reasoning behind the placement of her poem “Praise of Three-Legged Dogs”. It opens the collection, was obviously meant to set the tone and tweak our attention toward certain themes, particular essences of important truths which Thomas felt determined to conquer. Disability floods the page, pulls no punches when it comes to precise language around topics so easily bruisable to the human heart. The dog lives next to his loss and seems at peace with its phantom limb, has gained easy control over its life again through the remarkable, creaturely habit of adaption.

The poem curiously ends on a note of hunger: starvation made metaphysical. It isn’t the kibble the dog longs for but a furry, missing paw, a final fourth contender to his rapturous doggy mobility. I wonder what Thomas meant by the poem’s entrance. It holds the collection’s door ajar for us to step through, all the while, we have soft tears in our eyes. Humans, by instinct, fall to pieces at the sight of a hurt animal. We’re given a relatively happy ending in “In Praise” but the heartstrings she’s so suddenly pulled are loose, looped, now, in tangles, our emotions are neither our own or anyone else’s, we can now safely enter into the land of beasts and enchantment she’s architect to.