Auteur: The Final Word: Plum Pudding Interview

The whimsically-named Plum Pudding, creator of the webfiction series Disparate Minds, has lent their pudding  talents to  When You’re Good To Mama, a haunting entry in Auteur: Volume 1: The Final Word. Here are Plum's answers to some of Riley G. Boyd’s questions. 

Above: an exclusive preview of Robert Shepherd’s stylishly sinister illustration for Plum Pudding’s When You’re Good To Mama, a tale of rot and depression, in Auteur: Volume 1: The Final Word.

Tell us a bit about yourself. How did you first get involved with this project?
My creative background before this project was rather trite and uninteresting. Not for me, mind you, the creative process leads you places and you learn from early experiences — but for anyone else, there’s not much to hear about. There were a few fanfictions, a few play scripts. I drew a bunch of comics as a kid, I’ve always been writing. And I’ve done plenty of stuff since, with loads of contributions to various things on the way. But Auteur was my first project — I was saying on some Discord server that I was rather sick of ordinary stories, that if I was in charge I’d be crazy and get weird with it, and Aristide, bless his heart, jumped in my DMs and offered me either a transgender cactus or metafiction skeleton. I took the skeleton. 

What makes Auteur such an interesting playground for a creative?
There are options. That sounds simple, but for many characters there aren’t many. Auteur can fit into various moulds; he can be very wacky and meta, he can be immensely tragic and gothic, he can be a devious bastard. You can take him into the area the story needs. And the bonus fun part of an arch-villain such as Auteur is the crafting of a protagonist. 

What excites you most about being part of such a collaborative anthology?
Variety. If my story doesn’t work for you, there will be a story in the book that does. That sounds very basic, but it’s the key to all good anthologies. Through the collaboration, you become something more. It lets you not worry as much, and plus it puts you in contact with lovely people.

If your story was someone’s first encounter with the Auteur series, what would you hope they take away from it?
I hope they have a good time, it was a good time to write. I’m not going to dictate the feelings that I want people to feel and take away from my art, that’s what the art itself is for.

What were your biggest inspirations in the making of your story?
When You’re Good to Mama is a classical horror story — or at least as close as Auteur gets to it, it is rather bonkers. It came from my love of abandoned things. Which is rather an artistic love, I think it started with photography classes. I love old places and nature reclaiming them and so I naturally had to pervert that. Put it in the desert, make it rather horrible. 
When You’re Good to Mama is also a horror story I wrote before I had read/watched/played many other horror stories — I think I wrote this sucker in like 2020 or 2021, during Lockdown — so before you think the mould is a lot like Resident Evil 7, look, I plead innocence.
One thing I can tell you is that working on this story actually inspired me to create an entire webfiction series, which very, very roughly spun out from this story. And, weirdly, Disparate Minds came out first, but you get it. (I would like to mention that while Disparate Minds came out of this story, and is technically speaking a spinoff of it if you squint, you don’t need either of them to enjoy the other. This piece was designed to stand alone — I don’t like drenching people in continuity.)

How would you describe the editing experience; how did your story change and evolve during the process?
Aristide is a darling. I’m not paid to say that or anything either. I’m saying that unprompted, he doesn’t have a gun to my head as I write this. He just punches things up a little. I turned in what was basically the final draft in and Aristide just went over some of the rougher bits, showed me how to do that, he’s really taught me a bunch.

Do you intend to return to Auteur again in the future?
Time is a circle: I already have. (When You’re Good to Mama isn’t even the first Auteur story I wrote after Aristide invited me over — though that one’s so far down the line that I wonder if it will be released in the next ten years.)

What’s your next creative project and where can our readers find you next?
My passion project continues to be the aforementioned webfiction series Disparate Minds, a story about a town of empty places and empty people — very liminal and Internet-age, but also it’s about the people as much as the location. You should read it. I’m sorry if I’m annoyingly trying to sell it to you and you don’t care that much, but you really should read it.
That aside, I’ve got a novel going for Auteur — the current draft is called Smaller Gods — that will be out eventually. I have some other things too, but I don’t believe any of them are announced. Well, Smaller Gods hasn’t been announced either, but this is an Auteur press release, may as well drum up interest! 

---

---

Auteur: The Final Word is available now:

eBook

UK Print Book

US Print Book