Author Interview with C. S. Poe

Absolutely! I have a degree in filmmaking and joke that I’ve reverse-engineered the traditional adaptation process. Instead of the word becoming a visual, I turn the visual into words. When I write, I construct a mental storyboard complete with camera angles and a shot list—that’s just the way breaking down those beats makes sense to me. So the product I end up with is prose that has a cinematic vibe and dialogue that’s punchy and very back-and-forth. It feels a bit like you’re reading a movie.

2. What is it about Gilded Age New York you find appealing? Does it help to guide your Steampunk novels?

I can’t say there’s any one thing about the time period that fascinates me more than others—it’s really a little of everything. The architecture, gangs, social hierarchy and political drama, fashion, now defunct etiquette, technology and the explosion of human curiosity… I can go on and on.

And living New York City, this history is literally on every street and becomes a rabbit hole of research. For example, my neighborhood park is named for Carl Schurz, a German immigrant who was a member of the United States Senate after the Civil War. He sat for a portrait taken by famous Civil War photographer, Mathew Brady, who also took what is arguably the most well-known photo of President Abraham Lincoln. Carl Schurz was also portrayed as a political caricature by Thomas Nast, the man who created the cartoon elephant and donkey still used by our two major governing parties today. And Nast was famous for his critical cartoons of New York City’s corrupt Tammany Hall and Boss Tweed.

See what I mean? You can just keep going and going and going….

I actually use this historical obsession in most of my books. Magic & Steam, certainly, as it’s set in the 1880s in New York City, but the Gilded Age has also been relevant to the plots of my contemporary mysteries: Snow & Winter, Memento Mori, and Southernmost Murder.

3. There’s been a perception that to produce art, one must know suffering. This is a subject that comes up often when discussing poets, songwriters, and novelists—that perhaps they do their best work during break-ups or when melancholic. Think Adele, Edgar Allan Poe, Virginia Woolf. Do you agree?

I think there’s something to be said about suffering and art going hand-in-hand—not that I’m here to romanticize anguish. As an author, it’s our job to write a compelling story, and I think when we’re willing to tap the gamut of human experience, and aren’t afraid to put words to the more negative aspects of what it means to be alive, it takes a book from readable to believable.

4. How did you break-in to publishing? Would you have done anything differently?

I was originally with a publishing house, which I think was a great introduction in terms of learning the nuances of the industry and establishing professional relationships. I’ve since left that house and am entirely self-published under my own company. If given the opportunity to do it all again, I don’t think I’d have necessarily broken into publishing differently, but I would have explored the benefits of being my own boss much sooner than I did.

5. What’s next from you—upcoming releases, story ideas in development?

I’m currently working on the third book of my police procedural mystery series, Memento Mori. It’s been a tough story to get right, so it’s been taking a lot longer than I originally anticipated. But once that’s finished, I hope to release a few short stories I’ve got laying around, and begin research for the fourth Magic & Steam book.