Finnian Burnett

5 Questions with Li Charmaine Anne

Finnian Burnett

January 6, 2025

Welcome to the 5 Questions Series. Each week, I’ll ask five questions of some of my favorite authors, editors, publishers, and other industry professionals. This week, I’m talking with Li Charmaine Anne.

First, tell me all about “Crash Landing.” Your inspiration for the work and your path to publication.

For sure. I’ve been writing a story about a feisty skater girl named Ash for a very long time—ever since I was around 16. The story has taken many different forms over the years. At first, Ash was the narrating character. At another point, I introduced queerness and framed the story as a middle-grade novel about snowboarders! The bottom line is that a rebellious board sport enthusiast named Ash has been living in my head rent-free for over a decade.

I had a lot of time during the pandemic. So, I decided to buck down, write this story, and get it as far as possible down the path to publication. I wrote the story again from scratch, this time from the point of view of a character who’s less confident, more sheltered, and just discovering her queerness. I related more to this point of view, so it felt more authentic. The story that resulted was Crash Landing.

Knowing nothing about the publishing industry, I signed up for mentorship programs. One program I did was the Writers’ Union’s BIPOC Writers Connect. That’s where I met Danny Ramadan, another Annick Press author. After the event, Danny sent me a mentorship program that Annick Press was doing, specifically for racialized authors. I applied, and instead of becoming a mentee, Annick acquired me immediately!

So, in a way, I got lucky. But I only got lucky because I put myself in a position to get lucky. That would be my advice to emerging authors looking for their big break: get yourself in front of opportunities and eventually, something good will turn up.

You won a Governor General’s Award for this book. Did you about pass out when you found out?

YUP. I still don’t quite believe it. Like, I’m proud of Crash Landing. I think it’s a good book. But I never thought of it as THAT good! (Lol.)

I’m honoured, humbled, and thrilled. I think a book like Crash Landing winning the GG Award is a sign that Canadian literature is finally moving in the direction I wanted it to go when I was a kid.

I say that because Crash Landing is about queer, racialized, and marginalized people. But it’s not trauma porn. It’s not Oscar bait. It’s a fun story about skateboarding teens, not a treatise on the human condition or some profound statement about immigration. It’s about regular, contemporary people figuring out everyday life.

So, I see Crash Landing’s success as the literary scene finally embracing under-represented authors, characters, and stories as a regular part of life. I hope that makes sense.

How important is it for you to write about queer voices in your work?

It’s important, but it’s not the No. 1 thing in my head.

As a queer person, everything and anything I write is, by default, queer. This is true whether I write a lesbian sitcom or a murder mystery solved by a straight guy detective. My queerness is an inherent part of me that shapes how I perceive the world and how I tell stories.

I will always want to include queer characters in my stories, simply because I relate to them more. We write what we know, right?

But to be honest, I think about racialized characters more. I think a lot about how to decolonize my work and how to write Black and/or Indigenous characters. While I don’t think it’s my place to tell stories from these points of view, I consider how I can creatively and respectfully have readers from these backgrounds feel seen and included when they read me.

Most of the characters in Crash Landing are Asian, but it would be disingenuous of me not to have a single Black or Indigenous character. It would be inauthentic because there are plenty of Black and Indigenous people in Vancouver, and Crash Landing is very much a story about Vancouver!

Writing characters who don’t share your identity can be challenging. And scary. But I think it’s worth it. And if someone gives me feedback on how I wrote those characters, I’d listen and learn.

What are you working on now?

I’m working on figuring out what I want to work on next!

I don’t want to say much yet because I have a lot of half-baked ideas, but I want to write something for an older audience, like “New Adult.” And I want to do something more experimental, more weird.

I think I’ll revisit some short story ideas and maybe submit to journals again. Short stories are a great way to test ideas you may want to explore in novel form. I’m definitely a novelist, though. I’m long-winded. Ha!

You told me you are spending a lot of time abroad next year? Can you tell me about that?

Yeah! I’m doing a working holiday in Australia with a friend I call my brother from another mother. I’m stoked.

Basically, it’s my way of resetting myself. If I can be real: the past four years have been rough. My mom was diagnosed with cancer during the pandemic and I spent two years living with my parents in near-total isolation because my mother was immunocompromised. This was hard on my mental health because I’m ordinarily an active person.

My mom then passed away in 2022 and I feel like I haven’t had space to grieve because I’ve had to devote so much energy to Crash Landing. It’s my first book and publishing it was a learning curve. It was stressful at times too.

The book came out this year and so far, 2024 has been amazing. But I also got laid off from my day job and my health hasn’t been the greatest (2x sprained ankles, 3x colds, 1x Covid lol).

I say all this because I believe we need to be in a healthy headspace to be creative. Part of the reason I have a hard time answering the question “what are you working on now” is because I haven’t had that space in a while. So, I’m hoping to reconnect with myself in Australia and just…live, y’know? Reconnect with what drives me creatively. And skate. Skate tons.

Bonus question: Have you ever taken a picture of a weird bird?

Ha! This is so funny because I’m a big bird nerd. As a kid, I’d walk around with a little handmade notebook and The Sibley Field Guide to Birds of Western North America, noting down the birds I saw.
Okay, this is a good one: this is a Gentoo Penguin from a trip my dad and I took to the Falkland Islands last February. The smart lil dinosaur is using a rock as a pillow—isn’t that adorable??

2024 Year in Review(ish)

Finnian Burnett

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December 30, 2024

Hey all! Five questions is on holiday until the first Monday in January when I’ll be talking with the brilliant, charming, and so cute Li Charmaine Anne about “Crash Landing” and other topics.

I usually do a year-end reflection at about this time of year and this year is no different. Except…

I’ve been feeling a little meh about goals and accomplishments and crowing about what I’ve done in 2024. Part of that is because I’m just dealing with something I’ve named, “Epic Dystopian Sadness” which probably means I should stop listening to so much Noah Kahan and Conan Gray, stop scrolling US political news, and spend more time listening to Wham or something else perky.

I’m trying to spend more time taking care of my mental health. More time outside, breathing in the freezing cold Canadian air, bundled up, walking and talking with my wife. More water, more tea, more healthy homemade soups. But also, yes, chocolate.

I was lamenting to a friend of mine that other day that 2022 Finn would be ashamed of how little 2024 Finn submitted, how little I got done. But that isn’t fair or even true. 2022 Finn would be impressed that 2024 Finn wrote two novels with my co-writer Andrew Buckley. 2022 Finn would be dumbfounded that present Finn got an agent – their first choice agent! – for ARTHUR UNDRESSED, an epistolary novel about a trans man trying to reconcile his complicated relationship with his dead mother.

I’ve long stopped comparing myself to other writers. I celebrate my friends and their successes. But comparing myself to past me is a little harder.

One of the students in my weekly novel-writing class said something profound the other day in class. He said he’s pulled himself back from looking at page counts and word counts as his measure of progress on his novel and instead is asking himself if he had fun writing on it that week. Perhaps that will be my big goal for 2025. Try to have fun with it, no matter what I’m working on.

I’m going to keep remembering the joy of writing. Which isn’t to say I’m not going to try to accomplish anything. I’m just going to try to do so without beating myself up, or comparing what I’ve done with how productive I was in the past.

So, in the spirit of concrete goals, this year, I’d like to:

Finish my gothic horror YA book

Find a publisher for my collection: Ravens Don’t Get High Blood Pressure and other tales of queer love

Finish the YA space pirate book I’m writing with Andrew Buckley and start the next in our Shakespeare retelling series.

Happy New Year, everyone.

5 Questions with L.E. Wagensveld

Finnian Burnett

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December 16, 2024

You just spearheaded a big author event in Enderby, BC. Is community important to you?

Yes, community is very important to me. I work as an Assistant Community Librarian, and I’m a mother of four, so I get a first-hand view of what community means, especially in a small town like Enderby. And, of course, a community isn’t just the place where you live but the people you surround yourself with; like writing communities. My friend and I planned the event with the dream of bringing writers, authors and readers together. I think that, so often, when people look for books, they don’t think of looking close to home. This was a way of shining a light on the talented people who may live closer than many people realize and garnering those connections to help writers, especially those just starting, find their community.

Can you tell me about the challenges of writing, working, raising kids, and finding time, somehow, to market your work?

There are a lot of challenges… and sometimes it feels like they’re insurmountable, to be honest. Many days, I get down and feel like giving up. It just seems like there is no time to write, and no one will ever read my books. I’m sure we’ve all had those days! I’m incredibly lucky to have a supportive partner who pushes me to write, even if I have convinced myself that my only purpose is to wash dishes and feed people.
I once heard Canadian author Gail Bowen speak; something she said has always stuck with me. About writing, while raising children and balancing life’s demands, she said, “You have to write in the cracks of your life.” I have held on to that quote for years because when you have a dream, you do some pretty crazy things to make it work. I have written and edited with icy fingers in hockey arenas and sat in my car awkwardly rereading love scenes while my kids play in the park. You jot notes in the middle of the night, on your phone, or whatever you have on hand, and find a way to make it work. And, maybe even more importantly, you learn to give yourself grace when it doesn’t work.

What are you working on right now?

That is a really good question, and I’m not sure I know the answer, haha. I published in September, and with my event and another festival I attended in October, I have yet to settle in to work on a new project. I have about 8 WIPs that I’d love to finish eventually. At the moment, I’m leaning towards completing the sequel to one of the books I released this year. I did a social media poll, and the answers were split pretty much down the middle as to whose story people wanted to see next, so that wasn’t much help!

Your write romance with some hard-hitting subjects. Is that important to you and can you talk about reader/publisher reactions to that?

It is important to me because I believe that romance can be honest as well as an escape from the everyday. It doesn’t have to be one or the other. In the past, romance has had a reputation for being unrealistic or creating unattainable ideals, but I think that has shifted in the last few years. As a genre, it can be really empowering. I have heard stories of women finding the courage to speak up about what they want in bed, even after years of marriage, and questioning things they might never have thought to question because these books gave them courage. There is also freedom in seeing ourselves reflected on the page, shedding tears, and feeling the characters’ heartache while having the comfort of knowing there will be a happy ending. It’s like being confident you will land in a safety net as you fall.

What advice would you give an emerging writer?

Don’t ever stop learning. Step outside your comfort zone, talk to people and foster genuine connections. Do the things even if they scare you because the rewards can be fantastic. And, of course, old faithful, don’t give up!

Bonus question: Have you ever taken a picture of a weird bird?

I have a fantastic picture I took of a Great Blue Heron being surprised by a River Otter. But also…how frickin scary are Harpy Eagles!? Why do they look human? Why can they see straight into your soul, even from a screen?!

Find L.E. Wagensveld on the web here

Five Questions with Lena Gibson

Finnian Burnett

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December 9, 2024

So many writers think it’s “too late” to become a published author. Can you help dispel that myth?

If you’re alive and want to write a book, it’s not too late. You might have to make changes to your life to carve out time, but if you want it, you’ll do it
I dabbled in writing for many years but didn’t take workshops or writing classes until late in 2017. That fall, I attended an author’s panel with five wonderful writers who talked about their books. Listening to them made me want to do something with my writing. Maybe even publish a book. Since then, I’ve devoted my “spare” time to writing whenever I can. I attend local workshops and always attend the Surrey International Writer’s Conference in October.
My first book was published in 2023, just before my 51st birthday. Since then, I have four more published books (including one this December) and four more in various stages of production with my publisher, Black Rose Writing.
I think being older is an advantage because I have time to write, attend workshops, and sell books that I never would have had when my children were young. Besides having more time, I have more patience and I’m less likely to let stray comments or negative feedback discourage me because I’ve lived through a lot of ups and downs. I appreciate that life experience has made me more resilient and have perseverance.

You have a new book coming out in December. Can you tell me about that book?

I’m excited and proud of the book coming out in December, so thank you for asking. It’s an apocalypse romance, stand-alone sequel to my first published book from 2023, called Aftermath: Into the Unknown. It is set three years after the asteroid impact from the first book. Though second in the series, the characters are new, so if you haven’t read the first, it won’t affect your enjoyment or understanding of the story.
Aftermath opens with twenty-year old Robin scavenging for supplies to share with her grandfather. They live in a hideaway inside an underground parking garage underneath a mall in Boise, Idaho. When a lawless gang of bikers move to town for the winter, her freedom becomes limited. Her grandfather is dying of cancer, and he encourages her to leave and find the rest of their family who headed to a bunker complex in South Dakota three years earlier. She teams up with a disillusioned biker to travel across the country.
The story is their treacherous journey. I wanted to show how similar people could be with their need of love and their will to survive, even if on the surface they seemed like opposites.

Like so many women, you were diagnosed on the spectrum late in life. How has that changed your writing life?

I didn’t find out I was on the spectrum until 2021, when I was 49 and a few months before I signed my first publishing contract. Since learning I was on the spectrum, a giant weight lifted from my shoulders, and I’ve felt less alone. I also felt like it gave me permission to write neurodivergent characters in a way that hadn’t been done much, from my lived experience. In many of my books, ASD isn’t mentioned. My characters just show some of the aspects of autism that I’ve lived with and coped with my entire life.
I didn’t change the characters from books I’d already written, it just became clear that some of their struggle to connect and find love and acceptance was because of their autism. This has always been the case for me. I hadn’t realized how much energy goes to masking and coping in everyday situations and has for my whole life. It has been a profound relief to give myself permission to just be who I am…which I hope comes across for some of my characters as well.
I’ve also discovered that autism and my special interests/hyper focus are my superpower. I am extremely focused, disciplined, and productive with my writing. Despite coming to this late and working full time as an elementary school teacher, I write a new book every 4-6 months.

What advice would you give to authors wanting to blend genres in their works?

The short answer? Do it! I’ll read your stories.
The longer version is to go about it deliberately. Many of my books (maybe all) are blended genre books because with the way my brain works, things are connected. I’ve also been an avid reader forever and like so many types of books. When I wrote The Edge of Life: Love and Survival During the Apocalypse and Aftermath: Into the Unknown, I set out to write romance/love stories in an apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic setting. They were always mixed genre from the beginning.
I made sure the romance was about connecting, intimacy, and feelings between the characters while the setting was the post-apocalyptic world they interacted with. The purpose was to show that beauty, hope, and things worth living for exist, even when civilization and the world as we know it is crashing around us.
In another book, The Wish, I combined a time slip and other speculative elements with women’s fiction. It is a story of a woman reclaiming her voice (literally because she is selectively mute due to trauma). It is also a thriller and has aspects of psychological horror. I sat down and wrote down the important attributes or elements of these genre and braided them together.
This works for me, because I like when stories are complicated and have lots of moving parts. My advice is then to make sure you satisfactorily wrap up each genre within the story.

What are you working on now?

I am at the three-quarter mark of the draft of a new motorcycle-racing romance. It’s the second in my Love on Track series (the first will be published in August 2025 and is called Racing Towards Destiny). I am a MotoGP fanatic and have followed MotoGP since 2010. My husband and I have an online pass to the MotoGP site, and ALL of their races (all 18-20 races per year of lightweight, intermediate, and the premier class) are archived so I can watch and rewatch them whenever I want. This means I often write to the sound of motorcycles racing-sort of like hanging out in a swarm of bees.
MotoGP is considered the top league in the world with the best riders. It includes several sets of brothers. In each set, one is more successful than the other and it got me thinking… so Racing Towards Destiny was the story of the younger brother who has always lived in the shadow. It is also the story of a woman with autism who drops everything in her life to move to Europe and write. To make ends meet, she takes a job as an umbrella girl in MotoGP.
The second book revolves around the older brother, the legend.
I’m also in the planning stage of the third Love and Survival book, being published July 2026. This was the first time I have a contract for a book that is not yet written. If I have not finished Racing Hearts: All In by the new year, I will switch to the post-apocalyptic story to ensure it is ready for my due date to submit it for publication.

Bonus question: Have you ever taken a picture of a weird bird?

I’m sure I have, but when I searched for some of the cool heron pictures I’ve taken, all I could find were nine million pictures of my cat and my daughter’s cat.

Lena Gibson can be found on the web here and pre-orders for Aftermath: Into the Unknown can be ordered here.

Five Questions with Premee Mohamed

Finnian Burnett

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December 2, 2024

I have to start by acknowledging you have four books out this year! (THE BUTCHER OF THE FOREST is one of my favourite books of the year!) How do you manage to find time to write, edit, promote, and you know, just generally be a human being?

Something something glass balls rubber balls… basically, the short answer this year is that I’m begging for a lot of extensions, skipping sleep, and skimping out on being a human being. Probably later on I’ll look back at 2024 and think, “Wow, I was NOT at my best that year,” but that’ll have to be far in the future. Right now the entire year and most of 2023 is a blur of stress and deadlines. (And frequently cursing Past Me for being a dick to Future Me.)
I apologize to readers of this blog who were expecting some sage discourse about time management and prioritization but the truth is, I’m bad at both. I have severe ADHD, I’m disorganized, and my only saving grace as a writer is that I live alone and can therefore allow the house to slowly deteriorate while I pour all my resources into other things.

You are a scientist (GO SCIENCE) and a writer. How does one inform the other?

GO SCIENCE! It’s funny, this is a question I get a lot. I’m still never sure how to answer it, because both are so inherent to who I am that I can never pick apart which way the influence or inspiration goes. I’ve wanted to be a scientist since I was very young, and while I’ve been writing fiction for about the same amount of time, I didn’t start seeking publication until a few years ago. So I’ve spent nearly a quarter of a century doing science or working in science-adjacent fields (industry, policy, consulting) and being very much immersed in that world—it’s still writing that gives me impostor syndrome, not science.
I will say that I’m positive that learning how to research (not just how to find information but how to evaluate the source, who’s doing it, what their agenda is, how it relates to other research, what’s novel about it, why it was worth doing, what will happen to it next, whether it’s sketchy or reputable, etc) does make it easier to write fiction, because it’s very much the same process. In both cases we’re looking for ideas that connect in interesting ways, facts that may not seem related but work together to create something new, questions that can maybe be answered in ways to generate more questions—basically, both good science and good fiction are looking to generate emergent properties from a whole lot of meaningless data, to pull meaning out of chaos and give it a recognizable pattern that the engaged reader can understand and even act on. That’s what we’re attempting in both cases: a shape, boundaries. Abstract, methods, results, discussion, conclusion is not terribly different from a dramatic five-act structure.

You have two books coming out in 2025. Can you tell me about them?

The first, ONE MESSAGE REMAINS, is coming out in February from Psychopomp! I am super excited about this one—it’s a weird format and I like weird. So basically it’s a mini-collection: one new novella, two new novelettes written to go with it, and one reprint novelette (THE GENERAL’S TURN, published in The Deadlands in 2021). They’re in a shared world, or I think they are anyway. All of the stories got away from me to some extent, and with great dexterity considering their lack of limbs.
THE GENERAL’S TURN is one of my favourite things I’ve ever written, and I love that my editor (E. Catherine Tobler) kept a very light touch on it. It’s a story about war, about tradition, about theatricality—about how some people do just want to watch the world burn, and some can’t do it unless they have an audience to validate them. I think the other stories explore the same themes; what do we owe to governments, systems, institutions? (Is family one of those things, or something else? Is it at the same level, or somewhere else?) What do we owe to justice? Who gets to say what justice is? If your enemy isn’t fighting ‘fair,’ do you pick a different enemy or do you redefine what you consider fairness? I guess I enjoyed asking a lot of questions in these stories that don’t have nice clean answers.

The second book, THE FIRST THOUSAND TREES, is the final book in the trilogy that began with 2021’s THE ANNUAL MIGRATION OF CLOUDS, from ECW Press. I’m excited for this one too—the first two books (CLOUDS and then WE SPEAK THROUGH THE MOUNTAIN, which came out June 2024) are from Reid’s perspective. She’s got a particular world-view, one shaped by having a chronic illness, having a mother with the same disease, the opportunities and limitations of her life, the anger she carries about the climate disasters that predated her birth by decades. But the third book is narrated by her best friend, Henryk—the one she leaves behind when she chooses to explore the world outside their little community. And he, as you might expect, has a very, very different experience from her as he travels up north to see if his remaining family will take him in. And it’s funny, it’s not that (as far as I can tell) any readers were clamouring for a Henryk book. But it’s what I wanted to write to wrap up the trilogy, and I’m so pleased that my editor (Jen Albert at ECW Press) was like, “Go for it! Follow your instincts!”

I will also have several short stories out, including one in the Stephen King THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT anthology! I’m stoked for people to pick that one up. I haven’t gotten my copy yet but I imagine it’s going to be one of those really nice fat volumes (34 stories!). And they’re all based in the world of his novel THE STAND, though we were allowed to pick whether we wanted to write our stories set during or after the book. Mine, entitled HUNTED TO EXTINCTION, is set quite a bit after, when people are starting to get… how shall we say it… a little too comfortable in non-supernatural explanations for things.

You write across genres and forms. Short stories, novellas, books… what appeals to you the most and why?

Honestly, I’m a novel guy—not just because it’s easier to tell people “Yes, I’m a novelist” rather than “Technically, if you go by numbers, I’m a novella-ist.” And short fiction constantly horrifies me. It is the hardest thing in the world to write a good short story, and I can say that very confidently despite having won awards for my short fiction. It’s so hard! How do people do it on a regular basis?! How do you just like, craft a perfect little gem in 2800 words, when I desperately want to explain every single thing in it at the novel length?
I also confess to liking the novella length (as you can probably tell from my publication history). It isn’t just that it’s quicker to write a novella because it’s shorter (although, let’s be real). It’s also that there’s a kind of purity to a novella that makes it both not merely a shrunken-down novel (with all its themes, subplots, and characters given short shrift after cruel miniaturization) or a fluffed-out short story (with tangents, irrelevant scenes, and extra characters for unneeded padding). A novella tells a single story, keeps its focus on forward movement, its shape is one smooth arc, and the only purpose of the length is to explore the premise of the story in enough depth to show the shape of the arc. It’s also a great length to experiment, in my opinion. Too short and the reader can’t perceive patterns that take some time to build; too long and any literary gimmick wears thin. I mean, I don’t mind annoying readers, but there’s a difference between annoying a reader and insulting their intelligence.

You have a fuzzy writing assistant? You know I want to see a picture! Does he show up in any of your fiction?

Writing OBSTACLE! Useless, useless man. Attacks my mouse, kneads my wrist rest, blocks my keyboard, sits directly on top of my notebooks, steals the lids off my pens, says “YO DE LAY HEE-HOOOOOOOOOO” at top volume when I’m on calls with editors. He does NOT show up in any of my fiction because he is a LITERARY NEMESIS.(Ed. Note. The Writing Assistant™ is dreamy, adorable, and absolutely above reproach. See photographic evidence below.)

Bonus question: Have you ever taken a picture of a weird bird?

All birds are weird. It’s like they’re trying to remind us that they’re dinosaurs. Anyway I feel like these little urban parrots in Barcelona should count! I was just sitting there trying to eat my bread and olives and then was like, “What’s all that noise? Wait, are those PARROTS?!!?” Please note the non-weird bird in the distance (a pigeon).

Links to books and more information about this incredible author can be found on the web here.