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CLARA: This is The Story Behind The Story. I'm Clara Sherley-Appel, and my guest today is M. K. England, author of THE DISASTERS, a heartwarming and hilarious novel about a group of teenage space academy washouts who are forced to step up and save the world. THE DISASTERS has been hailed for its strong feminist messages and highly diverse cast of characters. I'm thrilled to have M. K. England with me today.

CLARA: M. K. England, welcome to The Story Behind The Story.

M.K. ENGLAND: Thanks for having me.

CLARA: So why don't you start by telling our audience a little bit about yourself. Who is M. K. England?

M.K. ENGLAND: M. K. England is a giant nerd. That's basically the summary. My day job is being a YA librarian, which gels really nicely with writing YA novels, and in my spare time I do a lot of gaming -- I play Dungeons and Dragons, I play video games, I do tabletop board gaming, all of that stuff. I also hike and garden because being outside is really critical to my mental health. So those are some of my other big hobbies.

CLARA: What made you want to be a writer?

M.K. ENGLAND: I have been sort of obsessed with story for as long as I can remember. I became a big reader in elementary school and just never stopped. I was always scribbling little ideas down here and there, but I was always just way too afraid to actually share anything with anybody. Honestly, I was too afraid to really work on anything because it just required a level of personal buy-in that I didn't believe I was worthy of or capable of. So I just had all these things swimming around in my head, and I just never was able to pursue them.

M.K. ENGLAND: But story has always been a really critical part of making me feel like who I am. Stories, especially big, dramatic adventure stories kind of like THE DISASTERS is, made me feel like really powerful and ambitious -- like there was this whole universe out there I could take on. And I definitely don't think I would have gotten this far in life without those kinds of stories to inspire me.

CLARA: What was the thing that changed that allowed you to go from being a writer who wrote sort of tentatively, who was afraid to share their work with other people, to someone who could be a published author and now is?

M.K. ENGLAND: It was a complicated evolution. I am the living embodiment of the concept that the brain doesn't finish developing until 25. I don't recommend myself before age 25. I'm surprised you still talk to me since we met way back when I was maybe 22 at the height of my terribleness. So I think I really just had a lot of growing up to do. I really needed to work through some of my anxiety issues. I can pretty clearly remember a day where I just got very sick of myself and was like, "I hate not being able to do this thing that I love and that I want so badly to do. So I am just going to sit down and do it, damn it." And I set myself a deadline.

M.K. ENGLAND: I kind of did NaNoWriMo in February 'cause I just wanted it done. So I said I'm going to wake up at 5:00 in the morning every single day this month, and I am going to finish this book if it kills me. And I think I got there through a little piece of writing advice through Maggie Stiefvater's blog. I had recently done a deep dive into her archives and found this little line that said something along the lines of I wrote my first book from 4:00 to 6:00 pm every Wednesday and it took me three months. I was like, "My god! Books are a finite thing. And if you just like put little bits of work in it adds up and suddenly a book appears." I had heard that before, but sometimes just hearing things that thousandth time, it finally clicked for me.

CLARA: Which aspects of writing -- so plot, setting, characters -- are the things that come naturally to you? And which ones are the ones that you struggle with more?

M.K. ENGLAND: See every time I think I have identified a strength or something that comes more naturally to me, something will turn around and be like, "No, no, actually that's going to be the worst thing for this particular project." For instance, it used to be my trend that I always nailed beginnings. The first chapter of THE DISASTERS is almost identical to the first draft back in 2014. It's changed very little. And everything I've worked on since then has been the same except for my second book that's coming out in January 2020. I rewrote that first chapter four times. And it was completely different every time 'cause I just couldn't nail it.

M.K. ENGLAND: So I think there is no such thing as a total consistency or a total strength. I think in general I really like writing dialogue and humor -- that's something that I just love, to sink into the voice of my characters. And I think pacing, my sort of natural tendency is toward very fast-paced books. So I think I understand that sort of fast-paced story structure well. If you ask me to write a slow, contemplative literary novel I would crash and burn very hard. But I do feel like maybe writing fast-paced action stories is more my strength.

CLARA: And what are the things that you've had to work on?

M.K. ENGLAND: I think digging really deep into character motivations has been tough for me. Emotions are hard and scary, and I try not to look at them too hard. So that doesn't translate very well when you're trying to write fiction. In general, people seem to like my ensemble casts, and I love writing big groups and friendships and things like that. But when it comes to really drilling down deep into one character's psyche, I find that challenging.

M.K. ENGLAND: I think I did a much better job with it in my second book, actually, and I think that's one of the reasons the main character in that book is now my favorite character I've ever written. 'Cause I just deeply know her issues. With Nax, it really took me several drafts and working with my editor at Harper Teen to finally get at what I was trying to say in a way that made sense to other people. My brain was filling in the gaps for me. I knew what I was trying to say, but conveying that to other people, because other people's emotions don't work the same way as mine, so the logical leaps just aren't always there. That was a struggle for me.

CLARA: So tell me about some of your favorite books.

M.K. ENGLAND: Oh, gosh. So many. So cruel. How could you ...

CLARA: Well, you don't have to pick one.

M.K. ENGLAND: Good, 'cause I never could. I'm in the middle of reading N. K. Jemison's BROKEN EARTH trilogy, which is the most stunning thing I have ever read. I just finished book two and I'm just constantly blown away with every new chapter. So I can't wait to dive into book three. I actually don't read a whole lot of adult fiction. So that was something that really stuck out for me. I also absolutely loved LADY'S GUIDE TO PETTICOATS AND PIRACY, which came out this year. It was the sequel to THE GENTLEMAN'S GUIDE TO VICE AND VIRTUE by Mackenzi Lee, and I highly recommend both of those books. Please do yourself a favor and go read them. Oh, gosh. There's been so many good books this year but that's like what's right on the tip of my brain.

CLARA: What was your first favorite book?

M.K. ENGLAND: Oh, I can't remember back when I was a really young child. I mean I know I absolutely zipped through all of the Animorphs books and Junior Jedi Knights and things like that, but the first series I remember being really obsessed with was the X-Wing books by Michael A. Stackpole. It start with rogue squadron. Those were the books that taught me how to write space piloting, and I loved the characters. I loved the ensemble dynamic of a squadron so much. I reread those books until they fell apart.

M.K. ENGLAND: I also was really obsessed with ENDER'S GAME to the point where when my family finally got our first computer in middle school, that was one first the first things I did was I was googling Orson Scott Card, and going to his website and then being really crushed when poor baby gay found out that Orson Scott Card is horrifically homophobic. That was a big, big disappointment in my teenage years. But ENDER'S GAME, that entire series, both the main series and the series focused on Bean, those were really big books for me.

CLARA: When you're reading, how does a book hook you?

M.K. ENGLAND: For me I think it's all about voice. I've got to have a character whose voice is just so solid and grabs me from page one and carries me through. I can read something that is much more slow-paced than I normally would like if the character's voice is so clear. And that's so hard to put my finger on, well what do you mean by voice? Mm, I know it when I see it. But it's really hard to put into words.

CLARA: So I'm going to ask you about your favorite books, but is there a particular character from a book that you really remember identifying with early on.

M.K. ENGLAND: This was not necessarily a character who I identified with because of who he is or anything, but there is, again we're going back to Star Wars books, there's a book called I, JEDI that in hindsight I think is sort of generally regarded as not a great entry into the Star Wars extended universe, but I loved it as a teenager. And it was the first book that I ever read that was in first person that I liked. I hated first person point of view before that, which is funny because now it's all I write.

M.K. ENGLAND: But in that story you can see so deeply into the main character's head and you could see him calling himself on his own bullsh**. You could see him just analyzing his own thought processes and being like, "Don't try and justify what you're doing. You know what's actually going on here and you're trying to mentally work your way around it," and that was my first time that I ever realized, "Oh, my god. Your brain can lie to you." Which of course -- critical revelation for later on down the road.

CLARA: How have the books you've read influenced your writing?

M.K. ENGLAND: I think every book I read, I take something a little different away. And sometimes it'll be something really small such as I really like how this author used this one word in this one context. And it just sets something off for me. Or I really like, again, how space piloting was written in this one book. Or how this characters sort of internal struggles was portrayed Internet this book over here. So there's just little tiny cherry picking from everything I read. I'm constantly learning from every single book that I pickup.

CLARA: How has becoming a writer, doing this professionally, changed your relationship with reading?

M.K. ENGLAND: Honestly, it's kind of ruined it a little bit. Which sounds terrible, but I do 95% of my reading in audiobooks now, and it might even be more 95% because I can't stop and pick things apart when it's on audio and when I have it turned up to one-and-a-half times speed. This is how I have to read these days. And it's partially because of time. Most of my reading time is while I'm commuting or while I'm doing dishes or whatever else. I can listen to an audiobook while my hands are occupied.

M.K. ENGLAND: But I have found that I really can't sit down and focus on a print book the way I used to. And I'm sure part of that is general life distraction. But part of it is differently that I can't stop looking at the sentences and going, "Hm, I would have rearranged that sentence. I would have moved that comma over here. I don't think that dialogue quite sounds natural." And I'm like, "Oh, dear god, stop it and just enjoy it the book."

CLARA: THE DISASTERS is a young adult science fiction novel, yet it seems like it's appealing to a much wider audience than that would suggest. Why do you think that is?

M.K. ENGLAND: Oh, thank you. I think some of the themes in there are pretty universal and I think at this point we're almost conditioned to look at that kind of space opera and be willing to sink into it. Like we've had Star Wars and Star Trek and Guardians of the Galaxy and we've become used to this genre as sort of an all ages, blockbuster movie kind of experience that everybody can have. So I think it's easy to sort of look past the age and just sort of sink into that kind of, that world and that experience.

M.K. ENGLAND: But really I think anybody can identify with that need for a found family outside your blood family. And that struggle to find yourself, that's not solely -- you know, YA doesn't own that. That is a thing like we're constantly trying to redefine ourselves no matter what age we are. So I think that's why YA novels in general are so widely read by adults. We never stop questioning who we are and trying to find our place in the galaxy and all of that. And you know, I think everybody needs to laugh and have fun and sink into something a little lighter once in a while.

CLARA: When you think of your audience who do you see? Who do you imagine?

M.K. ENGLAND: Kind of imagine me as a teenager, which might sound a little narcissistic, but this is the kind of book that I would have wanted. I loved action-packed space adventures, but they all featured straight, white, cis, neurotypical dudes and I had such a complicated relationship with that as a young person 'cause I didn't really have words for my experience of gender or anything at the time. So I was just like I hate that all of these books are full of dudes and I also hate that I'm not a dude so that I can't do all of these things. And I can't identify with femininity but I don't want to be a dude either. So where are my books?

M.K. ENGLAND: And writing THE DISASTERS was sort of cathartic because I just fill it full of queer characters and put the power in different hands 'cause the idea of 200 years in Earth's future, the galaxy still being saved by a straight white dude just makes me feel dead inside. So I had to do something else.

CLARA: So what do you hope those teenage yous will get out of reading the Disasters?

M.K. ENGLAND: First and foremost, I hope they will have a good time and be lightened and take a moment away from how dark and heavy the world is right now and just have that moment to be transported and see themselves saving the galaxy. But ultimately I hope they just see that they have a place in the future and that they have power and they can own that power and go out and make big changes. I hope that THE DISASTERS will do for them what books did for me as a kid. Making me feel ambitious and powerful and like I can go out and do all the things and take on the world.

CLARA: I'm Clara Sherley-Appel and this is The Story Behind The Story. We're going to take a short break and we'll return to my conversation with M. K. England.

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CLARA: You're listening to The Story Behind The Story on KSQD 90.7 FM, Santa Cruz. For those of you just joining us, my guest is M. K. England author of THE DISASTERS.

CLARA: Where did the idea for THE DISASTERS come from originally? How did it start?

M.K. ENGLAND: All my ideas start as kind of like a weird little random seed that just pops into my brain from nowhere. And it'll be something super tiny and vague. For this one, it was a hotshot pilot fails out of an academy on his first day. There's no story there. There's no character even really. There's nothing going on there. So I just have a Google Doc that is full of little seeds like that and they just sit in that Google Doc for weeks or months or years until the right catalyst comes along.

M.K. ENGLAND: And for this book, that catalyst was Guardians of the Galaxy. I saw Guardians of the Galaxy in the theater in summer of 2014, and something about the tone of that movie or the voice of Peter Quill or something just set it off and I was like now I have a direction for this. It's not like the plot and everything instantly popped into my head or anything. I absolutely do not work like that. I am much more of a workhorse writer where I sit down and outline everything and all of that. I am not a stroke of genius kind of person. But I did need to get that voice solidly in my head. And after seeing that movie I was like, "Now I can hear Nax. Now I know who he is, at least to a degree. Now I can tell his story."

CLARA: So there's that word again, voice. That's the same thing you said you looked for in books, the things that hooks you.

M.K. ENGLAND: I know, it's such an elusive concept that I'm going to try my best to encapsulate. It is some combination of speech patterns and worldview and certain sense of humor and all the little quirks of speech and behavior that make us who we are. If you read an author's body of work, even across genres, across age categories, you can usually kind of pick something up and be like, "Hm, this is their novel." Even though it's totally different, I can still hear a little bit of the author's voice in there. So there's that element of voice and then there's also just the character's voice.

CLARA: How would you describe Nax's voice, then?

M.K. ENGLAND: I think Nax is really filtering the world through his humor as a defense mechanism and through all of his anxiety and self-doubt. So everything that he goes through kind of bounces off that anxiety and then he'll make a sarcastic comment to sort of deflect that. So that's kind of key to his voice in general. And the way he kind of talks to himself inside his own head is really critical I think to the readers' perception of him. He's very self-deprecating, he's very dry and sarcastic at times, but you can also see the genuine care coming through. He can be almost painfully earnest at times and so all of those things together kind of make Nax's voice. But I think it's his humor and his sharpness that sort of grabs you at the start. That's sort of the key to his voice.

CLARA: So if Nax came first, who came after?

M.K. ENGLAND: I think the rest of the crew kind of came all at once. Because I'm a gamer, I tend to kind of build my adventuring party as a unit. So I kind of like build them like D&D characters. Now I need a healer and I need a mage and I need like where's my DPS and all of that. So in this case, I was like all right, I need a navigator. I need somebody who can be sort of a doctor. I need somebody who can talk. You always need the face in a heist. So I kind of had these components that I wanted as part of this unit and then started to assign personalities and they sort of just erupted from there. Once I had their little cornerstone, then they just sort of flushed out from there.

CLARA: And how did the plot develop?

M.K. ENGLAND: I really built the plot for this one by asking a lot of what ifs. So I started out with that idea of hotshot pilot fails out of academy on his first day. Okay, well what does he do then? He can't just go back to earth 'cause that's boring. There's no story there. So let's say he needs to go out into space somewhere. Okay, if he goes out into space, then there needs to be a place for him to go to. What happens when he gets there? And just from there, sort of unspooling a bit at a time.

M.K. ENGLAND: Honestly, this was so long ago at this point, this was four years ago that I wrote the first draft almost to the day. So I don't totally remember how the early part of the plot came together. But I do remember that I rewrote the third quarter of this book four times 'cause I could not get it right. And it changed drastically every single time. Like 50% to 75%. Couldn't get it right.

CLARA: So you've been an active participant in several, you mentioned NaNoWriMo and several national novel writing months, how do you prepare for something like that? And how has that experience shaped you as a writer?

M.K. ENGLAND: It really helped me hone my process I think. NaNoWriMo is not for everybody. It works well for me because I'm binge drafter. I can't sort of sit there and quietly noodle away at something for three months. I need to just bang out the story. But before I do any of that I am a thorough outliner. I have to know from beginning to end what's going to happen and especially the ending.

M.K. ENGLAND: I totally admire writers who can sit down at a blank page and just sort of start writing and be like oh the characters will take me where I need to go. I don't know how it's going to end but I'll find out when I get there. And I'm like that is terrifying. I could never do that. And I'm a very sort of external processor so I have to sit down with a critique partner and verbally bounce ideas around and solve plot problems.

M.K. ENGLAND: And I usually say okay here is a problem I'm trying to solve. We discard the first few solutions that come out because they're always the most obvious or the most borrowed from other things and then start to dig into the more interesting things and formulate an outline from there. And so that's how I start every NaNoWriMo is with a thorough outline of what I want to do. It doesn't always work out, but that's where I start.

CLARA: What do you do to help yourself stay focused?

M.K. ENGLAND: I think shooting for halfway is really important. I never try and shoot for 50,000 words from day one. I shoot for 25,000 words. And I know if I can get over that bump then I'll make it the rest of the way. I mean as far as staying focused, I am just one of those people that is super motivated by the pretty little line graph that's on the NaNoWriMo website. Just seeing the little line go up every day and making sure that my bars are above the line of average. I don't know. Stuff like that works for me. I'm differently like a stars on a calendar, like give me my gold star.

CLARA: When you're writing an entire novel in a month I would think that editing would take on a larger role than it might if you're writing it in sort of a slower process. You alluded to this a little bit, but how did THE DISASTERS change from first to final draft?

M.K. ENGLAND: I think that sort of depends. I think the level of editing, all books need to be massively edited. And I'm not sure that I would actually need any less editing if I wrote slower. I think I would just take longer to get there, because that just my process. With The Disasters, that was my first time writing a whole fresh idea start to finish during NaNoWriMo, 'cause my very first book that I ever finished that was terrible, I had tried to write that book three or four times before that. I would get 5,000 words in and quit. And then I would get 10,000 words in and quit. And finally I finished it but that idea had been living in my head for a long time.

M.K. ENGLAND: With THE DISASTERS, it was start to finish NaNoWriMo, 51,000 words, and that was without the last chapter and a half or so. 'Cause I needed to go back and fix some things before I could nail that ending really. But I always knew the emotional note that I wanted to end on. I have to have that before I start writing. THE DISASTERS, really it was like a coat of polish every single time. Every single revision things got deeper. The world got more complex. The characters got deeper. Their interactions got deeper.

M.K. ENGLAND: Really, I think the characters are what changed the most, not in terms of their personalities or anything. They've always been pretty much the same kind of people that they all right, but the way that their rough edges bump against each other got more complex. And I think the biggest lesson that I learned in the course of revising this book is that I needed to be meaner to my characters.

M.K. ENGLAND: I want people to get along. I like books with happy endings. I wanted them to be a big found family that flew around in space and had adventures and that was coloring my writing of the entire book from the start. And you can't have people meet on day one and suddenly be like wonderful friends. They can't just sort of insta-click. Not all of them. So I really had to go back and give myself permission to make them kind of hate each other a little bit at the start and give them some points of contention. That's probably the biggest change.

CLARA: I'm kind of connecting what you're saying now to something you said earlier. You said that in some ways character is the hardest part for you. Do you feel like you end up focusing on that more because it's something that is a little less natural?

M.K. ENGLAND: I mean I'm so new as a writer still that I hesitate to make any kind of generalization, really, 'cause I'm still just growing and changing so much with every single project. But differently from THE DISASTERS to my next project, I started the second project from a character point of view. There is a fabulous book called STORY GENIUS by Lisa Cron. And so going into my second book I really used the approach described in that book to develop the cast of characters and to really like hone in on that emotional arc before I ever wrote a single word. And I think that really did actually cut down on the amount of revision that the book needed ultimately because I didn't have to go through a million drafts to kind of nail down how to express the characters' more inner journey. It was always there alongside the actual plot details.

CLARA: I mentioned this a little in the introduction, but THE DISASTERS has a very diverse cast of characters on a lot of different dimensions. And one of most notable ones is that pretty much all the characters are queer in some way or another. How did you approach writing queerness?

M.K. ENGLAND: It was always a goal of mine, from the start with this book. Even though it scared me because back in 2014, publishing was very different. And that was only four years ago. It really hasn't been that long, but in those four years the #WeNeedDiverseBooks movement cropped up. There's been a huge push for change, especially in YA publishing. There have been several big, successful, financially successful queer titles in YA. And so the doors really opened up during that time.

M.K. ENGLAND: But while I was writing this and while I was queering the book and trying to find an agent, that wasn't necessarily the case. So I went into it almost pulling back a little bit. I wanted to queer it up even more. I wanted it to be rainbows and unicorns everywhere. But I was holding myself back because I was so afraid of not being able to be successful in publishing because of it. But I wanted it. So I really just kind of went for it. I just dove into it.

M.K. ENGLAND: And I got some really weird feedback from some critique partners along the way. Like I got asked, "Oh, what about that normal girl?" And I'm like, "Who the f**k is the normal girl? What are you talking about?" There was a lot of kind of bad internalized stuff that I had to get through to really let myself kind of open up and embrace it. And once I did I was like, cool. Everybody's queer now.

M.K. ENGLAND: And I'm just leaning into it now because sometimes people are like, "Oh, but that's not realistic to have every character queer." And I'm like, "I don't know, as a queer person a lot of my friends are queer, flock together and all of that." So I would say that's fairly realistic but also I don't care if it's realistic because this is my fantasy future and I'm saving the galaxy. So everybody's queer.

CLARA: One of the things I find very striking is how well, I think, or how fully I think, the queerness is integrated into each character's personality. So in a lot of books you see either they're queer and that's all you need to know about them and nobody cares about the other things that make a person human. Or it feels like an afterthought. And this book doesn't feel that way at all. So I'm curious for you as a writer how you strike that balance.

M.K. ENGLAND: I think it's a natural reflection of life in the real world as a queer person. You don't walk around all day like gaily parking your car and gaily baking your brownies and gaily going to work. You just kind of do all those things and I think that applies just as much to saving the galaxy. I definitely didn't want to shy away from anyone's identity but also they're kind of up against a ticking clock and there's like some stuff going on.

M.K. ENGLAND: So the romance is there as like a really light touch, but it's also just kind of a part of who everybody is and we move on with our lives because it doesn't need to be a huge thing. I love coming out novels. I love novels that sort of delve into queer identity and with those internal struggles, but that's not this book. This is an action-adventure, sci-fi, explosions, fun times.

CLARA: One of the places where it struck me the most was when one of the characters comes out as trans. And part of the reason it's so striking is because it's halfway through the book at that point, but it feels so seamless. She is providing this information as she's explaining, answering a question from another character about why she made the sort of career choices that she made. And to me I was struck by just the sort of matter-of-factness of it. That she had things that she was interested in doing and that she was denied. So she kind of made the best out of the options that she had. I don't know. I found it really striking.

M.K. ENGLAND: I think part of that is like it's just a product of that character's personality. She's very practical and she is never going to let something kind of get in her way. She just kind of says, okay, that's the way it is. I'm going to move on and make sure that I am enjoying my life and doing something with my life that matters and that part in particular really made me nervous because I was so worried about doing any kind of harm to my own queer community.

M.K. ENGLAND: I always want to make sure that I'm doing things properly and in a way that is respectful to everybody and that will resonate honestly with people. And it really kind of hurt me to even have to put any level of discrimination into the future. But realistically, I can't say that in all parts of the world we're going to be there in 200 years, as tragic as it is for me to say that. There's always going to be little pockets of resistance and little bureaucratic nonsense that goes along with gender and things like that.

M.K. ENGLAND: And I sure hope in 200 years it's different and that this problem would not have cropped up. But, yeah, I was worried about that part. And I did have sensitivity editors for several of the identities in this book and that was one of them. So I'm very glad that it came across okay.

CLARA: So you also identify as queer. How would you describe your relationship to queerness and queer culture?

M.K. ENGLAND: Very complicated. Again, I kind of grew up with a lot of weird internalized nonsense. And my identity has shifted a lot over the years, especially just since writing THE DISASTERS. My identity has almost evolved along with the development of this book and those were separate things that had nothing to do with each other. It just had to do with other things I was reading and other experiences I was having. But it really kind of colors history in a different way.

M.K. ENGLAND: Because of the ways I've identified in the past and the particular struggles that I've had, I've had a hard time integrating with any kind of in-person queer community. So I really found my people online in fandom. I have been a fan fiction reader and writer, well reader since I was a very young teenager. Since my family got our first computer back in middle school, I found fan fiction within six months. And only starting writing my own a few years ago because, again, too chicken to share my writing; that applies to everything.

M.K. ENGLAND: But being part of that community was really my first exposure to queer relationships in fiction because you certainly weren't finding it on the bookshelves in the early 2000s. And I'm not just talking about fan fiction itself here either. I'm talking about the community surrounds a fandom. So the places online that people hang out, the conventions, all of that; they are just all such safe queer spaces when you find your little pocket of people. And I found so many people that I deeply connected with and identified with.

M.K. ENGLAND: And being in those spaces I really got an education in the language of queer culture and the different ways that people are identifying and everything was so much deeper than I ever thought. And it allowed me to dig in and find some better words for what I've always felt. So it really, fandom I think, has been the most critical experience for developing my own queer identity.

CLARA: You were saying earlier that about three or four years ago when you started writing THE DISASTERS, there was sort of abiding belief that you couldn't have every character in your novel or most characters in your novel be queer because it was perceived as not true to life. My experience of fandom, much like yours, is like that. When you're in a fandom, everyone around you is queer in some way or another, or at least is very, very well versed in queerness, queer communities, and queer identities. They really are these sort of fantastic pockets.

M.K. ENGLAND: For me, the most critical experiences were the ones where I got to take that to an in-person space, as well, where I would go to a convention and meet up with some of the people that I had met online, and it would be almost like two or three days of just total accepting, welcoming-ness, in a physical space where everyone around identifies as queer in some way. And it was just the most honest experience that I've ever had in my life. And it's always hard to go back to real life after having that. Con drop is a real thing. But having those experiences was incredibly important to me, even though I'm sad that I can't have those experiences in my everyday life, very grateful to have had those experiences, and grateful to fandom and all the wonderful people there for allowing me to have that.

CLARA: I'm Clara Sherley-Appel and this is The Story Behind The Story. We're going to take a short break, then we'll return to my conversation with M. K. England.

Announcer: Hi. This is Mark Stone, assembly member from the 29th Assembly District, and I'm excited to welcome listeners to KSQD 90.7 FM K-Squid, our new community radio station for Santa Cruz county. K-Squid exists thanks to local fundraising efforts by folks who believe in the value that an independent, community-focused radio station provides. I welcome the chance to talk with you on the airwaves and share my ideas. Congratulations K-Squid. I look forward to many years of quality programming.

CLARA: You're listening to The Story Behind The Story on KSQD 90.7 FM Santa Cruz. For those of you just joining us, my guest is M. K. England, author of THE DISASTERS.

CLARA: There are a lot of really interesting and nuanced portrayals of mental illness in THE DISASTERS and especially various flavors of anxiety. Why was it important to you to put these aspects of your characters on display?

M.K. ENGLAND: Well, again, that's another part that's very personal to me. I have dealt with mental health issues. I mean they were diagnosed early in college but I can see in hindsight that they went back farther than that. But I've learned over the years that especially anxiety, anxiety especially presents so differently from person to person. One person's symptoms are not the same as another person's. And one person's experiences are not the same as another person's. And there's just so many nuances to that.

M.K. ENGLAND: And my particular flavor of anxiety, I guess, is one that frequently brings on the comment, "Oh, you seem so calm and collected all the time." And that's why I wrote Case the way she is. She is ultra confident and in the moment she can absolutely perform in a crisis. And that's very much the way I am. When there is stuff going down, I am there, I am focused, I am calm. And it's after the fact, or it's in the quiet moments that your brain is not fully occupied that it starts to shred itself to pieces. I wanted to portray a character that had more of that flavor of anxiety.

M.K. ENGLAND: And with Nax I gave him a different aspect of anxiety, which is that kind of constant framing of yourself and your identity in negative light and constant negative self-talk and to a point that is almost compulsive for him. So I kind of took different pieces of my own experiences and what I've learned of others' experiences and just wanted to portray some different ways of experiencing that.

CLARA: So what was it like for you, as someone who does experience anxiety, to write those kinds of scenes -- to write that negative self-talk into Nax's internal monologue or to write a scene where Case has a panic attack?

M.K. ENGLAND: Nax's negative self-talk unfortunately came extremely easily to me. So that part just flowed very naturally. Writing Case's panic attack was hard. And I actually have a hard time going back and rereading it because it's so close to my own experiences that it almost like brings me back to that. And fortunately I don't really have panic attacks anymore. I mean my book comes out next week, so who knows. We'll see. But in general I've learned a lot of strategies over the years and I think I've gotten, I've learned to manage my anxiety better. But still going back and reading that scene is hard for me.

CLARA: So when you are reading that scene or when you were writing it, how'd you go about doing it in a way that didn't set off your own triggers?

M.K. ENGLAND: I wrote that scene when I was in a good place. I was not feeling particularly ... Mental health has its ups and downs. There are always good times and bad times and I think one of the biggest misconceptions is like, "Oh, you're going through a stressful time or bad things are happening, therefore your mental health is bad." Unfortunately no, like everything can be wonderful and I will just be in a down moment. I'll be having a bad couple of weeks where my brain's baseline is just way low.

M.K. ENGLAND: So I made sure that I was at a higher baseline when I was writing that scene and I kind of tried to detach from it as much as I could. Sort of step back and observe from the outside, like what does it look like. Observe it almost like a documentary. There's this one little detail that just sticks in my brain for some reason. After I have a panic attack for some reason my lips swell up almost like I have an allergic reaction to something. I don't know biologically what's going on there or something.

M.K. ENGLAND: But like just observing those little details from a safe, removed distance. And then kind of listing them out gives me a layer of protection from that. So still, I'm sure I could go back and read that scene when I'm in a good place and be okay, but if I'm in one of those lower moments, then probably not a great thing to do.

CLARA: We're getting close to the end, so I think now is a good time to ask you to read a passage from THE DISASTERS. And before you do, why don't you set it up for us.

M.K. ENGLAND: Without getting too spoilery, there is a part about halfway through the book where a heist has gone down and our crew is trying to make their grand escape in a very fancy ship that Nax is a big fan of. So this is a portion of their escape that will hopefully give a little taste of the fun of it.

M.K. ENGLAND: A fifth fighter appears on my Hud, joining the other four boxing us in. But this one is directly above us, forcing us down. We're going to collide unless they match our speed. What in the hell am I supposed to do now? We are so dead. I've got nothing. I knew I'd probably kill us this time out, but ... unless.

M.K. ENGLAND: "Case," I ask, my voice coming out surprisingly even. "Can you give me anymore power to the engines? I'm going to try something that might be ... not good."

M.K. ENGLAND: "Oh, lovely," Case says. "We aren't using the weapons systems right now, so I can cut them off and reroute that power. Other than that all I can do is override some safety protocols and hope the ship doesn't explode. Are we in favor of that?"

M.K. ENGLAND: "Of not exploding?" I ask, incredulous. "Of the override, Nax." She snaps, her fingers flying over the screen. "Do it!" Astra says.

M.K. ENGLAND: My hand shakes over the throttle control. This is exactly the kind of thing that always backfires on me. I try to get too fancy, try to show off, try to push myself. But right now, if we have any chance of getting out of here, I have to do this. I have to. I blow out a slow breath.

M.K. ENGLAND: "Okay, tell me when you're ready."

M.K. ENGLAND: "It'll only take a ... Okay, now!" Case shouts. And I cut off the engines completely and shove the control stick forward throwing us into a free fall. The ship screams in protest with some help from Astra. But the fighters leap past us at full speed. We're free of the aerial blockade. I jerk the stick back up and for a sick second we're sailing forward on our leftover momentum alone.

M.K. ENGLAND: Then I wrench the stick over, kick in the afterburner, open throttle wide out, and Case was not kidding. Without the safety engaged, this ship can move. It is unbelievably hot. We blow past the fighters and I don't even bother with the evasive maneuvers that might slow us down. Just rely on out-and-out speed to get us up and away.

M.K. ENGLAND: The fighter formation waivers behind us for a moment and I can imagine them chattering over the com. Trying to hail us. Trying to figure out what the hell just happened. But fortunately we don't have to listen to any of that crap. The thrill builds in my chest like the swell of a shout bubbling under my ribs and a grin tugs at the corners of my mouth.

M.K. ENGLAND: I actually pulled that one off. The atmosphere turns wispy and it's drag on the ship falls away bit by bit. Our momentum pushes my head back into the chair, crushes all my organs back against my spine in a way that will never stop being exhilarating. My grin turns cocky and I roll my head over to share the moment with Case. If we can keep up this pace we can make the A-jump in just over a minute. We're home free.

M.K. ENGLAND: Worst. Thought. Ever. What is wrong with me? As if summoned by my arrogance, a screeching warning erupts from the hud and I slam my foot down on the right rudder pedal yanking the stick back and over. A rush of energy surges past us in the wake of an enormously fast projectile. The bullet winking away into the distance. The ground to orbit rail guns. Not good.

CLARA: I could really see what you were saying earlier about writing scenes where you're piloting the ship. There's so much detail but it all goes so quickly.

M.K. ENGLAND: Yeah, when I'm writing those scenes, those are some of my favorites 'cause I really like to sit back and close my eyes and feel myself physically in that space. What physical forces are acting on the body and what does it feel like to stretch in this particular way to put your force down on your left foot while you're pulling the stick this way and how does all of that work in visceral physical way? And really those scenes are just all about adrenaline. I want to feel like that sort of heart-poundy blood singing kind of really intense ... I just want to have a very in-body experience for this.

CLARA: Do you find that you're actually performing any physical acts to try to imagine those things? Or is it entirely in your head?

M.K. ENGLAND: Depends on the scene. More so with any kind of fight scenes that are more down on the ground. With piloting there's only so much I can do. I can't really roll around my office in my desk chair. I mean I guess I could, but it doesn't quite get the same feeling. But for sure, with any kind of physical fight I will differently get up and feel what it feels like to crouch in this particular way. And if I'm moving from this direction to this direction what muscles are pulling and how does that feel?

M.K. ENGLAND: But I definitely have noticed that when I'm trying to write an emotional scene or when I'm trying to write one of these action scenes it's not good for me to do that in public because I make a lot of very weird facial expressions.

CLARA: So for something like the piloting, how much research goes into it?

M.K. ENGLAND: For the piloting, not as much as you might think because I just read so much of it already for years and years and years. Normally, I put a lot of research into different things. For the piloting I didn't have to quite as much. I did make a decision to rearrange the flight controls in a way that they don't exist on earth-based flight systems because to my brain, when you're flying in space you just have a different -- I ended up swapping the roll and the yaw, so that one is on the stick and one is on the pedals, instead of in a typical plane where they're the other way around.

M.K. ENGLAND: Because if you think about it when you're in space, and you're much more in a three-dimensional space more so then you are -- not that like flying through Earth's sky is not three-dimensional but space is infinite in every direction, without atmospheric drag and there's just very different forces working on you. So I thought that it made more sense to swap those. And here's where video games come in -- that's the way a lot of gamers who are doing space flight simulators arrange their controls. That's probably the extent of the research that went in for piloting.

CLARA: What were the other areas in THE DISASTERS that you put research into?

M.K. ENGLAND: I did a little bit of research into some of the medical stuff. FBI, please don't come looking for me, I swear I'm not doing weird things with gun shot wounds. But really most of my research went into portraying the various identities in the book correctly. Even though I have -- everybody in the book is in some way there's a piece of them in my friend group or among my students I was working with or in my family. But I still wanted to make extra, extra, extra sure that I was getting things right. And so I did a lot of research on the Muslim faith, on all of the various identities that are in there. So I know a lot more about Kazakhstan than I knew before. I know a lot more about Pakistan than I knew before. That was really important to me.

CLARA: What was the most satisfying part of THE DISASTERS for you to write?

M.K. ENGLAND: Definitely the ending. Like I said earlier, I always know that emotional beat that I want to end the story on, and I just love to write towards the moment. And so when it finally hits, I'm just like yes, yes! I'm so pumped up. And in THE DISASTERS, the way the second to last chapter ends is just like this giant middle finger moment that I find so incredibly satisfying. And then the last chapter just wraps up in a way that I personally find very gratifying. So I hope others have that same experience.

CLARA: This is your first published novel and at the time we're recording this episode we still got about a week before it launches. Describe what the publishing process has been like for you. How has your life changed in the last year or two?

M.K. ENGLAND: Gosh, it's been sort of eternal. My publishing process has taken a little longer than normal. We signed the deal officially back in May of 2016 or something, and we signed it for a Fall 2018 release date. That was just where they wanted to position the book on their list. So I knew I was in for at least a two-year wait. And being one of the very last debuts of the year has been more of a emotional challenge than I thought it would be.

M.K. ENGLAND: But really my whole structure of my day-to-day life has changed now that this is really become a professional part of my life. And I kind of like it that way. I like structure. I am not a write-in-my-pajamas kind of person. I have to put on clothes and put shoes and sit down at my desk and do work. And I just like to have things to occupy my time. Like I said with Case's anxiety, my brain does not do well in quiet times.

M.K. ENGLAND: So I am constantly occupied. I'm constantly working on something. And so having publishing there, there's always something to do. There's always the next project to work on. And I always have little ideas that are bubbling away and little things I can make notes on and I'm always working on something and I just find that very satisfying to have as part of my daily life.

CLARA: What's been the most exciting part of the process for you?

M.K. ENGLAND: I think the moments where readers have responded to the book have been incredibly special to me. Some of the earliest readers of the advanced copies of THE DISASTERS have become people that I interact with online almost every day. And their support has meant so much to me and just hearing people connect to the book in exactly the ways that I was hoping people would has been everything. And seeing the final hardcovers was also a great moment of just like, it is a real thing. It is a real object that actually exists now. That was also a neat moment too.

CLARA: What surprised you?

M.K. ENGLAND: How much dead time there can be between steps. There were sometimes months between something being due or the next step of the process coming up where I was just sort of left to my own devices. And again, I like structure, so spinning my wheels and like waiting for something to happen is not my strong point. So I am constantly like what can I be doing. And there must be something I can be doing to help myself in my publishing career. And they're like, no. There is nothing you can be doing right now. They're like go work on something else. But Type A me is always like there must be a thing to accomplish. There really is not always a thing to accomplish.

CLARA: So here we are, eight days before launch, what are you feeling right now?

M.K. ENGLAND: Mostly nauseated. I am a very weird blend of incredibly scared and very excite and eager for this to be over. I kind of want to rip the bandaid off. I want to skip straight to the part where the book is out in the world. Yeah, I'm looking forward to my launch party. I'm looking forward to the short tour that I have planned right after the release day where I get to meet readers and meet some other authors and just travel around and see some friends and looking forward to all of that.

M.K. ENGLAND: But, boy, this process has been so long. And seeing it finally, like not end because there's still another book coming after this and all of that stuff, but it's a big moment that has been looming in the future just like a giant thing that is going to happen one day. So finally having that off of my horizon, like I can't even imagine what life is going to look like in 10 days from now. So, we'll see.

CLARA: So what's next?

M.K. ENGLAND: Next is a book coming out in roughly January 2020. It's another stand alone book from Harper Teen. For this one I'm pivoting genres a little bit. It's still sci-fi but there's magic in this world and it's not space-based. It's in a secondary world. So futuristic secondary world with magic. A wonderful, prickly main character who is a Slytherin, or she's a Hufflepuff that thinks she's a Slytherin, and she was so fun to write. And she is so damaged and I just want to wrap her in a blanket.

CLARA: Well it all sounds great. M. K. England, thank you so much for joining us today.

M.K. ENGLAND: Thank you for having me. This was fun.

CLARA: M. K. England's debut novel THE DISASTERS will be released by Harper Teen on December 18th. You can order it online or wherever books are sold.

CLARA: Next time I talk to San Francisco author Charlie Jane Anders about her new novel THE CITY IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT. I hope you'll join me.

CLARA: The Story Behind The Story is produced for KSQD 90.7 FM by me, Clara Sherley-Appel. Our sound engineer is Lanier Sammons. He also wrote our theme.