Since selling her first short story in 1999, T. L. Morganfield has recently come to editorial attention. She has sold her fiction to Realms of Fantasy, Paradox, GUD, Tales of Moreauvia, and Lilith Unbound, to name a few. While she also writes horror, her bailiwick is Aztec culture, which she explores in her fiction, using both SF and fantasy themes. She is a 2002 graduate of Clarion West and she lives in Denver, Colorado, with her husband, Jeff, her two children, two dogs, two cats, and a bottle of Advil. I am pleased Traci was able to answer a few of my questions for The Fix.

You’re basically a full-time writer. When you wake up in the morning, what does your writing day look like?

It’s usually full of hope for progress, which is smashed by the end of the day. It’s really amazing that I get as much done as I do. I think anyone who has small children can appreciate how difficult it can be to find the time to do what you want or need to do for yourself, but it’s a matter of taking full advantage of the moments given to you. These days my schedule is more conducive to getting writing done than it was before, for my youngest has just started pre-school, which means three free hours each weekday in the mornings. Nap-time is also a god-sent. The rest of the time is hit-or-miss, depending on what the kids want to do. Weekends are family time, though. Then of course there’s the housework and making dinner (though I’ll freely admit that a clean house is not my top priority).

I write in spurts, and I pace a lot while thinking. I always have music on too: The Beatles, Duran Duran, Tears for Fears, and Sheryl Crow being some of my favorites. It’s extremely rare for me to even attempt to write anywhere but at my PC. There’s no such thing as a typical day for me, for I could be researching a new story, which means no actual writing at all, or I could be reading and critiquing for my critique group. I usually have several projects going at once and I work on them as I feel like it. And like any writer, I hit blocks and can’t seem to write, though for me it’s more of a feeling of “I don’t want to do this today” and I’ve learned to listen to this voice. I’ve found it does me no good to push to do the work; the muse needs a break and so I give it to him, usually by playing video and computer games, like Age of Empires and Civilization. Typically a block will only last a day or two, then I’m back on the horse and galloping full speed again.

Who are a few authors you admire? Have they influenced your work, and if so, how?

When I first became interested in science fiction, it was through works like Isaac Asimov’s robot novels and Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? I really like Bradley Denton, particularly his Blackburn fiction, though stories like “Captain Coyote’s Last Hunt” and “The Territory” really stick in my mind as particularly powerful works. I particularly admire Gary Jennings’s masterpiece Aztec, which just blew me away on so many levels, and it was reading Lyda Morehouse’s book Archangel Protocol that inspired me to combine science fiction and fantasy with Aztec mythology. I was sitting at my desk at Clarion West, trying to think of something to write for my week three story, and I wanted to write something similar to Archangel Protocol, which I thought was really fun with its mix of angels and cyberpunk, and eventually I came up with an idea of melding cyberpunk with Aztec mythology. I cringe at how bad my story was, but it was the seed of all that was to come.

When I was still in college, I worked in a bookstore at the airport here in Denver, so I saw and read a lot of books I probably never would have picked up otherwise, a good many of them mainstream, and I spent a few years trying to write like Bret Easton Ellis. I liked the stark, nihilistic, and visceral approach he took to his fiction, though that also meant I had a penchant for first person present tense for everything I wrote, regardless of whether it was appropriate or not. I’ve since developed a skepticism about the style, but immersing myself in it so heavily helped me to better discern how to use it effectively. I think other bits and pieces of Ellis’s influence can still be found in my work, though I’m no longer a fan of nihilistic fiction. I prefer hope these days.

You belong to two writers’ workshops, Liberty Hall and Codex. How do you use online workshops such as these to get a story where it needs to be? Also, is there a downside to workshops that you’ve found?

I’ve belonged to number of writers’ workshops over the years, starting with the Zoetrope Studios back in 1998, and I went through a phrase where I really disliked them because I’d been in too many—online and in person—where it seemed that what I gave was very lopsided to what I got out of it. Nothing frustrated me more than doing critiques and getting nothing in return, or in other cases getting two-word critiques. My college writing courses, full of folks just there because they had to be in order to graduate, actually proved the nail in that coffin for me and after I finished college, I swore I’d never go back to critique groups again. I’d become rather jaded about it.

But finding groups where writers were serious about their craft and understood the value of critiquing and not just getting critiqued renewed my faith in online writing groups. It also helped me tremendously to move away from workshops where genre was a free-for-all and instead focus my efforts in speculative fiction. I have several critique groups now, including a private email group involving a few folks from my Clarion class as well as a couple up-and-coming short fiction and novel writers. I mostly use them for looking at my second drafts; my first drafts are so embarrassingly bad that I try not to let anyone see them. I try to work from one round of critiques, to not overdo it, though if I make significant changes from second draft to final, then I’ll spring it on whichever group didn’t see it the first time around, though I focus mostly on what people say about the things that were concerning me. I also have a couple of trusted readers who I can go to as needed. Finding a good critique group can be difficult but also very rewarding, both professionally and for friendships.

Was there one single experience at Clarion West that stands out in your mind?

My time at Clarion was intense and life-changing, and it still boggles my mind that I even survived those six weeks. I work pretty fast and constant now, but nothing like at Clarion. There was so much good stuff that I took away from that experience, but one in particular sticks out in my mind.

In week six, I was burnt out and really wondering if I was cut out for this writing business. I’d turned into my own worse critic and the idea of being a professional writer seemed so far off to me, just a futile dream. But during my private conference with John Crowley, he sat me down and asked, “So, what are you planning to do with these Aztec stories you wrote?” His enthusiasm left me stammering. I hadn’t given it any thought. He gave me advice on how to pursue them and pretty much I’ve been trying to follow that advice since.

Tell us a bit about the historical research leading up to the actual crafting of a story. Does the research inspire the story, or do you ever have a story idea that leads to research?

For me, stories happen both ways. With my One World story “Night Bird Soaring” (in GUD #3), I’d read about the Teotl Ixiptla—people who spent a year living a life of luxury as a god impersonator only to be sacrificed to that same god at his/her festival—and I was intrigued by the idea and so took it a step further by making it an alternate history where in the future people are selected at birth to be god impersonators when they reach the age of thirty. In other cases, I’ll have a story idea already and while working on it discover that I need to do research to make the setting pop and come alive, such as with “The Hearts of Men”; I knew very little about the Old American West when I started, but what I learned in the course of researching not only enriched the story, but gave me ideas for future stories in the same universe. I love buying books for research and I have over 40 books on Aztec history and mythology alone, though I’m starting to expand my collection out to include Rome, Greece, and post-colonial Mexico. While I do occasional consult Wikipedia, as a quick reference to set me in the right direction of where to look for information I need, I much prefer textbooks I can flip through. I use as many primary sources as I can, though given my historical interest, they’re hard to come by. I treasure the few volumes of the Florentine Codex that I’ve been able to afford.

I’ve notice that setting is very important in your fiction. This encompasses worldbuilding, I gather. What is it that interests you about setting so? How do you build characters and plot from this?

When it’s done right, setting is a character in of itself. A good deal of history is mankind adapting to the climate and making due with the resources available to them (or going to war with others over what they don’t have). Culture grows out of setting as does politics and conflict, and while culture can be transplanted to a new setting, it invariably changes to become something new, something uniquely different from the original. A story you tell in one place completely changes if you move it someplace or sometime else. Every setting has its own unique set of foods and animals and plants and weather, all of it affecting how cultures evolve. It’s just fascinating and it makes little sense to me that anyone would want to confine themselves to a medieval European setting when the world beyond is so interesting and full of potential. Doing the research necessary for authenticity can be daunting, particularly when working with a real historical culture where folks can call you out when you fudge details, but it I think it’s a worthy endeavor.

I really enjoyed your alternate-history SF Aztec tale, “The Place that Makes You Happiest.” I understand there’s an interesting history behind it. Could you tell us about its evolution from seed to final draft?

The seed for this story goes back quite a few years ago. A good friend of mine was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor and he died two days after Christmas in 2002 at the age of twenty-five. I’d tried many times to write about it, but I never felt anything I did worked well. Yet the desire to write about losing my friend remained something I very much wanted to do.

I didn’t set out for “The Place That Makes You Happiest” to be that story. In fact, it started off not much different than “Night Bird Soaring.” I’d written a few more One World stories that focused heavily on the political aspects of the alternate history, but they weren’t doing particularly well in the markets, so I decided I needed to go back to what had worked in “Night Bird” and that was to write about space-travel in this alternate world. It was only on a whim that I went with the idea of the protagonist’s best friend having brain cancer that keeps him from going on this trip to Mars and she feels guilty for having won that spot on the mission. The rest of the story grew from there and writing it, though emotionally taxing at times, proved therapeutic for me. It was perhaps the easiest first draft I’ve ever written. The rewriting proved the most difficult aspect, particularly the ending, which I wrote and rewrote time and again. In truth, I was a bit weary of putting it out to market, for it was the most personal story I’ve ever written, so I was shocked when it became a finalist in the Writers of the Future in 2007. Alas it didn’t place, but it found a home at Paradox and I couldn’t be happier.

Your story “The Hearts of Men,” which will appear in Realms of Fantasy, takes place right after the Mexican-American War. Tell us about the fantasy element you incorporated with this interesting historical era.

I wanted to write a story about the myth of Huitzilopochtli, who was the Aztec god of war, but to be quite honest, Huitzilopochtli isn’t a very sympathetic god. Not many Aztec gods are—Quetzalcoatl being the only one who is, really—but most of the sacrifices were made in Huitzilopochtli’s honor, and the legend of his divine birth is a blow against the idea of female political power. When he hears his sister plotting his mother’s murder for becoming pregnant out of wedlock, he springs fully grown and fully armed from his mother’s womb and chops his sister’s head off and throws it into the sky to make the moon. Anytime I’d written about him, he was always a villain, but I really wanted to do one where he wasn’t, because he was a cultural hero to the Aztecs; he led them out of slavery in Aztlan and showed them where to build their city. “Mexico” itself comes from his sacred name, Méxtli. There is no deity more important to the Aztecs.

After reading The Gunslinger, I came away with an image in my head of Huitzilopochtli dressed like a cowboy and being born with six-guns at his hips. It seemed a bit ridiculous at first—Aztec cowboys—but I just couldn’t shake it. And I’ve always found the best way to rid myself of a writing itch is just write it. I set the story during the years proceeding the Mexican-American War because it was a tumultuous time for those Mexicans living in the territory ceded to the United States; they were now Americans, but most Americans were more interested in the land than the people living on it, and the U.S. government broke many of its treaty promises. It seemed the ideal time for a revitalization of Huitzilopochtli as a cultural hero, though “The Hearts of Men” isn’t a retelling; the old blood-and-heart-demanding war god wouldn’t have found much success among Catholic Mexicans. Méxtli is instead a re-imagining of Huitzilopochtli, who, like those he seeks to liberate, has to change to make it in this new, unfriendly world.

What’s ahead for you? Goals? Ambitions?

I’ve been working on a novel for about a year now, called Morning Star Rising, the first of two historical fantasy books about the Toltec legend of the priest-king Ce Acatl Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl. He was a kind of King Arthur of Mesoamerica, best known for outlawing human sacrifice in the centuries before the Aztecs came into the Valley of Mexico. It’s a fascinating time period, with so much melding of history and mythology. Like in The Mists of Avalon, Morning Star Rising is told from the viewpoint of Topiltzin’s sister, who’s only mentioned in passing in the myths as the instrument of his ultimate downfall. It follows her life as a priestess of the feathered serpent god Quetzalcoatl and how she, as the god’s chosen high priestess, aids in her brother’s rise to power over their uncle, who murdered their father and usurped the throne in the name of Quetzalcoatl’s arch nemesis, the dark sorcerer god Tezcatlipoca.

I also have a few more Méxtli stories in the pipeline and some non-Aztec work. I also hope to someday write a One World novel. In the meantime, I’m looking forward to the days when both kids will be at school full time and I’ll have so much writing time that I won’t know what to do with myself! Oh, and the second and third professional sale. I definitely want those.