The Fantastical Five with Andrew Najberg and Willow Croft
I’m really glad to have created the structure of these preset interview questions like these “Fantastical Five”, the “Spooky Six”, and the “Four Red Herrings” because the possibilities for me to go into deep-dive tangents are endless. Take Andrew Najberg, for example: we could compare our synesthesia-inspired colour assignations, or science/quantum physics (my poetry book is even titled “Quantum Singularity”)…but I’ll let you discover more about this author for yourselves. Enjoy the journey!
Andrew Najberg is the author of the best-selling (#1 US Horror Amazon) novels The Mobius Door (Wicked House Publishing, 2023) and Gollitok (Wicked House Publishing, 2023), as well as The Neverborn Thief (Olive-Ridley Press, 2024), the forthcoming collection of short fiction In Those Fading Stars (Crystal Lake Publishing, 2024) and the forthcoming novel Extinction Dream (Wicked House Publishing, 2025). He also anticipates an end of the year release for the choose-your-own-adventure novel Try Not to Die in the Shadowlands. His short fiction has appeared in Fusion Fragment, Khoreo, Translunar Travelers Lounge, Utopia Science Fiction, Prose Online, Psychopomp Review, Solar Press Horror Anthology, and more. Currently, he is working on a novel called Eat the Light, signed for an early 2026 release through Wicked House Publishing.
He also has published the poetry collection the The Goats Have Taken Over the Barracks (Finishing Line Press, 2021), and the chapbook Easy to Lose (Finishing Line Press 2007). His book Fighting Fermi is forthcoming through Walnut Street Publishing (2024). His poems have appeared in dozens of journals online and in print, including North American Review, Asheville Poetry Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Yemassee, Cimarron Review, Louisville Review, and Good River Review. He was the winner of a 2010 AWP Intro award in poetry, and the 2022 Brain Mills Press poetry month grand prize winner.
When he is not writing, Andrew is an avid tabletop gamer who received his first game writing credit as part of the licensed title for Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving, and he is currently working on an original title with author and board game designer Jon Cohn. For fun, he plays board games, Dungeons and Dragons, and video games with his kids, trains in Tae Kwan Do, periodically paints, draws with pen and ink, and plays drums.. Currently, he teaches creative writing, Japanese literature, rhetoric and composition, and honors seminars in the humanities for the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga where he also serves as the director of programming for the honors residential college.
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Willow Croft: “Oh no, we accidentally altered the timeline!” How do you keep track of your characters, your plot, and key events in your book? What sort of outlining and other preparation goes into keeping your story on track?
Andrew Najberg: So, when I was in college, some friends and I were talking about music. I don’t remember what band we were talking about, but I do remember that I complained that when it comes to lead singers, I prefer red and pink voices over yellow. Naturally, they had no idea what I was talking about- and that was how I learned I have synesthesia. For years, I’d been listening to music as these weird and complicated shifting color patterns in my head – and I’d also linked that to how I think about structure. When I write novels and short fiction, I try to hold the story in mind all at once by visualizing the story, its structure, how the characters relate as patterns of moving colors, kind of like nested flowcharts (in an oversimplified way). When I’m working out the story, the parts of the story move about a great deal, but as they start falling into place they also become more stable and the patterns strike me as visually satisfying. The colors are still there too – I especially see the way themes develop in these terms, atmosphere of scene, and the dispositions of my characters.
Willow Croft: “Full Speed Ahead!” What sort of technology (or lack thereof) do you create for your books? How do you research new advancements that could help propel your story through the far reaches of time and space?
Andrew Najberg: Oof – all sorts! I incorporate a wide variety of technologies from sentient robots in a story like “Do You Read?”, generational spacecraft in “What Lemons Taste Like”, predominantly subterranean colonies like in “Robot Fish Don’t Know They’re in Water” and cloud consciousnesses in “We Have No Spare Parts” – the significant majority of the stories in the collection incorporate tech elements and ideas both in the plots and in their thematic underpinnings. A lot of times, part if the inception of the story is that I get particularly interested in some specific idea/technology and work to frame a story around it.
To make this possible, I do my best to keep up with emerging thinking in fields like propulsion technology, quantum physics, exotic celestial bodies, earth orbit research and more, and I mostly accomplish this through reading academic journal articles I arrive at from gateway magazines like Scientific American and Popular Science, as well as social media discussion groups focused on things like astronomy, biotech, contagious diseases, etc. I also do draw from popular sources – for “Do you read?”, I also took some time to watch a considerable number of Boston Dynamics videos and for “We Have No Spare Parts” I read a good bit about neural-implant chips, artificial blood, and nanotech.
Willow Croft: “Hey, look, a terraformed planet. Just in the nick of time!” Where do you find inspiration for the world-building included in your books or stories? Are there certain settings that intrigue you the most?
Andrew Najberg: So, my world building is planted in a couple square things: that there are fundamentals of human relationships and interconnection that I don’t think will change easily with time, and I tend to extrapolate problems that I currently see existing into what I believe will be their future forms. I often do work with things like eco-catastrophe, overpopulation, prejudice as world-themes and I have a particular interest in representing immigrants since my own family is composed of immigrants on both sides. Against these backdrops, I often try to focus on simple but compelling emotional drives – a father so desperate to protect his son he’ll trade a week of his life to do it, a mother who doesn’t know how to tell her daughter she’s dying of cancer, a newlywed couple who jump on the chance to take the honeymoon they never thought they’d afford. For settings – I like to think about how the ordinary can be infused by technology and vice versa – how would advanced tech fit in a public park? How would we bring a park into a long-voyage spaceship?
Willow Croft: “I think someone’s aboard the ship!” Do you have go-to life forms (whether biological, robotic/android, a yet-unknown extraterrestrial, or any other characters) that you tend to populate your book’s key locations with?
Andrew Najberg: I tend to see the universe beyond our planet – especially that part of it that is within reach of our species – as largely hostile to the survival of our species. I don’t see worlds where we land, hop out the ship and helmet off within the hour. As a result, I tend to build off earth’s more exotic forms of life when I consider alien life – particularly species that grow under difficult or unusual conditions. I’m particularly interested in the resilience of fungus, life that lives without sunlight, life that develops around ocean vents, life with a non-carbon base. I don’t have a doubt that the universe DOES have life out there – but I don’t know that it’s exactly our kind of life, so I want to push the boundaries on what we consider living and then use that to develop what I feel to be reasonably plausible alien life.
Willow Croft: “Everything’s wonderful here on Planet X! / Everything’s terrible on Planet X!” Are you more drawn to books set in dystopian societies or on dystopian planets, or do you prefer to explore the more hopeful, utopian side to science fiction? What appeals to you about the subgenres to sci-fi that you write (and read!) in?
Andrew Najberg: Lol – dystopian for sure. If I describe an idyllic place, wait for the rug pull. I think for me that both my fiction and the fiction I read are ways I negotiate things I find challenging in life – and I do firmly believe that life is outright hard even if we manage to forget the problems we face as a species. This is also why I tackle what I find to be important emotional issues in basic relationships – these are the emotional issues that matter to me. Similarly, I do feel like we’re treating the planet in an unsustainable fashion, that we have a level of cultural division that is not sustainable either, that we’re facing some very real emerging crises that we’re not equipped to deal with. Thus, my stories tend to explore the outcomes of these kinds of paths.
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“Bringer of Nightmares and Storms.” Horror writer Willow Croft is usually lurking deep in the shadows of her writer cave, surrounded by formerly feral (but still fierce!) cats for company. Visit her here: http://willowcroft.blog, or check out her other services here: https://kirsten-lee-barger.mailchimpsites.com/.