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Genefa Stori was born at around 2.00 pm on a frigid winter afternoon some years ago (the author does not like to divulge her age) outside a dairy in the derelect part of a small town called Mangaweka. There was snow all over the mountains. Trees were brown and barren, having lost their leaves during the mild autumn storms. The old town was tatty, deserted and lifeless. It seemed the only thing missing was a tumble weed, stumbling and bumbling its way down the dusty roads. But for the fact that there is no such thing as a tumble weed in this country and no dust in winter, there might have been.
The part of the town in which Genefa was born has long been forgotten by time itself; they just forgot to tear it down. The streets are still dirt and all the old places of a time long ago are still there. Old town Mangaweka is a survivng relic.
For a kick off, many years ago the Coal Merchant ran off without warning and yet left the place as it was on the last day that he worked there. The bank suffered the same fate. The old saloon is still standing and bears silent testament to the roaring twenties when the music consisted of jazz, jazz and jazz. The Great war had not long concluded and life had settled down to somewhat of a permanent party of peace and hope, the world would never make THAT mistake again THAT'S for sure!
Al Jolson screamed out Who Played Poker with Pochontas and Sid Gary took his turn screaming out his Vagabond song. Marion Harris was not far behind with A Good Man is Hard to Find, followed closely by Bert Williams singing You'll Never Need A Doctor No More. It was at this point that I think that one of the men living in the old town took Bert Williams' advice too literally, for it was around that time that the sole physician beat a hasty track from old town Mangaweka, never to return again.
Ah yes, those were the days, Bill Murray and Aileen Stanley and Miss Fanny Brice. Jay Gatsby might even have felt himself right at home in this little slice of 1920s paradise. The flappers in the saloon with their dresses twirling gently against their calves as they danced to Eddie Cantor's, Oh is She Dumb! It was a time after the war and before the crash of 1929, anything was possible, anything could be done, and often times was. The young of the day no longer trusted their elders, they had, after all, been responsible for the Great War, and thus they flew in the face of all the values and traditions of their elders and created new ones of their own.
Old town Mangaweka still bears testament to that dream, to that innocence...also to the innocence that came to an abrupt end, similar to the way that many places came to an end with the crash of 1929. Ten years later the world was to enter another great war. 1939 heralded in World War 2 and after that, the Roaring 20s became a memory (a blurry one for some I am sure) and subsequently, Old town Mangaweka faded into oblivion.
So, Genefa was born in old town Mangaweka, which today is just a ghost town, and as I said before, they forgot to tear it down. But that she was born there is a rare thing indeed.
For want of a name, folks looked to the old Genral Store, which had not been frequented since they used money by names of which I cannot even pronounce let alone spell.
I am sure the general store saw its share of little girls in their box plaited dresses and little boys in their sailor suits extending their dirty hands across the counter politely asking for this, that and the other sweets of the day. But at some point that charming little store was abandoned to time as well.
As I said earlier, for want of a name, they looked to the dust covered door of the forgotten little store, the letters painted in the same dark green paint on the glass window in capitals, the colour not dissimilar to Fried Green Tomatoes.
Time had eaten away at the letters beneath the dust and cobwebs. Time had stolen the round piece off the R turning it into an F, and someone had made off with the L on the end of GENERAL, and it was never to be seen again. Time had also worked its magic on the E on the end of STORE and thus all that was left to time of the name of the store was GENEFA STORI, and thus the girl was named.
...where it all started...
Genefa has always been a writer, though she never once aspired to being a writer. She never stood there and thought to herself, "When I grow up I want to be a writer!" No, she aspired to perhaps growing up to be a racing car driver or rodeo rider.
She kept her first diary at the age of ten, but had been a prolific reader since she learned how to read. Her favourite early childhood stories were When Baby Bunny Grows Up, Rapunzel, Doogle and the Magic Roundabout, Where the Wild Things Are, and Little Black Sambo. As she got older she graduated to Little House on the Prairie, Thursday's Child, Swiss Family Robinson, Charlotte's Web and Famous Five. By the age of twelve she was reading Go Ask Alice, Holocaust, and mostly non fiction literary offerings.
Genefa wrote her first novel at the age of fourteen. She had elected to take Economic Studies in the fourth form at College and discovered very quickly that the subject was terribly boring and the work mundane, thus she opened her Economic Studies book and began to write.
It had not been intended by her to write a novel at the age of fourteen, at the time she did not realise that it was even what she was doing, she just kept writing. For one hour every day for five days a week she drifted off to the world contained inside that Economic Studies book and made the world bigger. She invented people, places and events while the teacher droned away in the background, having been merely reduced to an annoyance who every now and then screamed, "GIRL! WHAT ARE YOU DOING?"
Genefa was adept at ignoring the terrible intrusions of the ghastly man who wanted nothing more than for her to fall madly, deeply and eternally in love with the laws of supply and demand! The only cognitive recognition that Genefa was prepared to give to the laws of supply and demand were that if she did not supply homework that the ghastly ES teacher would demand she attended detention. But it soon became apparent to the ES teacher that Genefa held absolutely no regard for the rules of supply and demand, when she refused the third time to supply his demand, he quit and decided to pretend that Genefa did not exist. That was fine by Genefa too.
So Genefa sat in the front row of the class, much to the chagrin of the ES teacher, and she wrote her story. However, it soon became apparent to the ES teacher that it could have been much worse. The boys who also loathed everything to do with ES soon began to disrupt the class, and thus Genefa's silence and dedication to her literary indulgences garnered much favour in the eyes of the ES teacher.
At the end of the year, the ES teacher nicely asked if he could read the novel, seeing as how Genefa had seen fit to spend all year in his classroom writing it? Unfortunately Genefa did not quite have a firm grasp upon the concept of imports and exports (or of the power that a teacher possesses) and she replied (right before reports were due to be sent home) that he could read it over her dead body!
He immediately imported new comments to her report card and exported it to her home. The report card for her year in Economic Studies read, "Genefa held absolutely no interest in this subject and acted accordingly."
So what DID Genefa learn from a year in Economic Studies, (other than the fact that some teachers can be right prigs?) 'If you do not supply what the teacher demands, he'll import your fate and you'll be exported!'
...on her writing...
Genefa never had a writing style or genre of her own, she still doesn't. When people ask Genefa, "What do you write?" she responds, "Things."
What are these things? Well she doesn't know until she has written them, and even then defining them is a hazy business indeed. Some are based in life experience, some are based in wanted life experience, some are based in dreams, some are based in reality. Some are fiction, some are non fiction.
The authors who have impacted upon her are Edgar Allen Poe, Emily Bronte..and yeah...that's about it. Genefa and I have that in common.
Genefa had always written non fiction up until a little over a year ago. She just decided one day to see if she could write something from her imagination that had absolutely nothing to do with her life experience. She had attempted to do this before and yet, other than when she was fourteen, had fallen flat on her face by page five.
At one stage Genefa despaired that perhaps she did not even possess an imagination broad enough to invent anything? But then one day she just started writing about a place called Sandanizta Mist and nine novels later, which equates to 1435.634 (one million, four hundred and thirty five thousand, six hundred and thirty four) words later she is still going. No one is more shocked than she. That she has written that many novels on the one subject at all and that many words in just over a year astounds even her!
...why she does not seek to be officially published...
She writes by one golden rule and that rule is, that there are no rules. The reason she decided this was as a direct result of trying to get published, the biggest complaint being that her stories are too long. Genefa finally decided to publish them herself on the web and thus I facilitate this.
The good thing about it is that no money changes hands, none of the work gets twisted into unrecognisable form by horrid editors and in line with publisher demands. If people don't like the stories, they do not have to read them. Yet if they do read them and find them not quite to their liking, then the only thing they have invested and lost is their time. If they read them and love them, then for once in their life they truly got something for nothing, so there IS such a thing as a free lunch. I agree that this was a very good path for Genefa to take, this way everyone walks away happy.
Remember, Genefa never aspired to being a writer, it is just a happy unplanned outcome of a life lived less ordinary. Money does not matter to her in the respect of being paid for her writing. It was never a dream to write, so where is the loss in gaining no monetary recompense? Notoriety means little to her also. Oftentimes notoriety comes hand in hand with pedestals and Genefa has often said that the air is way too thin up there.
It has been suggested that perhaps she was a born writer, yet she never knew it? I guess we will never know. That Genefa loves to write is a fact, that she never planned to and yet does, is a blessing. And in this big old world, that's a pretty fine thing.
...on the Sandanizta series...
"When I began to write the first, Sandanizta Mist, I had a simple image in my head. A man standing in a long black coat beside a freshly dug grave. I had no idea where it was going to go, nor did I have any set structure or even basic idea for a story. I just made it up from one scene to the next, from one line to the next. I knew that I wanted my characters (some of them anyway) to come from a different world, what I did not know was what that new world would be, or why, or what its function would be. I knew that I wanted them to be good people, but at the same time I did not want them to be angels or to be from Heaven or Hell for that matter, yet I wanted the two opposing forces to be present within the story. As the story progressed I kind of winged it.
I did end up incorporating into the story many of the things that have fascinated me in life. But those things too were opportunistic in nature and not a word of it was planned or mapped out. I cannot brainstorm to write a story, it just comes to me and I follow it along. There were few streets that the story headed down that became dead ends. Nor were there dusty roads in the story where I felt it might be better to backtrack to a certain point. Wherever it went, I followed willingly.
The characters, Heathcliff and Troy were born out of a few things, firstly the idea of meeting a real life Heathcliff was swimming around in my mind at the time, though I started the story with his younger brother Troy. I wanted Heathcliff to be grouchy, moody, emotional and a little unapproachable to begin with, and I made him that way but with absolutely no idea in mind as to why he would be this way. Eventually the character of Annie was born to fill the reasons of why Heathcliff was the way he was. But the end that Annie came to, I had no way of explaining it, and it was well into the fifth book, I think, that I finally figured out why Annie had come to the end that she had. Although Heathcliff was moody, emotional and a little unapproachable, he was also very deep, very kind and very sentimental once you got through the wall with him.
Troy was born out of the idea that it would be great to find a man who was both sensible, funny, emotional but somehow very evenly keeled. Troy kept Heathcliff balanced in both character and in the story.
Other characters I created such as Ruby and Chas were based a little upon people that I have known in my life, and through their lives, reflect some of the reasons why I think people do the things that they do.
Marli and Kodi, the twins in the story, are essentially two people who did exist, whom I knew. Marli was pitifully and unmercifully nasty. Kodi was pitifully and unmercifully trusting. These two, with their qualities, play against each other nicely in the first story and throughout all of the nine in a way.
The second book, Across the Sandanizta Mist was a lot of fun to write. I got to go back in time before the first story was written to explain a little of where Troy and Heathcliff came from. I got to play mind games with the reader and to also make little coincidences in the other story make sense. It explains a little more about the world in which Heathcliff and Troy live, but it does not really answer where their world is, why or how it came to be. It does not even explain what Troy and Heathcliff really are. The reason for that is because I hadn't yet figured that part out. In actual fact, I only worked that part out in Pt 6, Flight of the Sandanizta Nephilim about a month ago. But having written that novel, I realised that I needed to explain how the world had come to be, so I wrote and still are, writing Pt 7 Forefathers of the Sandanizta Mist. Pt 8 has been partially written and Pt 9 is almost finished and most of it has been uploaded.
Also, in the second book I was able to bring people from history back to life again. People such as Emily Bronte and Edgar Allen Poe, and I incorporated their lives into the story with my main characters in novels 1 & 2. I also got to take a closer look at some of the evil entities of the 20th century (Amon Goeth & Josef Mengele) and muddle around with some of what happened in real world history.
In novel 3, Through the Sandanizta Mist, many of the same characters are present, but I also used it as an opportunity to fade some into the background and to introduce new characters. This is where I developed my character Tage. I have such a passion for this character and I can see his silhouette in my mind as I write him, and yet I cannot work out who he is based on, yet I know him to be someone from my childhood. One day the mystery will solve itself, I guess. In book 3 I also let some of the baddies from Sandanizta Mist, novel 1, out to play again. Toward the end of Through the Sandanizta Mist, I dealt with the baddies decisively, and rid the world of their presence once and for all...or did I?
In novel 4, Inside the Sandanizta Mist, I moved into giving childhood in the new world a go, it was fun, but sometimes I found I hit walls, so I had to persevere a little. But I really wanted to bring an element of excitement back, not that 4 isn't exciting, but I wanted to resurrect some baddies again. I also went more into showing the different ways that my characters communicate with each other. Their belief systems, their rituals and the way they raise and teach their children. I did that because their children will do as they are doing when they become adults, and yet it also shows how time changes, even there.
But why it is that they are doing what they do in that world is still not really gone into in too much depth. I still kept secrets, partly because I still had not worked out how their world had gotten there, or what the the original intent of the place was. More importantly, I had not yet worked out why some people were brought to their world when they died and yet others were not. I did not want to replace Heaven with this world, so I followed it along and hoped that an idea would come to me eventually. And as it happens, it did.
Pt 5, Four Corners of the Sandanizta Mist, I really got going on the world that they live in and some of the things that had occured in the history of the place. Birthing the character of Monet was really quite by accident, and yet very necessary. I actually went back through the first four novels and threaded hints of him in there, so that I could make a lot of things that made no sense, or had not reached any conclusion, come together a little bit more. I had so much fun in this one too because I got to invent even more baddies, some really horrible characters, and it was kind of fun, in a Stephen King-ish type of way.
Anyway, one part of the story is not complete without the other and I would suggest that if anyone wants to read them then start at Pt 1 and work your way through to Pt 7, or else some of the things will make little sense. I have no idea where the Sandanizta series will finish, but I do think that it will be a little while yet."
