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Game Talk - Geneve Flynn

  • 5 days ago
  • 6 min read

Having finally met Geneve a couple of years ago at StokerCon in San Diego after repeatedly hearing/seeing the name in genre circles, it was a joy to meet at last. That meeting had me grinning my ass off: the lady is a genuine fan and connoisseur of the horror story, be it on the page or on the screen - big or small. Time to talk game.




1. For those who don't know, who are you?


Hi, I’m Geneve Flynn, and I’m Chinese, born in Malaysia and I now call Australia home. I’m a multi-award-winning horror author, editor, and poet. Along with Lee Murray, I co-edited the ground-breaking anthology, Black Cranes: Tales of Unquiet Women. I like B-grade horror and action movies, cats, dogs, and cups of tea. If we ever meet at a convention, I will happily share a pot of tea, look at photos of your pets, and chat about terribly awesome and awesomely terrible films. CC already knows about the bad films thing.


2. Game talk – how do you organise and manage your game? How has it evolved?


I try to be organised but too often, my game looks like scattered lists. I record all my obligations, such as promo, community work, and speaking engagements on my calendar, plus I have a spreadsheet of all the work I have out for submission, and any invitations I need to write for. I also have a paper list beside my keyboard so I can get that shot of dopamine from crossing things off. I try to be disciplined with work hours but I’m not very good at remembering to clock out.


My game has evolved in that I used to say yes to everything. Now, there are so many things (which is a great problem to have) and I physically can’t, as much as I’d love to. I have to keep in mind the objective of my game and manage my resources, so now I’m a little more selective. In terms of how I write, I used to be a panster but now I’m definitely in the plotter camp. I find a plot gets me where I want to go much more efficiently.

3. Talk us through one of your biggest achievements in your game – give us the story behind it. How did it play out?


The anthology I mentioned—Black Cranes: Tales of Unquiet Women—launched my career and catapulted me out of my little silo. It came about because Lee Murray (my co-editor) and I are conscientious Asians and we both turned up to a panel far too early at GenreCon (Australia’s leading genre convention) in 2019. We started chatting and we realised we were the black sheep of the literary family: we’re Asian, women, and we write horror. We wondered where were the stories (in English) that reflected our experiences, and Lee turned to me with a wicked gleam in her eye and said that we should put together an anthology of Asian women horror. I was very early into my career at this point and Lee was already one of New Zealand’s most celebrated writers, but I was in my “What are you going to say yes to today” phase, so I agreed, even though I was terrified. The anthology won a Bram Stoker and Shirley Jackson award, and short/longlisted for various others. It started a groundswell in Asian women’s horror, springing up several other projects, and created a sisterhood. I still look back on that moment a little dazed, a lot amazed.


4. Tell us more about this sisterhood, e.g., is it more of a local thing or is it global? How has it evolved since the Black Cranes anthology dropped?


The sisterhood is something very dear to me. I grew up as the sensitive, dreamy, INFJ girl between two brothers in a family who are all very much on the concrete, sensate side of things. I was the quiet, conscientious Asian in a mostly white Australia, who thought about the world in strange and horrifying ways. (I once tried to impress my high school crush by quoting from Pet Sematary. It didn’t go well.)


For the longest time, I didn’t recognise anyone else like me. Then Black Cranes happened. In the curation process, I was delighted to discover Nadia Bulkin, Grace Chan, Rin Chupeco, Elaine Cuyegkeng, Gabriela Lee, Rena Mason, Angela Yuriko Smith and Christina Sng, as well as the works of my co-editor, Lee Murray. Brilliant authors with roots in Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand, the Ryukyu Islands, Singapore, and China. From there, we made more and more connections, seeing more and more reflections of that same, dreamy girl who loved the darkness beneath the mask of the world.


Black Cranes spawned other collaborations, such as the Stoker Award-winning poetry collection, Tortured Willows, and the Stoker Award finalist non-fiction collection, Unquiet Spirits. Then there’s Kristy Park Kulski’s Silk & Sinew (on the 2025 Stoker Award preliminary list for anthology) and Coven of the East, edited by Angela Yuriko Smith and Pauline Chow. Like true sisters, we have welcomed each other, lifted each other up, and made space for everyone at the table.


5. It's great if things go according to plan. Tell us about when it didn't; how did you handle it? What were/are those challenges?


I once submitted a short story to The Dark magazine and I think it holds the record for my fastest rejection. If memory serves, the refusal arrived twenty-three minutes after submission. I remember barking a laugh of surprise—it was so swift that I didn’t yet have time to feel disappointed. That came later. I hold that rejection as a writer’s badge of honour because The Dark is a notoriously tough market to crack, and it still makes me smile to think about the surreal speed of it.


The only thing to do was send the story out again. It got rejected the very next day. But I loved that story so I sent it out again the next month. And again, and again. Same deal. It would be almost a year before it finally found a home at PseudoPod. That same little story would surprise me by winning a Brave New Weird award and earning a mention in Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year anthology.


I write this not to thumb my nose at The Dark but to show that, although things don’t always go to plan, sometimes they still work out pretty well. The challenge of being a writer is always going to be rejection. It’s part of the job and it sucks, but it doesn’t always mean that it’s the end of the road. The trick is to hold on to the belief in your work and to keep at it. Keep writing, keep learning, keep putting your work out there. Don’t give up; success could arrive the very next time to pick yourself up and try again.


6. Give a pep-talk to someone on game in your field.


Play your own game, and remember why you’re playing it in the first place. No one’s writing and no one’s success is going to look the same as yours. No one’s reasons for why they keep turning up at the page is going to be identical to yours. So focus on your own game and try to have fun doing it. On the flipside: writing is not a win-lose type of game—community, kindness, and lifting each other up is what’s going to progress you along the board and also help you keep your sanity in this difficult business.


7. Promo for website / links:


Latest work:


“If I Am to Earn My Tether” and “a pocket of soil” in Silk & Sinew: A Collection of Folk Horror from the Asian Diaspora, ed. Kristy Park Kulski, Bad Hand Books (Bram Stoker preliminary list for Superior Achievement in an Anthology)


“I Am Not Myself Today” in Darkness Most Fowl, ed. Elaine Pascale, The Godmother of Horror Press (Bram Stoker preliminary list for Superior Achievement in an Anthology)


Instagram: @geneveflynn

Headshot credit: Owen Flynn


 
 
 

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