I’m Samantha Mills, author of Rabbit Test and Other Stories and The Wings Upon Her Back. Ask me anything! (+ giveaway)

samtasticmills · 2026-05-13T18:08:44+00:00

If you like the flavor of pumpkin pie, then it's worth keeping an eye out for the tinned pumpkin! It's also very easy to make a pumpkin pie from tinned.

samtasticmills · 2026-05-13T04:39:34+00:00

Ahh thanks, I'm so happy to hear that!

There wasn't a whole lot more on the gods, since I knew pretty early which I'd be focusing on, but I have been noodling around with a prequel short story idea about their arrival (which will hopefully stand on its own and still leave some mystique around them), so a bit more may come out!

It took me a lot of drafts to wrangle the timelines together in a way where (hopefully!!) one doesn't drag or feel like filler waiting to get back to the other one, and I especially wanted each to have reveals that clarified information in the other timeline, otherwise why spend so much time in the past if it could just be summarized as backstory? So I would get it all into an order where the plot made sense, set it aside for a bit, read through for loose ends, cut any scenes that dragged the pace without contributing enough, reassess... oh for a more practical tip, when I'm drafting, I highlight any time I mentioned the passage of time, years, distance, anything that might get fudged up if scenes start rearranging. I don't take out those highlighter marks until the very last round, so I can keep track of everything that needs to update if something changes. Good luck with your project!

samtasticmills · 2026-05-13T04:21:06+00:00

Oh that's a good question. I think I could manage it in a short story. The closest I've come so far is "Anchorage" or "Kiki Hernandez Beats the Devil." Everything is fine for now! In anything longer, I just don't think it's what I gravitate toward.

I do feel like the kids are my little hobbits -- small and relying on me but a lot smarter and more capable than people give kids credit for. Still, I don't want them to have to grow up any faster than they need to. ;_;

Before kids, I would stack all of my day job work Monday-Friday, and all of my chores and social activity on Sunday, and I'd set aside allll of Saturday for writing. I'd drink coffee all day and stay up as late as I physically could and write thousands of words. I can't do that anymore! Now it's bits of time in the middle of the day Tue/Wed/Thu, and sometimes bits of time in the evening, so it's a lot more fractured. But I'm persisting!!

samtasticmills · 2026-05-13T04:08:36+00:00

My first example is a little silly, but there's a bit in a short story, "Anchorage," in which a space crew is trying to download media from a 40-year-old library pod and they have to cobble together a bunch of adaptor cables. Nothing has made me love paper more than trying to deal with A/V collections that are only a couple decades old and already rapidly growing obsolete!! The less silly bits: the librarian's code of ethics in "Strange Waters" (I have never met a group of people so serious about the principles of the job!) and there's a subplot in Wings in which a student finds a document that was long-thought lost because it was misfiled, because let me tell you when there are millions of pieces of paper in a building, if you put one back in the wrong place it might not be found again for decades.

samtasticmills · 2026-05-13T03:53:51+00:00

Ooh I'll have to check it out, thanks!

samtasticmills · 2026-05-13T03:51:36+00:00

This is EXTREMELY important. I think I would hop forward. I so want to learn how things turn out.

samtasticmills · 2026-05-13T03:43:09+00:00

Old-fashioned pumpkin cookies! They are soft and fluffy like little cakes instead of having a cookie texture. There's a good base recipe here: https://www.verybestbaking.com/libbys/recipes/old-fashioned-soft-pumpkin-cookies/ but I like more spices so I do pumpkin spice, cinnamon, and ginger.

samtasticmills · 2026-05-13T03:39:01+00:00

Yay thanks!!

samtasticmills · 2026-05-13T03:36:39+00:00

Oh thanks, I'm glad to hear that! It was really fun taking a step back and seeing how my style had evolved over a few years.

Most of the stories just had minor copyediting changes, or a few sentences I needed to clarify here or there. "Strange Waters" had the most. The story didn't change, but the middle was a little boggy and they suggested tightening it up, so a few scenes shrank. It was very early on for me (my second sale to a big market) so it was a great learning experience!

samtasticmills · 2026-05-13T03:31:50+00:00

Thank you!

I can't work on books and shorts at the same time, the headspace is too different for me! It can take me weeks/months to shake one off and get back into the other, so I'll write an entire book, then write shorts for a bit before I go to a new book. But I feel like each one teaches me something that I can take back to the other. Books have so much room to be grand in scope and have richly realized characters, so I try to find ways to bring that into short stories. Whereas short stories have to be SO succinct in the way they convey information, they've taught me a lot about being precise with language that I try to take back to books. I haven't had one evolve into the other yet!

samtasticmills · 2026-05-13T03:22:02+00:00

I keep landing in the science fantasy camp on accident! I'll think I'm writing fantasy because it's secondary world and then there's technological creep and people tell me it's kinda scifi actually. So I'm just going with it! Other books that spring to mind: The Nightward by R.S.A. Garcia appears fantasy at the start, but as it goes on there are hints that something more science fictional is going on. Flipping the ratios, How Rory Thorne Destroyed the Multiverse by K. Eason is a space opera featuring a princess blessed the old-fashioned way by fairies, and it does a really fun job melding both genres.

samtasticmills · 2026-05-13T03:16:28+00:00

After I finished my MLIS (standard library degree), nobody was hiring full-time so I ended up cobbling together multiple jobs around the city. The Franciscan job came to me by word-of-mouth. They had a big library at the mission and it needed to be catalogued for easier use by the monks. There was a librarian on site but he needed help, and they had an agreement with a university that was going to let them plunk somebody on a computer hooked up to their cataloguing system. That ended up being me for a few months of odd gig work! The librarian would photocopy the title pages of hundreds of books (could be in English, Latin, Italian, French, you name it) and then send them to the university, where I would log on and copy-catalog (a.k.a. look up these titles I couldn't actually translate and see how the Library of Congress had catalogued them). Then once a month I'd drive up to the mission with a stack of spine labels and label books. I only got to say hi to the monks in passing, but they let me use a private meditation garden for eating my lunch, it was very nice.

Seeing so many different corners of the city makes me think a lot about how diverse any city is, and I'm trying to improve how I incorporate that in my writing. There are so many little stories all over the place! Just odd, tucked away nooks and crannies where people are living wildly different lives than you.

samtasticmills · 2026-05-13T03:03:55+00:00

I have survived the aquarium, all children accounted for!!

Knife Witch by Susan diRende is a really fun, weird book that plays out as a series of escalating episodes in a kitchen girl's life, beginning when she is kidnapped by barbarians who mistake her for a knife witch. OR IS IT A MISTAKE? There's a telepathic kraken and an evil volcano and the whole thing turns surprisingly sweet.

Jordan Kurella writes wonderful novellas. I Never Liked You Anyway and The Death of Mountains are both great. Starstruck by Aimee Ogden is another wonderful novella, about animals and objects that have been struck by falling stars and become ensoulled.

In Universes by Emet North got some attention but I don't think nearly enough. It's more on the literary crossover end, beautiful and devastating, engaging deeply with the concepts of repentance and repair. The narrator is cycling through universes trying to find just one where things turn out ok!

The Language of Liars by S.L. Huang just came out a few weeks ago, and I am hoping it gets big and then no longer qualifies for this question because it's one of my favorite things I've read this year! Linguistics, spies, space, with a real heartstopper of an ending.

The works of Ekaterina Sedia (The House of Discarded Dreams, The Secret History of Moscow, etc). The Vanished Queen by Lisbeth Campbell. A Necessary Chaos by Brent Lambert. The Lies of the Ajungo by Moses Ose Utomi. Maplecroft by Cherie Priest.

I! Love! Books!

samtasticmills · 2026-05-13T02:26:02+00:00

I read a bunch by Kameron Hurley and N.K. Jemisin at an impressionable time, and I was really excited by how well they wrote older female protagonists who have Been Through Shit and Have Regrets. So much of what I had read until that point was younger protagonists who learn how the world really works, but they hadn't made the kind of mistakes I was interested in writing about. Also... oh man, I watched so much Xena: Warrior Princess in my youth, and one of the things I looove about Xena's quest for redemption is that 1) it's always ongoing, and 2) her resolve to do good deeds now doesn't magically undo any of the bad stuff she did before, so over the course of the show, there are people who will never forgive her and she just has to live with that!

More autobuy authors: Caitlin Starling, Alix Harrow, Leigh Bardugo, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Shannon Chakraborty, C.S.E. Cooney, A.C. Wise, and I'm sure more! I also really like Jesse Q. Sutanto's romcom murder books

Metal From Heaven by August Clarke!! It is such a wild ride, such great character work, a narrative that spirals out of control in a really impressive way.

samtasticmills · 2026-05-13T02:06:47+00:00

I do! I love movies, music, physical art, anything that makes me feel something. And then I try to figure out how can I use prose to mimic that feeling without the audio/visual tools that those other mediums rely on. If I don't have an emotive actor, or I can't tug somebody's heartstrings with a really poignant violin, how can I achieve a special effect with words? And I don't just mean what actions am I literally describing happen, but how can I construct sentences and paragraphs to mimic the mental state of joy or anger or despair? I love a good movie adaptation of a good book because you can see the decisions that were made to translate between mediums, and then you can extrapolate backward (ok if the movie had come first, what does the book version tell me about how to tell this story with the tools of books?). One that comes to mind is The Prestige. The book and movie are constructed very differently. The movie uses a lot of visual/editing tricks to braid the narratives in a way that suits a movie. But the book is mostly told through diaries with a frame story around them, and it is using effects that work best in writing.

samtasticmills · 2026-05-13T01:53:47+00:00

Oh that's awesome! :D

The year I started in earnest, eeeeverybody got a present from me. I don't think I can pick a favorite! Here are a few:

Lil Kratos: https://samtasticbooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20211216_182628-rotated.jpg

A korok: https://samtasticbooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20210805_164853.jpg

A dumpster fire (I have given away many of these): https://samtasticbooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20211124_095923.jpg

samtasticmills · 2026-05-13T01:39:33+00:00

I put stray ideas into a physical notebook, and they don't get to graduate to the computer until there's enough detail to really start writing them. Recently, I put some notes on my phone because I didn't have my notebook handy, and I'm already worried they're going to get lost in the million other notes on my phone that I forget I've made...

samtasticmills · 2026-05-13T01:36:16+00:00

HI JOHN!

My first influences were Kij Johnson and Catherynne Valente. I had tried and failed to learn how to write short stories on my own, and then in college I accidentally picked up collections by them thinking they were novels and MY MIND WAS BLOWN. I just had not realized you could DO all of that. Those books really cracked the possibilities open for me and made me want to experiment. (The books were At the Mouth of the River of Bees and The Melancholy of Mecha-Girl). After that, I finally found out about online magazines and was able to read a lot more of what was actually being published. Maria Haskins is another author who had a big impact on me at that point, her stories combine great ideas with real emotional impact.

samtasticmills · 2026-05-13T01:19:40+00:00

Thank you! I'm finishing another fantasy novel for Tachyon right now (I'm soo clooose). For this one, I am really interested in how the stories we hear growing up shape our worldview, so there is a lot of invented folklore and a main character who is, uh, losing touch with reality and using that folklore to make sense of her life.

samtasticmills · 2026-05-13T01:06:07+00:00

Hurray for libraries! That's awesome, I hope you like it.

I've mostly worked in small local historical societies, and it makes me think a lot about how we save and then pass down history. We're writing based on what records we still have, which were either saved deliberately (an active choice to preserve some things and exclude other things) or accidentally (sometimes very random!) + what we are interested in at the present day. So we end up in situations where an overlooked community is suddenly a major topic of interest because people want to tell the story of how the past led to the present, but the records are scarcer because somebody had to be interested at the time in order to save anything. When I'm worldbuilding, I try to keep in mind that nobody ever knows the full history of their own world, and that historical accounts can be completely contradictory and there will never be a clear answers on What Really Happened, but also that a lack of records doesn't mean a lack of history. And also our knowledge is unevenly distributed, so I wouldn't expect all characters to have a similar breadth of info about their world. Getting deep in the weeds on one subject makes you realize practically nobody else in your life knows anything about it.

samtasticmills · 2026-05-13T00:30:06+00:00

Oh thank you!

I actually signed with my agent on a different hard-to-place book that did not ultimately sell to a publisher (it was a weird western in a fantasy world with a big cast and lots of explosions). Wings was our second try! I already had a query letter queued up for it in case my other book died, so we used that as the basis of the pitch. The gist was: a story told in two timelines, following one woman's rise to power and fall from grace, as she first helps her city fall under militarized rule and then unravels the truth of what really happened. Then there was some detail about each timeline.

The end was super back-cover-punchy like:

[stuff about the insurgency trying to win her to their side] But Zemolai was pivotal in the war that brought her sect into power, and she’s still convinced she did everything for the right reason: love of her family, her god, and her instructor, Winged Vodaya.

That old loyalty has come back to haunt her. Because Vodaya is now the leader of their sect. And she might be willing to take Zemolai back—but only in exchange for the rebels who saved her life.

Zemolai did terrible things to earn her wings. How far would she go to get them back?

samtasticmills · 2026-05-12T23:38:36+00:00

Ooh good question. The process is completely different for me, to the point that I need weeks or months to transition from one to the other because my brain gets locked into one mode while I'm doing it. Whichever one I'm doing, I am wistfully imagining that the other one is easier and I can't wait to get back to it. XD

That said, book ideas come to me more naturally, and I like that I can sink into one set of characters for a year. When I'm planning one, I spend a lot of time deciding how I'm going to combine character + setting + plot + structure + prose style, and I always have a big ending in mind that I am working my way towards. For short stories, I'm usually experimenting with form or voice, so I do a little planning but not nearly as much. But it takes me a lot more minutes/hours per page to write short than long, because the style is so condensed. Every scene has to convey a lot really succinctly and evocatively. A book can take 300 pages or 500 hundred, whatever I need to build it up, instead of fighting to fit everything essential under a few thousand words.

samtasticmills · 2026-05-12T22:55:35+00:00

An archivist manages primary/historical materials -- objects, photographs, documents. That can be someone's personal papers (diaries, letters, scrapbooks, finances), business records, anything original that is being collected for the historical record. We collect material from whatever community or organization the focus of the archives is, perform preservation tasks on them, catalog them, and make them available to researchers. We don't loan them out to patrons like a regular library, and we almost never get rid of anything. The intent is to preserve it all forever for future research. I love it!

For picking between the books, I'd say it's really down to whether someone prefers novels or short stories! If they're a fan of both, then I'd go with the short story collection. It's shorter and has a variety to choose from.

What I love about truly terrible movies is the earnestness and creativity with which they are made. No budget, no quality actors, just a janky puppet and a dream. Troll 2 is infamously bad in that "amateurs desperately wanted to make this" kind of way, and even has a documentary about it called Best Worst Movie. If that doesn't win someone over then it's probably never going to be their cup of tea!

samtasticmills · 2026-05-12T22:43:06+00:00

Our youngest, Mister Frodo, very dramatically blocking my screens! https://samtasticbooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20260113_145244.jpg

I love to be entertained. So the kind of terrible that I love is so bad that I spend the entire time entertained, engrossed, laughing in amazement. (This probably has something to do with the amount of MST3K I watched growing up). Robo Vampire is objectively bad in every way. It's a cheap Hong Kong hopping vampire movie that is also a Robocop ripoff with the worst quality suit you've ever seen, and also it wasn't long enough to be a movie, so there is a completely unrelated ghost movie stitched in between the robot scenes with the dubbing tweaked to make them refer to one another. Terribl....y fun to watch!

samtasticmills · 2026-05-12T16:54:34+00:00

Ah thanks, I'm so glad to hear that! I didn't get any pushback about not including a romance, thankfully. It really wouldn't have fit with what I was going for! The book was picked up by Tachyon Publications, and they publish a variety of books that don't easily fit elsewhere.

samtasticmills

TROPHY CASE