In conversation: Mia Dalia

Your "to be read" pile is about to get a lot bigger

One of the upsides of being an author who’s, well, I guess, published some stuff over the years, is once in a while either publishers or individual writers will approach you in hope of a cover quote. This can be a mixed blessing. Reading a book for this purpose is seldom as relaxed and pleasurable as doing so for its own sake, and there’s the further knotty problem of how to respond if — for no reason other than personal taste — a book simply doesn’t appeal to you.

Once in a while, however, you learn about a writer who makes the process seem like a blessing. This is how I discovered the work of the remarkable Tyler Jones, who I talked to here. And more recently it led me to Mia Dalia.

Mia sent me the manuscript of her novel Haven. Within a few pages I knew I was going to enjoy it, and believed I knew where I was in terms of both its genre and likely story. I was absolutely right about the first thing, but wrong about the second, as the novel steadily and slyly wrong-footed me — doing so with a subtlety which is all too rare — and ultimately delivered an ending that left me sitting blinking and silent. It’s superb.

I’ve been lucky enough to experience more of Mia’s fiction since, including some beautifully acute and pointed short fiction — and the nuanced novella Discordant — and decided this is someone you guys need to know about. So here we are…

In Conversation

→ MMS: So, Mia, I’ll start with the obvious — and invite you to say a little about yourself, and how you got into writing...

→ MIA: I've often wondered how much or how little to say in response to that question, consistently landing on the latter approach. Though I constantly put bits and pieces of myself into my writing and my characters, outside of that I’m reluctant to get personal. That said, in the summer of 2021, I started getting story ideas. They came to be at times fully formed, vivid and demanding of attention. I told my wife this was happening, and she insisted I start writing them down. Because my wife is brilliant, and I tend to heed her advice, I did as told. (Some people get alarmed by hearing voices in their head, I managed to turn it into a vocation.)

This was particularly tricky at the time as we were sharing a tiny studio apartment and a single computer. Trickier still, because my wife was working remotely full time, using said computer. I started waking up very early and staying up late to get a few hours or writing in here and there. I did research in the afternoons, using my phone and TV. Before long, I had a bunch of short stories and a novel. And then more and more. I basically haven't stopped writing since. Only now that we have more space and I've got my own computer, my writing schedule is less erratic.

Books have always been a huge part of my life. I read a lot and across genres, so that's how I write too. I've done proper literary fiction, horror, thrillers, mysteries, noir, comedy, sci-fi, bizarre, etc. The only thing a reader should expect from my stories is a good story well told. The rest ... I like to surprise.

Getting published has been the biggest and most frustrating part of the writing journey. I've learned a lot of lessons, all the hard way. But I am trying to get as much of my work out there as possible. My short stories have been featured in a number of anthologies, magazines, literary journals, and adapted for podcasts. I was greatly honored recently to have one of them, The Last Best Thing, to be shortlisted for the Crime Writers Association's 2024 Dagger Awards.  There's a number of new short stories coming out this fall too.

In long form, my debut novel (historical fiction/occult) Estate Sale, is out in the world. It is joined by two psychological horror novellas, Tell Me a Story and Discordant, a sci-fi adventure, Arrokoth, and a short fiction collection, Smile So Red and Other Tales of Madness. If all goes to plan, my second novel, Haven, will be coming out October 29th. And for Christmas, Spaceboy Books, with whom I've worked on Arrokoth, will be publishing my neo-noir dark comedy, Do You Know The Muffin Man?

So that's me in the book-shaped nutshell. Now, I think it's only fair to pass the same question over to you, Michael, if only so you can show me how “author talking about their work” should be done properly :)

→ MMS: I can’t promise I’ll do that — talking about my “work” always makes me feel like a fraud and imposter who has spent his entire life only moments from being found out. But it’s fascinating to me — and I hadn’t realized this — how recently it seems a light bulb went on for you, in terms of wanting to be a writer. Partly because your work feels so mature and accomplished, also because most of the writers I know have been writing for ages. It’s what they do, and — to varying degrees of success of financial viability — have pretty much always done.

Reading has always been important to me too. I read endlessly as a kid and teenager. My mother taught me to read when I was four — we were traveling a lot at the time, living in different countries and picking up schooling on a slightly ad hoc basis — and I dove in. Wrote a couple of small things in my teens, then lots of sketch comedy when I was at college and for a couple of years after that, before being pulled into horror and genre fiction by Stephen King and Peter Straub and Clive Barker, by remembering how much I’d loved Ray Bradbury as a child, and through friendships with people like Nicholas Royle and then Stephen Jones. Wrote a bunch of kinda-horror short stories, then decided to try a novel, which for some reason came out as science fiction — Only Forward. Then two more in a similar vein —  Spares and One of US — before swerving into crime with The Straw Men trilogy. Since then I’ve ranged over the map like a drunk trying to find his way home in the dark: supernatural psychological thrillers like The Intruders and Bad Things and We Are Here; a straight thriller called Killer Move; adventure with weird bits (The Anomaly and The Possession) and then... I have no idea how you categorize Hannah Green and her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence. Oh, and there was The Servants in there somewhere.

So, something that strikes me from listing all those is we seem similar in having little regard for genre boundaries. I’ll wearily cite the fact that publishers can be rather judgy about this approach: they prefer their authors to pick a goddamned lane and stick to it. Do you think you could do that, if asked? Or do you need the freedom to take your voice and ideas and express them through whichever genre seems most appropriate to each? Do you even see a real difference between genres, or is it all “fiction of the imagination” for you?

→ MIA: Thank you so much for your kind words about my writing. To be honest, it doesn’t feel like a recent thing to me until I look back. When I started writing, it was like finally discovering what I was always meant to do, and ever since, it’s been the most organic (if that’s the right word for it) experience. The same thing happened with playing music, actually. I think I’m just a late bloomer.

Your journey to storytelling has been more of a natural progression. Except for the genre-hopping! And this is fascinating to me, and I’m so glad we get to discuss it, because I have been thinking about it a lot. One of the reasons I love your work so much is its range and diversity. Fantastic stories every time, but they are all different. As a reader, I genre-hop. When I became an author, I proceeded to do the same. And then I realized that not only is it not a “done thing,” but it is, in fact, actively frowned upon.

To answer your question: as much as I’d love to claim, “Why, I’d never, my artistic integrity is uncompromisable,” commercial viability is important to me. I want my work to reach a wide audience, and there are always the exigencies of Mammon to consider. Which it to say, I could, if pressed, stick to the same genre. As much as I hop and blend, I can differentiate. But I do think this approach would be disservice to the art of storytelling. (That sounds a bit grand. Er ... sorry.) And it would be depressing and limiting and likely result in a lot of genre-varied projects on the side.

But I keep wondering why there is this “single lane” standard for authors. In other forms of media, genre diversity is encouraged and welcome. People enjoy when a pop star does a country album, or a comedic actor does a serious drama, but for some reason, they want authors to produce the exact same kind of book time after time. It would be easy to dismiss this as intellectual laziness, but I think it goes deeper than that, down to the way the audience engages with their entertainment media. Is it because reading requires a much more active audience participation and focus than music or movies? Or because a book takes up way more time to get through than a music record or a movie? Or is it a curated preference, created by the publishing industry to make marketing and sales easier? I haven’t unraveled it all the way yet and would love to hear your thoughts on it.

→ MMS: It’s a great question, and I wish I knew the answer. I’m not sure it only applies to fiction, however. While bands can swerve into different genres, I suspect that’s only greeted with enthusiasm by their fans if it’s a case of “We all know I’m a pop star and will stay that way, but for this one album I’m going to step the tracks and play around in country or death metal for a while”. That’s intriguing, and can be fun, but with the safety net of knowing they’ll go back to doing what you enjoy them for.

But if you’ve come to adore a band because of their particular vibe and they meander off into something else entirely, and apparently permanently, especially if it doesn’t seem to play to their strengths, that can be a dealbreaker. I’m thinking in particular of a band I loved way back in the day, a Scottish rock outfit called (sadly) “Gun”. Their first three albums were fantastic — hard rock but with unusual arrangements and superb musicianship — and they were truly amazing live. Then they produced something completely and unlistenably different, and soon afterwards vanished from the scene (excessive cocaine intake may have been involved, I later discovered).

Something I think may be easier to do in fiction than music is to transport a “voice”. You can bring a sensibility, a style of word use and choice, a type of story and concern, and apply it to quite different genres — almost as if you’re using the tropes as seasoning for what remains fundamentally the same type of story. I suspect that’s what I’ve been doing over the years, but it’s also likely to be related to what you say: I like reading all different genres, so there’s an interest in dipping my toe in each.

A lot of readers don’t share that feeling, however. Many SF readers seem to just want more SF. Same with fantasy or horror fans. And because their willingness (or otherwise) to buy a book is what makes it profitable, that’s a large part of what drives publishers to expect their authors to pick a lane. It’s more profitable that way — and they’re in the profit business. There are a few authors who can get away with dotting all over the map: the rest of us can’t, and perhaps that’s simply the commercial reality of working in creative professions. People love Leonel Messi because he’s in all likelihood the greatest footballer of all time. That doesn’t mean they’ll be equally interested in watching him play tennis. As a creator you enter into a mutual contract with the reader, and their desire and preferences can’t be ignored.

So perhaps the compromise is to stick to that one lane but allow yourself to change the color of your car once in a while. One of the reasons the Stones have been such a great band is Charlie Watts was a jazz drummer at heart. He couldn’t fully indulge that with the Stones but he could let that taste inflect what he did. He was a rock and roll drummer but that extra spice — the tendency to let a little of that jazz flavor profile leak through — helped make him (and the Stones) exceptional.

A lot of the question of choosing (or refusing to choose) genre comes down to finding which is the best one for expressing whatever it is that you want to say. Which brings me to another question: What is that, for you? What drives you — is it stories, or characters, or ideas you want to express? Is it predictably one of these which tends to get your mind working, with the others joining the party later... or does the whole thing arrive in your head as a series of pre-interlocking parts?

→ MIA: I agree, it is certainly a contract that the author enters with a reader. In a perfect world, I wish it was more of a conversation, albeit a somewhat one-sided one. When we enter a conversation with someone, we cannot always control its direction. However (and especially if we know this person or have spoken to them before and liked them well enough to talk to again), we can realistically expect to be entertained, delighted, amused, perhaps even learn a thing or two about ourselves and the world. That, to me, would be an ideal author/reader dynamic.

However, we do not live in a perfect world. And I don’t know if my stories have the power to enhance the one we do live in. So why do I write?

Well, the simple answer is that I started doing it to entertain my wife. (She always asks me to tell her a story. In fact, one of my published novellas is titled Tell Me a Story.) And then I got the bright idea to entertain others.

The complicated answer is that, probably like you, I feel compelled to tell stories. I don’t know how to stop. They used to come to me complete, start to finish, leaving me feeling like a typing monkey. Now all it takes is a spark of an idea, a prompt, an image, or a first line. I absolutely need a solid first line. From there, I get to put it together like a puzzle, which is a lot of fun for me and hopefully for my readers too. I don’t pre-plot much or storyboard. Most of the time, the entire thing lives in my mind, which can be tricky with long works. My characters are permitted and encouraged to surprise me ... within reason. I do weave bits of me and my ideas about the world into the fabric of the narrative, but it is never meant to be didactic or confessional. Subtlety is paramount, in fiction and life! The book’s purpose is to entertain, transport, inspire thoughts and feelings. That’s (mostly) all I want to do.

But here is a rare confessional bit: the late Carlos Ruiz Zafón, who had a great many wonderful things to say about books and writers, had once said, “One of the privileges of being a writer is that you are given a platform from which to scream.” And I could not agree with him more.

What about you? Do you ever scream through your writing? Do you find yourself hiding pieces of yourself, worldviews and opinions, inside it like Easter Eggs? And consequently, do some of your stories become more important for you than others?

→ MMS: I’ve never seen that quote before! And the answer is yes, without question. The first story I wrote, in fact — The Man Who Drew Cats — was most definitely both a muted scream and an attempt (I realized later) at catharsis.

I’m sure that a desire to share observations about the world, and little ideas, and atmospheres I find resonant, are the driving forces behind my desire to write. If I’m truly honest, I suspect it’s these which bring me back to the desk and the blank screen far more than the desire to tell “a story”, often the part I find hardest to construct or drag out of that shadowy and smoky back room of the brain such things coalesce or reproduce or... however the hell else it is they come into being.

Very often my stories, especially the shorts but including whole novels, have come about purely because I’ve got an idea I’m burning to play with: characters come next, and the story to wrap it all in usually arrives third — often only after a certain amount of wailing and gnashing of teeth. Like you, I like to find my way into a story, rather than building the skeleton and then putting flesh on it. That feels like a much more organic experience for me, and I hope also it lends an off-kilter energy to the story which eventually emerges, and a slightly dreamlike logic to parts. Because dream logic isn’t “wrong”: it’s not always appropriate during the day, or in “reality”, but when we’re writing or reading a work of fiction, it may be just the thing.

And yet, despite this desire to communicate “real” things like ideas and opinions about the world as it exists, and people, and human nature, I much prefer a fictional landscape in which to do that. I’m not built for journalism. I like making shit up.

So finally, what’s up with you right now? What are you working on at this moment. And if you believe in such things, and have one — what’s the five-year plan for Mia?

→ MIA: I never stop writing. I can’t seem to stop writing when I try. (Much the same way I can’t seem to stick to one genre.) Right now, I’m gearing up for a pretty busy season. I have a number of short stories coming out in various anthologies in the upcoming months. Four in October alone. And of course, my second novel, Haven, arrives right in time for Halloween, on October 29th. I am hugely excited for it. Haven is my first book to get a “proper” release, so it’s coming out in all formats, including a gorgeous hardcover and awesome audiobook, and it will be available across all markets and platforms. It’s already been gathering some great reviews from early readers, a starred one from Booklist, and praise from other authors, present company most appreciatively included.

I also have a very different and very quirky smaller release scheduled right for Christmas (I like to time my books to holidays, be it national ones or my birthdays) from Spaceboy Books. It’s titled Do You Know The Muffin Man? and can be best described as a darkly comedic neo-noir murder mystery with baked goods.

Five-year plans are unfathomable for me. But I am working constantly and prolifically, so hopefully that pays out. I have had the great fortune to sign with Curtis Brown agency recently, so I’m very interested to see what that goes.

And I’m thrilled to get to work with one of my favorite editors in the world and a true legend of the genre and be featured in the upcoming anthology series he is reviving. The vagueness is deliberate until the official announcements are made, but the excitement is very real.

So, my plan is to just keep writing and hoping that my stories find an audience. And then, of course, raking in all the fame and fortune that follows. Cue in maniacal laughter and various atmospheric special effects.

Also, I would just like to say what a great pleasure it was chatting with you, Michael. Whoever said “Never meet your heroes” had been proven wrong! Thank you and thanks to everyone for reading this. Cheers!

Further information about Mia’s varied work and publications can be found at her website.