Name: D. Thomas Minton
Age: 42
Author of: “Hoodoo“
Current Geographic Location: I currently reside in Kaneohe, Hawaii.
Original Hometown: I am a child of the military, so everywhere-and-nowhere is my original hometown.
Recent publications: “The Fine Art of Surfacing” appeared in OG’s Speculative Fiction last year. “Memories of Childhood” is forthcoming as a podcast from Nil Desperandum. I’ve had a handful of other fiction publications over the last two years.
Do you think alien life exists in the Universe? I’ve always liked the odds that other life is out there somewhere. I just wonder if we will recognize it when we find it. Scarier still, will it recognize us?
If you could travel off Earth, would you? What if it meant you could never come back? Before my daughter was born, I would have punched my ticket to the stars without a second thought, one-way trip or not. Now if my family couldn’t go on the one-way trip, then neither would I.
What inspired your story? The idea for this story came out of a brainstorming session with my writing group. I was exploring ideas where an artifact was something mundane and/or tragic. I don’t want to say more, because it might give away the story. The setting and title came from a wonderful trip I took about 10-15 years to Goblin Valley in the southwestern USA. I’ve always wanted to use it as a setting in a story, and here it is.
What music or movies helped you to write this piece? I always write to music. My musical tastes are varied, so it’s hard to remember specifically what I was listening to when writing Hoodoo. If I had to guess, I was probably listening to Porcupine Tree. Their music is beautifully cold, much like the world in Hoodoo.
How many rewrites did you do before submitting? I wrote the first draft in less than a week and then did one substantial revision a couple of weeks later.
What is your favorite bit? I particularly like the opening lines because they show a lot about the story’s main character, Sam Gondo:
Sam Gondo had never thought Luke Estes was a bright man, and this confirmed it. Only an idiot would gawk at a Bindi weapon.
