Author Interview with Gevera Bert Piedmont

Q: If you could have a fantasy pet, what would you have and why?
A: I would have a time-traveling lizard and its companion translator parrot. With this
living TARDIS I could travel anywhere and anywhen and make myself understood.
Or be burned as a witch. Actually, the latter is more likely. Probably I would just
stay home with the lizard and the bird and sit in the sun and talk with frogs.

Q: What type of music best describes your writing?
A: I choose different music for each piece. I wrote one piece to Nine Inch Nails, another
to Heilung. If a song invokes the same emotion as I want the story to feel, that’s what I
will listen to, ad nauseam, while I write and revise. Right now I’m overdosing my ears
on The Hu’s “Wolf Totem” so something might come of that.

Q: Tell us about your writing office/space and why it’s special to you.
A: I write sitting on a couch with my feet up and my computer on a tilted lap desk. I
can see my pond and my frogs and fish. If I’m just editing or researching, I might have
music on or some weird TV in the background. True crime, aliens building pyramids (not
true, it was dinosaurs), archeology, random people reading Lenormand cards on YouTube.

Q: What is your favorite piece of visual art that has inspired a story or two?
A: I don’t think there is a piece of real visual art that I have written about, although I
have written about artists creating visual art. I want to write a story with a
character based on Nitzer Ebb’s song “Getting Closer,” for instance.

Q: If you didn’t write full-time what would your day job be? Is writing a hobby for you?
A: Writing stories and editing anthologies is pretty much what I do, along with physical
therapy because my body is an old and ruined forbidden temple I need to keep standing as
long as possible so I can keep writing and editing. (I also take care of my fish pond.)

Q: What is your writing schedule and how many words do you write in a sitting?
A: In the winter, I work out from breakfast until lunch and write, edit, and/or research
until dinner and sometimes beyond if I’m on a roll. In the summer, I work until
lunch and then I exercise in my pool, and when my ruined temple can’t take any
more movement, I retreat back to my writing couch.
Since I don’t exclusively write it’s hard to say how many words. The most ever in a
day (during NaNoWriMo) was around 18,000 but that hurt my brain. 2-5,000 is
more like it with bursts of up to 10k.

Q: How do you celebrate publishing a new story?
A: I tell people who care about me. I post it on my socials. I feel validated and happy. I do all the things I want my writers to do when I publish them. When I got my book contract, I screamed, and my husband thought someone died! I wanted to eat junk food and I didn’t have any, so I dug out this teeny tiny jar of Nutella my husband had brought back from England about 10 years ago that expired in 2018 and ate that—and it gave me massive hives. I recently got three of my books into a local Barnes and Noble and that same one is going to hold a book launch for the Connecticut horror anthology and carry that book indefinitely! I had a big bowl of edamame to celebrate. You can tell how exciting of a person I am. 10-year-old Nutella and steamed soybeans, woo-hoo

Q: How do you balance your outside life with your writing life?
What is an outside life? LOL The other “work” that I do is selling at in-person events. I have some leftover
steampunk and gothic jewelry I made, I hawk my books and I also create oracle decks that I sell. I’m often with authors at those events so they are still writing- focused. I’m in a few writing associations and have many writing friends and have made many more through editing anthologies and we all love to talk about (bitch about) writing and (not) getting published. My non-writing friends are always happy when I sell something, and I try not to bore them with too much info-dumping on my writing life. My husband is an avid gamer (tabletop, roleplaying, computer) and I often join him—there is a decided overlap in my various communities of steampunk, pagans, spec fiction writers, and
gamers.

Q: Write your eulogy in three sentences.
A: Bert Piedmont has reached the clearing at the end of her path. If you have not heard
of her, you missed out. If you have, you know who and what you mourn. In lieu of
flowers, feed a frog.

Q: What project are you most proud of completing?
B: My Necronom-RomCom duology of anthologies. I was supposed to have help and I
did it by myself. It ended up being two volumes of really great and fun stories. It’s
almost ready to hit the shelves and I can’t wait to see what readers think. And it’s
awesome to think that most of those stories exist because of me, because I put out a
prompt.

Q: Do you have any projects you would like to tell your readers about?
A: I have a few anthologies about to hit Amazon: The two volumes of Necromoni-
RomCom, Light and Dark, over 40 Cthulhu-Mythos-inspired rom-com tales, plus
Horror over the Handlebars, over twenty coming-of-age horror stories set in 80s and
90s Connecticut, mostly by authors associated with the state. Those should be out in
June 2024. If you want to write for me, there is a submission call out for Deep Ones stories at
https://obsidianbutterfly.com/aodo.html My very weird horror novel about sentient fungus from outer space running an MLM that targets fat people, Fat Monster, published by Nightmare Press, will be
out later this year. I’m finishing up the third Mickey Crow novel, Metal, and working on a couple of
non-fiction books about writing from a pagan point of view. I have a few novels on the back burner that I’m co-writing with other authors so it’s a question of everyone finding time together. I have an idea for the next Connecticut-themed anthology too!

Q: Who is your favorite character from any of your stories and why? If you had to choose a
popular author to continue writing this character in another book who would you choose
and why?
A: I love Mickey Crow. Right now, Metal is going to be her swan song unless I pick up
more readers and that makes me sad. She’s so very real to me, this woman who is a
ball of anxiety, who has these physical deformities, this prosthetic arm, she doesn’t
know where she came from or who she is, and her best friend is this gorgeous,
famous rich woman who wants to be someone else. And they hunt monsters together.

I would see if William Meikle would let Mickey into the S-Squad. She’s not much of
a fighter but maybe his military boys would appreciate her tech.

Q: Where can your readers find you on social media?
A: https://www.Facebook.com/geverabertpiedmont is my author page
https://Facebook.com/transformationsbyob is my publisher page
http://www.instagram.com/theonlymissbert/
https://linktr.ee/bybertabird
https://www.ObsidianButterfly.com
Https://www.GeveraBertPiedmont.com

Bio: Gevera Bert Piedmont is a neurodivergent cyborg swamp witch living on the edge of a frog pond in Connecticut with her spouse, cats, and an impressive collection of rubber lizards. She is the author of The Maw and Other Time-Traveling Lizard Tales, the Mickey Crow paranormal series (Shiver, Formless, and forthcoming Metal), co-author of Airesford (the other author is an actual zombie), editor of the Necronomi-RomCom Cthulhu Mythos duology and co-editor of Horror Over the Handlebars, an anthology of Connecticut horror. Her next anthology, with co-editor Elizabeth Davis of Dead Fish books, will be The Atlas of Deep Ones.

Her short stories have been published in Love Beyond Death, The Fellowship of the Old Ones, Heart of Farkness, Through a Scanner Farkly, Doomscrolling, Wicked Sick, Something Woked This Way Comes, and others.

Her novel Fat Monster will be published by Nightmare Press in late 2024.

Bert has an MFA in creative writing and belongs to HWA, Connecticut Authors and Publishers Association, and New England Horror Writers. Her (very) small press publishing company is Transformations by Obsidian Butterfly, LLC, and at this time is only publishing anthologies. Connect at Facebook.com/geverabertpiedmont, geverabertpiedmont.com, obsidianbutterfly.com, or her Amazon and Goodreads author pages.