Sophie Partlow is the author of online publications Gnawed, about a medical breakthrough with an unfortunate side effect of turning users into cannibals/zombies, and its sequel Fractured. TNZ contributor Chris Wozney had the great good fortune to meet Sophia at CapriCon last February. Her writings can be found and followed at SophiePartlow.com
Q: There are some lovely images of you online; who takes the pictures?
A: That’s incredibly kind of you to say! I was a rapper named Mad P in a former life and moved in the North Carolina art scene quite heavily. I made friends with a wide array of creatives: artists, writers, musicians, and of course, photographers. I’ve been very lucky to have been shot by Sid Mercutio, CHD:WCK, Crippled Science, and most recently, J. Maxwell. Furthermore, I’ve been in front of the lens for several black women, including Jasiatic, Marquita Stovall, and Meesh the Great.
Q: I appreciate hard SF writers for keeping science in SF. How was science part of your life growing up?
A: My mother’s mother was a nurse and driver in the Army. I remember reading my grandmother’s anatomy books and playing with her stethoscope, Taylor hammer, and other medical equipment when I was three years old. Her husband, my grandfather, was a Presbyterian minister, so I was raised in the church. Unfortunately, it never permeated because the bible stories just didn’t make any sense. I knew that it took a male and a female to create a baby. I knew that you can’t propagate an entire species from a single pair of animals. I knew that the various states of water did not include wine.
My father was an engineer who took STEM very seriously before STEM was even a thing. He helped us straight body (decisively win) science fairs, piped audiobooks through our home’s intercom system, built computers with us in our game room, and constantly did things like review fractions/decimals/percentages on road trips. He’d say six, and we’d have to reply, “1/6, .1666 repeating, 16.66%.” I was steeped in science-based clubs and after-school activities, including a summer camp called Math and Science Education Network (MSEN), held on the UNC Charlotte campus, that I attended for years. I’d done sheep eye, frog, salamander, owl pellet, and fetal shark dissections before I was out of middle school through that incredible program.
I was in International Baccalaureates (IB) and excelled in Health Occupation Students of America throughout high school, even making my way to the HOSA national conference my junior year. The major I started in when I went to college at Florida A&M University was Biomedical Engineering, although I completed my junior and senior years at UNC Charlotte with a Bachelor’s in Marketing. Thinking I would move into the emerging field of tele-psychology, I went back to school for graduate level certifications in Psychology, Cognitive Neuroscience, and Information Technology, then received my Master’s in Healthcare Informatics.
So, yeah. Science was a small part of my life growing up. Just a smidgen.
Q: Are there some cutting edge discoveries that you are planning to incorporate into future writing projects?
A: YES!!! All of my stories center around cutting edge discoveries in science, including things like DNA sequencing and CRISPR, as well as nudiviruses and viruses as delivery mechanisms. I am very excited about a book series I have in development called Tethered, which involves quantum entanglement and cloning. The fiction comes in when a scientist commences with the very first human trial of his quantum entanglement chamber and instead of a copy of himself emerging, a beautiful Martian woman comes out.
Q: How do you keep informed about what’s going on in various fields?
A: This may sound funny, but Reddit. I follow the /r/science subreddit, which is a place to share and discuss new peer-reviewed research, and provides further post subcategorization into Psychology, Social Science, Astronomy, Health, Environment, Medicine. Biology, and Neuroscience. Reddit also has dedicated subreddits to each of these subcategories that are just as rich. It’s all just a treasure trove that’s updated in real time.
Q: Have you encountered David Byrne’s ”Reasons to be Cheerful” online news feed?
I have not, but you’ve just created a causal loop temporal paradox, because I just signed up because you’ve brought this to my attention!
Q Do you have a circle of friends with whom you get to toss ideas around?
Sadly, I do not. Although, just a couple of days ago, I ran a few of my ideas by an EMT friend of mine who was able to corroborate and catalyze several plot points for me, such as thyroid storms, adrenal dumps, and even how a person’s skin could be translucent. It was fascinating and I do believe that he will be someone I bounce things off of in the future.
Q: How did writing become part of your inner landscape?
A: I genuinely hate writing. I have an extremely difficult time when asked to do so for assignments or when prompted. Pardon my hubris, but that’s how I know that my stories are good! I am compelled by the characters and situations that exist in my mind to the degree that I will bite the bullet to write them out. I do love puzzling it all together, researching for efficacy and believability, and coming to a place of completion. That makes it worth it to slog through the actual typing part. I want you to know that I am enjoying participating in this Q&A, though! You’ve managed to ask such engaging questions that I am not at all minding the written response bit.
Q: Were there teachers who were encouraging? Or writing workshop experiences?
A: While my father was all about the science and math, my mother was and is a high school English teacher who always encouraged me to read and write at progressively higher levels. In high school, I took a creative writing course for the first time and my mind practically exploded with novel (new, not book) ideas. Then having to write so much for the IB program and essays to get into college and then so many papers in college… I got incredibly burnt out and my desire to write atrophied for decades.
And then my little brother, Chris A. Matthews, who struggled with his grammar and spelling his whole life, wrote a book. It’s based around his therapy practice and it’s called Finding Your Relationship Fix. I was so inspired that he could overcome his own challenges with writing to become a published author that I decided to try and flesh out a couple of book ideas that I’d been mulling over for years. I adore him and he is one of my biggest cheerleaders! Today, my books and serials propel me back to that feeling of sitting at my desk in that creative writing class, helplessly overflowing with words and ideas.
Q: Has poetry and or music played a formative role in shaping your creativity?
A: I feel like such a hater! I dislike the act of writing and now I hate to inform you that I utterly abhor poetry. I started my creative life in the slam poetry world and quickly became disenfranchised. Very little of it was objectively well done and the delivery became so passé that I was turned off by pretty much all spoken word. I have yet to find the on switch even some twenty years later.
Music, on the other hand, was a boon for my creativity. Especially hip-hop. Now THIS was poetry transcendent; what poetry wishes it could be. The act of setting rhymes to rhythms just clicked for me. I was a very sheltered kid, living in my own head most of the time, and suddenly I can say anything I want? Are you kidding me? One of the first songs I wrote was called “Marshmallows”, where I rapped in a Martha Stewart-esque voice about how to use household items like ice pops, hangers, and yes marshmallows, to murder people in obscure ways.
Because I routinely mixed my wholesome exterior with grimy and surprising lyrics, my crew started calling me the Goblin Queen. They said I reminded them of this obscure X-Men character by that name. Her real name is Madelyne Pryor, an Earth-616 version of Jean Grey, and she is this sweet, pretty, and rather demure woman who just happens to rule over a hoard of demons. That’s where Mad P came from.
All of this has resurfaced in my writing as of present. It’s more seasoned, but I still have that, “Oh, I can say anything I want?” mentality. I touch on sensitive topics around race, religion, LGBTQIA+, women’s rights, etc. My action and sex scenes can get quite graphic. Furthermore, my pieces tend to be more cerebral and are written at a very high caliber. I released the first ten chapters of my novel Fractured, and a few people commented that I used a lot of big words. When I asked my Dad what he thought, he damn near forbade me from changing a single thing. I really needed that affirmation, and now I refuse to dumb anything down a single jot.
Q: When we were chatting online, you were resting after an embryo transfer. How was that experience?
A: I wrote a blog about it all called Internal Vacancy Filled.
Q: Who are your favorite authors to read?
A: Don’t laugh, but when I’m reading for escapism (which is my favorite reason to read), my go-to genre is Dime-Store Romance. Especially period novels. Ergo, my favorite author of all time, ever, even across categories, is the incomparable Judith McNaught. She establishes rules and does not break them. She hurts her babies. She doesn’t use easily-resolved miscommunications to move a plot forward. She is explicit, sexy, and thorough. She is a master of character development. There are certainly more, but for pure reading enjoyment? No one can touch her, in my opinion. If only she weren’t missing!
Q: What were some of your favorite books when you were growing up, and how did you find them? Or did they find you?
A: I was a super early reader, grasping the concepts at three years old and devouring chapter books by the time I was in k cindergarten at four (because my birthday is in September, not because I’m some kind of savant). Back in the day, before Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace, you had to look in the paper for items for sale. When I was five, my Dad went to buy a gun off of one such ad and took me along with him to this rural farmhouse out in the sticks. Looking back, I can’t believe how sketch the whole thing was: a black man going to the middle of nowhere with his young daughter to meet a country white couple who were known weapons owners… but obviously it all worked out fine. Superbly, in fact, because the wife saw me sitting in the car reading a Babysitters Club book and came over to talk to me about it while her husband and my Dad conducted their business.
After a few minutes of chatting, she told me to hold on. She went and spoke to my father for a moment, he nodded and smiled, then all three adults went into the house. Each emerged carrying a massive, over-stuffed, black garbage bag. My dad opened the back of our Ford station wagon and they put the bags in, then asked me to get out of the car and come see.
There were books, books, and more books! I am grateful to that woman to this day, because while my Dad had almost completely filled the wall of built-in bookshelves in our game room with his ibrary, these books were mine, all mine! After cataloguing them all, they were truly across the board, with everything from Beezus & Ramona, Shel Silverstein, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, to Jude Deveraux, Nora Roberts, and guess who? JUDITH MCNAUGHT! I got in so much trouble when my oblivious ass got caught with some Fabio-covered title in class in the first grade.
Q: There’s an online photo of a child with this huge mastiff. Is that you? Were animals an important part of growing up?
A: That’s my daughter Cloud, who is adopted, but really does look like a perfect mix of my husband and myself, somehow. And that’s Ladida, our Shar Pei mix.
I’ll tell you a brief story about how I know representation matters. I grew up with animals my whole life, from dogs and cats to mice and iguanas. My first dog was a beautiful blond Cocker Spaniel named Daisy. My father was an avid photographer, and one day I was leafing through his latest pack of images from Eckerd. When I came across a photo of myself hugging Daisy, I was taken aback. It just didn’t look… right. I was borderline repulsed. I had never seen a black child with a dog before. Ever. It was just so weird, and I remember that feeling to this day, of not fitting into what is expected and normal, even in my own mind.
Q: I have a similar experience. I am old enough to have grown up at a time when women simply weren’t represented in many professions. Only men were doctors — even though my own great-aunt, for whom I was named, was a doctor, psychiatrist, and published writer. Her careers were never discussed in my presence. To this day, if I read or hear professional designations like “doctor, lawyer, senator”, I imagine a male silhouette. A few writers have helped break that mold in my mind: David Weber and Steven Brust especially, because they use female pronouns and depict women and men as human beings, first and foremost. It takes a special kind of effort to unmake an early conviction, especially to do so in a kind, appreciative way.
You have matured as a writer during a series of paradigm shifts in publishing. It seems to me that storytelling is more internally focused than it was in the past, diversity is sought after, and the mechanics of publishing are transformed. How have these changes affected your professional life?
A: This is an excellent question that could elicit a 10-page paper!
Q: If you write it, please post it!
I was very impressed with your CapriCon panel about the marketing game and how to not let marketing ruin your life. Could you expand on that theme for readers? Can interested readers access the presentation?
A: Thank you! I have almost always worked myself to exhaustion in whatever capacity I may have been operating in at the time: investor, entrepreneur, student, executive, or artist. After having to leave my former job as Vice President of Marketing for a company that touted work-life balance, but practiced the polar opposite, it felt as though I were emerging from an ocean only to see that living in a “grindset” was simply the water we’re all swimming in. I developed that presentation, “F__k Hustle Culture,” that speaks specifically to creators about the signs of and solutions for this insidious way of thinking and living. You can view the full presentation by clicking here, and be on the lookout for more as I flesh out these ideas into a more comprehensive self-help work.
Q: Zombie storylines hold a strong appeal for many readers. Horror literature can be cathartic; it can also be the equivalent of grabbing the bull by the horns: confronting fears head on instead of ignoring them and their causes. Do you get feedback from readers?
A: As a marketer and data science professional to my core, I live and breath analytics. I try to give myself as many sources for data collection as possible, from email opens to blog reads to book downloads. I even analyzed the average viewing time on a video of my Gnawed serial reading. It’s very helpful to glean where I lose eyeballs, because I can ascertain how engaging the piece was in a very authentic way. Another great tool for gathering feedback is, of course, social media. A single reader will tell you their opinion, but more often than not, it will praise rather than constructively critique. With analytics, you’re looking at a much wider pool of readers and followers to glean conclusions that are much more empirical.
Q: Ha! That is the most hard science response I’ve ever gotten to that question.
You divide your time between two homes. What are they like?
A: I am very aware that I live a somewhat charmed life. I have had incredible luck in love and am married to what my atheist self would consider my soulmate. My husband moved to America to marry me in 2014 and lived with me in Charlotte, NC. He became a permanent resident and spent seven years with me in America before I decided to return the favor. We wanted to raise our daughter in England and we were in an excellent position to pull the plug, so we packed up our entire house and moved to a town called Ipswich near his side of the family.
As we were moving, I began pursuing a job with a national nonprofit that was dedicated to ending systemic racism in education, a mission that was and is very close to my heart. I had to travel back to New York by myself to bring our three dogs over and had to do an interview in the airport’s live animal clearance facility parking lot. Fortunately, I got the job, which was touted as a remote position. However, the organization held teacher professional development conferences all across America, so I wound up establishing a second residence in Charlotte to give myself a US home base.
Mind you, we’d moved our whole house over in a shipping container, so for the Charlotte home I had to purchase each plate and bedspread, set up all the tech in the house, and assemble every stick of furniture by myself, from scratch. I was stuck in North Carolina while applying for permanent residency in the UK. It took nine long months, but now that I have my visa and my daughter is a citizen by proxy of her British adoptive father, we can all travel fairly freely. Having left the company that required so much travel of me, I’ll be able to spend much more time in England moving forward.
Q: That’ll make it harder for me to find you at future conventions, but we have online. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us. And congratulations!
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