Samantha Steele

Smashwords Interview

Describe your desk
Desk? What desk? You mean that table in my room the printer sits on? Well. It's littered with brand new notebooks, blank papers, books on writing, and various colors of Sharpie. I don't actually use it - it's kind of like a junk drawer. Once every couple months I clean it up all pretty and organize all the clutter and think, yeah, I'm gonna use this as a great place to write and gather my thoughts.

But the thing about artists is, we can't think in organization. Clutter is creative.
Where did you grow up, and how did this influence your writing?
I was born and raised in Anchorage, Alaska. It's dark, it's cold, and it's empty. It made me a night person, which can be a problem because I like writing in coffee shops but they all close before my creativity hits. Alaska also has a lot of empty space untouched by human hands; I've used that to my advantage in a lot of my writing, making up towns and big cities in my home state. When I read other novels where towns are made up and there's some kind of location (like this made up town is between town A and town B) I find it harder to believe because there actually IS stuff between those two towns. But in Alaska there's so much empty space that it's actually possible - in fact, some day that town might really exist.
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