Interview: “The Ocean is My Wife” by DeAnna Knippling

When Harwood is pulled beneath the waves by the cursed ship Merry Mermaid, he must face not only the monstrous Milady who rules the abyss, but the truth of what it means to love the sea.

Interview Questions

Did a real place or moment inspire part of your story?

The real person who inspired this story was my daughter Rachael, who, when I said I needed to write a haunted ocean story, said the name of the story should be “The Ocean Is My Wife” and then promptly refused to give me any plot ideas. I want to say that right after that my brain started playing Tom Wait’s song “All the World Is Green,” which has a line that I misremembered as “the ocean is my wife.” And then I remembered another Tom Waits song, “The Ocean Doesn”t Want Me Today.” Those two influences melded together (as music). After I started writing, I started thinking about the Dan Simmons novel The Terror, the graphic novel series The Unwritten by Mike Carey and Peter Gross, and Milady in The Three Musketeers, of all things. But the story started with Tom Waits songs.

I dunno. I usually start with some kind of real-life inspiration, but apparently I had a lot of ideas about oceans and pirates that were all lined up and ready to go.

Does water mean something special to you personally, or was it just the right element for this tale?

When I lived in Florida, I would take days off to go to the beach: on good days I’d go walking chest-deep in the waves and sing; on bad days I’d find somewhere sort of sheltered to stand next to the waves and sing.

The language of this story feels like an old sea ballad. How did you find Harwood’s voice?

I used to ghostwrite novels for clients. One of the novels had a big section set on the ocean, and I ended up putting a sea shanty vocal collection on during the novel as writing music. And sea shan’ties became sea shall-ies. The beginning of the story starts with a sea shanty that I wrote. In my head it’s always sung by a bunch of gruff-voiced pirates banging their boots on the floor and cups on tables. Once I had the song in place, the language fell in place.

The Merry Mermaid is both ship and monster. How did you approach creating something so vividly alive?

I’ve been writing a lot of haunted house stories lately. So I made the ship the same way that I’ve been making haunted houses: something grotesque that people are not supposed to know but are nevertheless dimly aware of, a setting that is treated as normal by some people and grotesque as others (the same way a real-life secret is treated), and took the practical elements of the setting and pushed them to an extreme.

This story plays with immortality as both curse and temptation. How do you think about that tension?

A lot of the things that seem to promise us some kind of immortality are at the cost of sacrificing our freedom and humanity—and people are always sacrificing their freedom and humanity and never getting the immortality. (It seems like pursuit of the techbro singularity and White Christian Nationalism are both firmly in that category.) From the outside, it’s easy to see that the people who get sucked into these things are becoming horribly warped. But from the inside, I suspect it all feels like just another day, and perfectly reasonable to harm those who oppose you…because who doesn’t want immortality? Tsch.

What inspired the idea of Milady, the ruler of the deep?

Okay, this is a little spoilery, so use your judgment here…

When I started, I was inspired by Milady from The Three Musketeers. Again, no idea why. But by the end, I was seeing her more as an Elder God from the Cthulhu Mythos stories, trying to swallow up the Earth and its pretty blue oceans. I don’t know that human choices would matter on such a scale, but the fact that a human being could choose the unknowable oceans, which never did him any good, over Milady and her bountiful immortality pleased me immensely.

What are you working on now—and what’s fun or exciting about it?

I just finished writing a longish short story about an android governess in space that I really like (“Authorization Pending”) that’s about love and free will versus corporate programming; next up, I’ll be going back to a gothic religious horror novel about a castle that lies outside of the sight of God right after I send this novel: it’s exciting because I get to work out all kinds of geeky things, like What DID the fruit of the tree of knowledge taste like?!? and If jealousy were a literal weapon, what would it look like? That’s my recovering Catholic background talking, though. We’ll see how it goes.

Aside from that, my latest completed novel is House of Masks, a gothic space opera about a planet with an immortality elixir that gets misused for millennia…until it runs out. Folks can find that here: books2read.com/house-of-masks

About the Author

DeAnna Knippling writes atmospheric gothic horror, mystery, suspense, and twisted tales from the edge of space & time. Her hobbies are cooking, taking long walks on Florida beaches, digging into the realm of open-source intelligence, fangirling over history, science, and psychology—and reading lots of fiction, graphic novels, and web comics while her tea goes cold.

Find out more about DeAnna at: WonderlandPress.com

Read the Story

“The Ocean is My Wife” appears in Haunted Waters, available now from Blackbird Publishing.

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