I must admit, there was an element of selfishness involved in this podcast. I'm currently doing a creative writing course in my spare time (rather than in my news stories, ho ho) and one of the things I'm struggling with, weird as it is to admit, is the idea that I can write anything. I don't have to be bound by the rules of this world, or any world, or any rules. I can conceive of something totally and utterly new. And that's... I still can't quite wrap my head around it.
But my guest on the podcast today, Cassandra Khaw, has long made their peace with this, producing works of - usually - pitch black horror that I'm not sure I'd have the nerve to imagine. The most famous of their pieces is probably the novella Nothing But Blackened Teeth, which was a USA Today bestseller when it came out roughly a year ago.
So I wanted to find out from Cassandra, who seems to imagine new stories at the speed other people think of things to eat for dinner, where their ideas came from and how to shape them from there. I also wanted to find out where their life-long love of horror came from - and I was treated to a wonderful real-life Malaysian horror story when I asked.