A Short Interview w/ Todd Robert Petersen & Zoë Petersen
"Bonus material" for Petersen's short story, "Cat Valhalla," published on Tuesday, 12/26.
Short Story, Long features long short stories, each paired with original art, published every other week. In between stories, we feature some kind of “bonus material” for each — an interview with the author, outtakes or trivia about the story, etc. The stories are always going to be available for all, for free, with the “bonus material” saved for subscribers only. Paid subscriptions help pay writers and artists.
Read “Cat Valhalla” now if you haven’t already!
Aaron Burch: I'm kinda always curious where stories came from and what the seeds of idea were. Can you tell me a little about the genesis for this story?
TRP: This story had two co-inception moments. A few years ago I started becoming obsessed with YouTube videos after I presented a film paper for an academic conference about how YouTube and TikTok videos were a large-scale return to one of cinema's earliest forms: non-narrative shorts. I realized that a lot of YouTubers must also have day jobs, so I started wondering what would it be like if you realized that some "nobody" at work was actually hugely famous in some obscure internet nerd fiefdom. Could be cosplay. Could be they're a vinyl collector. Could be that they are obsessed with make up. Eventually I found my way down some rabbit hole about a guy who was showing people how to distress new Fender Stratocasters to look vintage (they call it relicing), and it kind of took off from there. I think the D&D world is an amazing subculture. It has so much gravity for me. So I went that way because I felt like mean people at work would pounce on this particular brand of nerd.
The other part of this is my family has a dumb/sweet lunk of a cat named Mars who, when he was a kitten, climbed up into our Christmas tree and fell with the lights wrapped around his neck. My wife saved him, thankfully, but it was bloody chaos for her. We had to take down the tree, and we made some kind of paper version for Christmas instead because he kept trying to climb the tree even after it nearly killed him.
So, I mixed those two things together and let the story bubble up out of interactions. The characters emerged from that experiment. I kept adding things that seemed like they'd be fun to write about: those Foam Forge videos, Cat Valhalla itself, the cast of office jerks.
Love this answer! Love how the "genesis" of a story (or at least a story that really works?) is often actually when a story is borne out of two or three geneses colliding.
"I felt like mean people at work would pounce on this particular brand of nerd." reminded me that when I accepted the story, I said, " I love how Derek is so kind of endearing at the end!" and in a reply, you noted, "I mean bullies are the worst, and Vestergaard crushes them all." Which all reminded me a bit of the interview I just did with Katie. She talked about balancing the two women at the core of the story, saying "I wanted to try and humanize the choice to participate in an affair, even if I couldn’t tap into it emotionally. I hope that I was able to do that somewhat with Maria: I don’t like moralizing, in fiction or in real life, so this was my personal exercise in empathy." and "I had tried to write the story of these two women more than once, but everything I did made one of them more important or worse, one more pitiable— and I didn’t want either of them to be anything other than people, both of whom had made decisions that were hurting the other, but most importantly, were hurting themselves."
I love that Derek is triumphant... but I'd also be lying if I said I didn't identify with the characters at the beginning who are making fun of him. I wonder if you thought about balancing these ideas and characters in your story, and if that ever tipped too far one way or the other, or maybe that wasn't really a factor in this story?
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