Darrin Bright

Darrin Bright works as an accountant by day, and scripts missions for starship bridge simulators by night. The smell of petrichor and rotting tomatoes reminds him of home (Woodland, California). His current physical manifestation is a carbon-based biped that resides in Cleveland, Ohio, which is not currently on fire. He wears a lot of purple, which is fortunate for him because it's his favorite color.

Get to know Darrin...

Birthdate?

September 18th, the day right before International Talk Like a Pirate Day. I share a birthdate with Jason Sudeikis, Jada Pinkett-Smith, and the late Fred Willard and June Foray.

When did you start writing?

4th Grade, in Mrs. Edwards' class. One of our classroom exercises was this thing called a "scribble", a random squiggly or curvy line or two on a mimeographed white sheet of paper. You were supposed to draw something using the scribble, and you could write something about it if you wanted. So I'd create a monster, unicorn, or spaceship, and write something about it.

When and what and where did you first get published?

My first professional publication in print was a scenario called "Fast Forward" that I wrote for In Your Face Again, an anthology supplement for the Feng Shui RPG, published in 2001 by Atlas Games. I had previously published some gaming articles online, but In Your Face Again was the first book that I could pick up on a bookshelf and see my name on the cover.

Why do you write?

After high school, I went to California State Polytechnic University: San Luis Obispo to pursue a degree in Architecture (Weird Al Yankovic's Alma Mater, in fact). Five years later, I stumbled out of there with a Bachelor's degree in English Literature. So I guess you could say, "Because I was really bad at architecture."

Why do you write Science Fiction and/or Fantasy?

Oh, the usual reasons: my brain is a swirling vortex of 80's cartoons, comic books, Dungeons & Dragons statblocks, and pop-culture movie references. But if there's any purpose to writing, I like to think of it as the ancient Hindu parable of the blind men describing the elephant. The universe is this unimaginably immense elephant, and it's our job to describe our little corner of the elephant as best we can. In my particular case, my portion of the elephant is much more interesting if it's got electro-plasma cannons and enchanted elvish longswords on it.

Who is your favorite author? Your favorite story?

I started with Robert Heinlein and Larry Niven. More recently, I've been reading a good chunk of Seanan McGuire and Ursula LeGuin. If I had to pick a favorite, then I'd say Douglas Adams. There was no subject he wasn't afraid to break apart into little pieces just to poke around and see how it works: religion, science, politics, philosophy, psychology, war, music, or moist towelettes. Nothing is sacred, nothing is safe, and it's all really, really funny if you look at it from just the right (or very wrong) angle. My favorite story is _Snow Crash_ by Neal Stephenson. I read that book over two decades ago, and I'm still thinking about how that book broke my brain open.

What are you trying to say with your fiction?

With my fiction, I like to subvert genre tropes and pick apart how stories are put together. Part of that is my English degree trying to deconstruct how and why the stories work the way they do, particularly when the characters in the story are self-aware of the tropes and are either trying to avoid or subvert them as part of the story. If the main character runs into Death and Death says OH, I'M SUPPOSED TO MEET YOU IN SAMARRA TOMORROW, can that character, knowing how that story ends, use the tropes to find a different ending? But another good chunk of it is so I can make cheeky jokes about the tropes at the genre's expense.

With this non-fiction piece about "SCE to Aux", I really love reading about disasters and accidents, particularly anything that involves airplanes, power plants, or spacecraft. Oddly enough, it helps calm my brain down when I'm feeling anxious. I was doing a deep dive on some of the things that went wrong in the Apollo program, and when I got to Apollo 12, I was just flabbergasted that no one had written very much about this mind-blowing incident, and all of the sources I could find on it were contradictory or appeared to have fictionalized parts of it. After doing a bunch of research, I finally asked myself, "Well, why don't you write something on this, and try to straighten out the fact from the fiction?"

If you could write your own epitaph, what would it say?

Either "My wife warned me this would happen", or "So I guess the cleric forgot to prepare raise dead this morning?"

Do you blog?

No, which makes it frustrating when I write a long "blog post" about something I really care about, and then I don't have a regular place to post it, so I throw it on Facebook or an online forum somewhere.