MASHED Interview with Cobalt Jade.

MASHED is an anthology of 17 sensually sinister stories curated from over 200 submissions from around the world.

Each story is a unique blend of horror, humor, food and sex, resulting in tales that will leave you both scared and slightly turned on, while laughing out loud and contemplating whether or not you should have your next meal.

Stories including:

“A Woman’s Corn” – By J. Donnait
“Charlie’s Chunky Munching Meat” – By Stephen McQuiggan
“Halloween Nosh” – By Brandon Ketchum
“Biscuit: A Love Story” – By Grivante
“Burnt Scrambled Eggs” – By Devon Widmer
“The Disagreeable Dinner” – By Mark Daponte
“Sugar” – By Darla Dimmelle
“The Henry Problem” – By John Grey
“Nibble, Nibble, My Wolf” By – J.L. Boekestein
“The Wrath of the Buttery Bastard-Taters” – By Alex Colvin
“Sauce” – By Steven Carr
“The Care and Feeding of your Personal Demon” – By Maxine Kollar
“P.A.C.D. : The Kitchen of Tomorrow, Today!” – By R.A. Goli
“Arabica” – By Cobalt Jade
“Toilet Manners” – By Eddie Generous
“The Stray” – By Calypso Kane
“The Tall Man in the Hat” – By Nicholas Paschall

Do you like food? Sex? Horror? Humor? Then this book is for you! Guaranteed to leave you scared, aroused and possibly a little hungry.

From the twelfth to the twenty-fourth of June, get inside the minds of twelve of the authors from the anthology. Find out what inspired the stories, what other projects the authors are involved with, and generally get to know the authors better.

Today, get to know more about Cobalt Jade and Arabica.

In the age-old first date manner, tell me a bit about yourself. 

I am a writer, landlady, and former graphic artist living in Seattle, but I spent my formative years on the east coast, in a decaying industrial city. The combination of early urban blight and later beauty and social progression has influenced me strongly. Generation-wise, ethically speaking that is, I’m more of a Gen X than a Baby Boomer. I’m very changeable in my interests. For a span of months I will be very into a certain topic, like Killer Whales, and research the hell out of it, then get into something else. Right now I’m obsessed with writing horror and have a nascent interest in pulp magazine covers. 

Who has influenced you most as a writer?

I had an uncle who was involved in First Fandom through the 1950s to the 70s, and he generously gave me some books, which I treasure to this day. Among them was Jack Vance, Philip Jose Farmer, and Ray Bradbury, my first love. I fell in love with his use of language. On my own I discovered writers like Ursula K. LeGuin, Tanith Lee, and Anne McCaffrey. All were big influences. 

What are your favourite books and why?

I’ve got a lot of faves, and they change from time to time. In a re-reading sense, I do The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Left Hand of Darkness, and Anne Rice’s The Witching Hour every few years. I think the former is the penultimate ghost story.

When did you realise you wanted to be a writer?

Around age 10 when I started my first science fiction opus, inspired by no less a luminary than Ziggy Stardust!

Do you have any interesting writing quirks?

I am a big fan of word generators. There’s a product I use by Gammadyne called Random Word Generator that I program to create the various languages I use in my work. I also use it to generate phrases for story prompts, like “The Walking Coffin.” Which is a magic item that carries the body of a deceased person back to their homeland for a proper burial, while keeping the body pristine and odor-free.

How did you become interested in writing this particular genre?

Erotic horror? I wrote a lot on the newsgroups in the late 1990s, like alt.sex.stories.moderated. I started for a lark. It was a guaranteed readership and I did fetish stuff that no one else was doing well.

What was the inspiration behind your MASHED story?

I like the combination of the erotic and the machine, also the sense of bondage in being, or acting like, an inanimate object. It was based on an idea from my fetish-writing days. I was also having a problem in drinking coffee, it was irritating my bladder, so I thought what if someone underwent a kind of hypnosis to cure their caffeine addiction, but their mind came up with something their body didn’t like (or maybe did, but too much?)

With over two hundred submissions, what was your reaction upon finding out your story had made the cut?

I expected it, who else could write a story about a human espresso machine?

Each story is a mix of horror, humour, food, and sex; what kind of reaction should a reader expect to have upon finishing your story – will they be more turned on or terrified?

Probably turned on in a reluctant way.

Do you have another writing project in mind or in the making? If so, can you tell us a little about it?

I have ideas for a lot of stuff, some straight horror, some erotic horror. Currently I am working on a story involving Seattle’s grunge years and a crime in present-day Florida. It will be psychological horror and (non-explicitly) erotic.

Excluding your own, which of the MASHED stories is your favourite?

The Wrath of the Butty Bastard Taters, I could relate to it.

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