Rest, Resist, Rewrite: Lindz McLeod’s Tarot-Approved Survival Guide

Tarot Interviews. Welcome to Tarot Interviews, where we explore the lives and creative journeys of fascinating individuals through the wisdom of the cards. Today we welcome Lindz McLeod, a Scottish writer and editor whose work blends the surreal, the eerie and the deeply human. Known for her award-winning short story collection Turducken and her erotic horror novella Sunbathers, lynn's crafts stories that challenge boundaries and embrace the unexpected. With a romance novel, the Unlikely Pursuit of Mary Bennett, set for release in 2025, she continues to expand her repertoire. Join us as we shuffle the deck and uncover the hidden threads of fate woven into Lynne McLeod's remarkable journey. Thank you so much for appearing on the show. What kind of a day are you having today?

Quiet and also busy. The several deadlines that I was putting off are rapidly approaching. This is hopefully a wonderful bastion of safety away from my pending deadlines.

I must say that is a stunning room that you're in there. Is this your library?

It is. It's the room that I work in most of the time. I was actually just posting the other day about my fiance complaining that we had too many books, which is not a thing, as we all know. It's a strange thing that she's made up. I, I mean Americans, who can understand, but, um, what you can't see is that the shelves actually go most of the way around. There are quite a lot of books in here, but I do contain it to mostly just one room.

So it's all neat, everything's on shelves, but I I work in here surrounded by and inspired by other books as well looking just behind you there and if you were to just read out a couple of books you've got there at random, which ones kind of inspire you from your eyeline as you're working there?

Oh well, I have some PhD books to the left of me here, gosh. I mean, they're all in order as well, because I'm a terribly organised person, because I think I have to be. So we have.

When you say order, are we talking order of height, thickness, color categories so we have.

We have a non-fiction section over here, which, of course, is broken down because I'm not a monster, um. So we have science, we have art, we have biography and autobiography, and then we have fiction. The graphic novels and comics are actually kept in, uh, in the living room in a beautiful display and again all in shelves. So, not a problem, no such thing as too many books. But I have to say there's quite a lot of short story collections here, and, of course, that's something I do a lot. I'm constantly reading short stories and thinking about short stories and talking about short stories, and I do think it's a really interesting skill and one that can help when you're writing longer work. But at the same time, the short story is quite a different beast entirely. It's something I think about a lot. So I've got, for example, Young Skins by Colin Barrett. I have Carmen Maria Machado's, Her Body and Other Parties. Oh, my fiance just got me A Sunny Place for Shady People, which is, um, Mariana, I think, Enriquez. I haven't had a chance to look at it yet, but it looks incredible. I'm really looking forward to that.

I actually read a fair amount of nonfiction as well. There's some kind of blurring of the boundaries that I enjoy. So one of the books that I have that is a complete inspiration to me I'd love to write something like this at some point is Benjamin Labatut's when we Cease to Understand the World, and this is a series of essays where he is talking about various different things. A lot of it is Nazi related in a way, but then he will also drop in things like the color Prussian blue or what happens to lemon trees when they die, and there are points at which he starts to blur the lines from nonfiction to creative nonfiction. It is quite trippy in places, but I'm just astounded by this book. It was written I believe he wrote it in his original Spanish and then he translated it, and I don't think the second one, which I think he wrote in English, quite matches the beauty of the first. I think the original language brings something to a poeticism that doesn't quite work in English, I think, or directly English.

One of my great regrets in life is learning French at GCSE. I wish I'd picked German, but the reason why I picked French oh really, I learn French too. Well, at the time I was thinking, you know, it'd be be good for basically good for meeting girls and also for reading baudelaire's poetry in the original french. This is how my teenage mind worked. I must say, being able to read a language as it was written is. There's nothing quite like it, but having to learn an entire language to appreciate it not sure, not sure, right?

I've got cards in my hand and it's time for your first one. Okay, are you ready? Okay, and describe what you see.

Oh, I see, Is it the three of swords? I think.

What impressions do you get from that card?

Well, it looks like three swords impaling a heart and behind them there are some clouds which look to be raining.

it looks like very much a conflict card my understanding of the three of swords is it's a card of heartbreak, sorrow, emotional pain, also loss as well. So it's a reminder that things can be difficult. Pain is a necessary part of growth and healing and we can emerge stronger. That's the traditional meaning. Let me think of a question for you. Let's take almost literally how do you navigate part of growth and healing and we can emerge stronger? That's the traditional meaning. Let me think of a question for you. Let's take it almost literally how do you navigate themes of heartbreak, loss and resilience in your stories?

That's a good question. I think I navigate them like everything else. They're an intrinsic part of life. They're an intrinsic part of storytelling, and one of the things that I talk about when I talk about weird fiction which I do quite a lot is people sometimes ask okay, but if it's weird or if it's surreal, how do you get the reader to still connect to what you're saying? And the answer usually is there are universal things that we all connect to. We understand love and loss and sacrifice and courage and cowardice. There are kind of these global emotions and elements. So, no matter how weird the story is, or even how banal and how straightforward it is, I'm always thinking what does this character love? What have they lost? What would they do to get what they want?

Looking back on the stories that you've written most recently, which character feels most um applicable to that?

oh well, which journey I feels okay so, um, there's, there's two things there and they're both very, very different. Uh, one of them is a book that I wrote in kind of late summer last year called mary anning dinosaur hunter. Um, and it is about mary anning, the real person, but she discovers a cave to the past and which is full of dinosaurs. It is basically a link to the cretaceous period, although cough cough it's, it is cretaceous, but we're hand waving some things. And she decides that this is the way that she will force the geological society to pay attention to her. If she can find a way to bring a live specimen out, then they cannot ignore her anymore and she goes quite a long way in pursuit of that goal and she does some some very stupid things as a result of wanting this goal so badly.

And the other one is a very short a flash piece that I wrote all in one go, um, about a month or so ago, and I've called it howdy cat, because Hello Kitty is probably a trademark to hell, and it is about Howdy Cat who becomes a astronaut and goes through the NASA space training program. And Howdy Cat's human companions do not like Howdy Cat and also she cannot speak because she is very much like, though legally distinct from, hello Kitty and no mouse. So it's it's kind of a play on the the. I have no mouth and I must scream. But it's also what would happen if, if this kind of non-human character comes along on the spaceship to to do this mission.

They're, as you can see, very different goals, very different characters, but they both have things that they want. They have things that are being denied them by other people, and, and what are they prepared to do to get those? Are they prepared to put up with abuse and harassment? Are they prepared to put up with humiliation and embarrassment and shame? Are they prepared to injure themselves or other people in pursuit of that goal? And injure can mean a lot of things. It's a very big spectrum.

Excellent, right. Well, so we have a card of loss to begin with. Let's hope we get something a little better, but I don't want to uh, to jinx the cards. It has happened in previous interviews. Okay, so I'm shuffling again. Let me know when to stop okay, so here we have the.

Is it the four of swords?

It is the four of swords exactly. And what impressions do you get?

So we can see there are three swords hanging on the wall and one sword is kind of laid horizontally. Above the horizontal sword we can see what looks to be a knight lying in state, as it was like dead Posed but dead. Those are interesting choices.

I like, I like them yeah, I find it fascinating that the swords are coming out to play. It was um in the last interview I did.

It was pentacles throughout and, uh, hopefully we'll get something a little different on the next head pretty apt for me um at the moment, like, yeah, we'll talk about it, I'll answer your question, yeah okay.

So this one is resting, recovery, contemplation. It's a period of stillness, hardship, the invitation to take a step back, regain your mental and emotional strength, and it's a reminder that true clarity and renewal come through peace and reflection. So how do you balance rest and reflection with the demands of being a writer?

Oh gosh. I mean, my friends would say I don't um, which is, and I understand why. So I last year I had, I had quite a year. I decided at some point in the year that I was going to try and write as many books as I possibly could in that year and so I took um. This was the result of having sold a couple of books on proposal and then having to write them, and I decided that wasn't enough pain and punishment for myself. I would go further. So I took a deferral from my PhD for six months and I went and wrote as many books as I could. I ended up fully writing four and part writing another five. It was kind of a nightmare. And I also wrote multiple short stories and something in the end of about 430,000 words approximately. It was quite a lot.

I'm pretty sure that I narrowly escaped interventions. On at least three separate occasions. My friends kept saying come for coffee, but there was a tone and I kept slithering out of them like an octopus backwards through a vent in the hope that I would just make it through the year. My fiancé also tried to give me several interventions and I did listen to them, but only because we live in the same house and I had to. Basically, it was my way of saying I feel very frustrated about how slow everything is. Publishing is a glacial industry and I'm quite a fast writer. I'm also very ambitious and there's very little control that you have over that. At a certain point, when you're querying, it's different, because if you get rejections from agents, you can just query more agents. When you're actually agented and you're going on submission with editors, you have no control over how long they take to get back to you. And I was also working with a production company who's shopping my work in Hollywood for adaptation, also working with a production company who's shopping my work in Hollywood for adaptation and, of course, almost within sort of six to eight months of starting to do that, there were the writer strikes as well.

So last year was a period of me burning myself out completely in every possible way and trying to do everything. And then I sort of took a step back once I had reached my goal and sort of said you know what, this year 2025, will be a little bit different. I am planning to do things a different way. I've already been doing things in a different way. I'm having something called a weekend which is, you know, only on occasion is a treat, but it is nice. And remembering that I can fill the quiver with as many arrows as I like, but I, you know, I it's not like the world is going to end tomorrow. I can take time about doing that and I've already. I can rest reassured in the knowledge that I have worked really hard and I've done all I can.

Those things are kind of I cannot talk too much about them, but in the last two weeks some some exciting things have happened in multiple areas, um, of various industries, and hopefully I'll be able to announce something soon, but it's been really nice to see, um things actually happening. And of course, both the uh, the film and television industry and the publishing industry. They're both very slow and there is this kind of delayed gratification going on where you might write something, uh, two or three years ago and only now someone's saying we love it and you're like, oh, that thing, sure, I mean okay, great, wonderful. But it is kind of like making a meal and then you have to freeze it and not eat it for a year. It can feel very no one's patting you on the head when you've done it.

So it is very much an industry for people who like to hurt themselves in various different ways. You have to be kind of prepared to be stubborn and sort of let yourself be powered by spite a lot of the time, and that can turn you into someone bitter. So it's also important to step back and sort of say like am I proud of the work that I'm producing? Am I happy with what I'm doing? And if I'm not, then you know, make some adjustments here and there. But I definitely feel like I have gone through some things. I went through some things in 2024 and I'm now at a place where I feel better about my career. I feel like I'm able to pick and choose more things, which is a relief no-transcript.

Excellent, I have to say. Thank you so much for joining us in your place of work on your weekend.

I genuinely wasn't joking. I don't often have a weekend, and a weekend for me means I get like maybe three or four hours on both days to relax. The rest of the time I'm a terrible workaholic. This is the thing. I'm trying to wean myself off it a little bit, but it is a problem.

Can I ask? We're pulling out a lot of sold cards so far. I did pick up in an interview that I read from a little while ago that you likened your stories, or the inspiration for your stories, to splinters. Can you talk to me about that?

yeah. So I'd like to say, oh, a story is a wonderful seed that blooms, and then you get to prune it and and and water it and and look at the flower and I'm like, no, I wake up with something burning and itching inside me. And look at the flower and I'm like, no, I wake up with something burning and itching inside me and I have to go and work it out with the tweezers of my own fingers on a keyboard. I often can't get the characters to behave how I want. They just tell me what the story is. They're in my head.

There's a scene in American fiction I don't know if you saw that last year which was an adaptation of Percival Everett's Erasure, and in it you can see the main character, he's writing the scene, and then his characters, who are like in the room, turn to him and say wait, what am I saying?

That doesn't sound right and that I laughed so much because that's exactly what it feels like. A lot of the time they're like what? I'm not going to do that right now. I'm like, no, but you, the plot says that you have to and they just don't want to do it and it's frustrating, but no, it does feel very much like I have an idea, and now I will. I will cancel films, I will cancel outings, I will just burrow myself into this wonderful room that you see here and until I've worked it out of my system because otherwise I can hardly think about anything else it has to be kind of tweezed out gently and even if I just get the bare bones of it dying, that helps. But I'll get really antsy if I can't go and work and often like the prose is putting itself together in my head as I'm running to the library.

Okay, right, Third card. It is so two cards down. They'll stay where they are. I'll keep shuffling and let me know when to stop. Okay, so how does this make you feel? What do you see?

Okay, so the ten wands are gathered together in kind of a bundle and there is what looks like almost sort of like a page character holding them all together. There's almost a Sisyphean element to this. It looks like, you know, know, there's kind of a um, it's an uphill struggle to keep these ones together. They, literally, they kind of want to fall apart, but this character is holding them together. This, this is becoming almost too revealing in a way, given what I just said. I feel I feel seen, I feel perceived yeah, so do I.

This is depicting exactly how I was trying to get all of my christmas decorations yesterday yes, I appreciate it sometime since christmas, up the stairs and into the loft. So, yes, 10 of wands symbolizing burden, responsibility, hard work uh it's. The weight of obligations can be physical, mental, emotional, overwhelming. Uh, it shows that you've taken on too much, as you've rightly seen, carrying too heavy a load. Uh, the lesson is to delegate and release those unnecessary burdens.

Well, I didn't expect an intervention from you as well, but I know I kept escape it, so I see what has happened.

Hey, I blame the cards entirely. Okay, so ten of wands. Do you feel extra pressure as a queer writer to represent your community and how do you handle that?

Yeah, absolutely Of course, and I've talked about this a little bit in. I had a story come out in Apex magazine in January, a novelette that focuses on queer characters being erased from the universe. And nobody knows why it's happening, it just is, and in it Apex also interviewed me as well, uh, with marissa van oden, and we talked a little bit about that exact question about feeling, when you are part of some minority, that you always have to be on as a spokesperson, you're not allowed to simply be and I think I quoted whoever it was that said about the sort of trump camilla thing is he gets to be lawless. Well, she has to be flawless, and I do feel like that's the case.

I also think that there is a certain amount of obviously there's huge pressure that I put on myself because of my own ambition and I do do a lot of different things, but I also try to be available and do as much for the community as possible. And this is again extra pressure that I put on myself and extra responsibility, and I do feel the weight of it. But to me it's a necessary weight because when I was kind of coming up, I benefited a lot from advice from certain other writers when they had time to give that to me, and I always thought that if I ever was in a position to give back then I would, and so I consistently try to do that, even when I absolutely don't have time for it. I will sort of give up hours of sleep just to help other people, if I can.

I've been mentoring writers for years. I was supposed to be through a one-year program. That program ended and sort of three years later we're still mentoring them. I'm doing everything I can. I edit queries for free whenever anybody wants one. I will never charge for that, and if anyone wants advice, On top of your existing workload.

Firstly, it turns out I'm really good at queries, but it's obviously not a useful skill for me anymore. I actually edited my fiance's query and she had multiple offers from agents, which is also a great book. So it's something like I teach workshops on and I will edit for free afterwards as well. Um, but I I feel like it's really important to give back. It's an industry that pits us against each other, that suggests there's only so many spots and so many people can make it, and so we're all crabs in a bucket fighting each other. But actually that is how. That is how they would like us to be, because then we're not supporting each other, then we're not lifting each other up, but a rising tide lifts all boats. I don't understand why we can't.

Um, so I'm I've sort of made it like a mission, a steely-eyed, optimistic mission, to try to help people as much as I can and whenever I've helped people. I think I must be the only editor in the world who is like no, stop paying me, I don't. I don't want your money. Like, of course I need money. I'm a. My bank account looks like a slender, Dickensian orphan, but, like you know, can you just please, can you just give it back, pay it forward to other people. If you know, if I help you now, if someone else asks you for help or advice, like, can you just give it and and try to make sure that everybody has the knowledge that they need to get where they want to go.

And also, you know, in this industry, hard work and talent will only take you so far. It is also about getting yourself into the right place at the right time. That requires a certain amount of luck and sacrifice, but it also requires the knowledge to be able to angle yourself into a position where you can receive the opportunity in the first place. If you don't know something's happening, you can't. You can't get to it. So I'm always like, if I've ever helped anyone in any respect, there's a non-zero chance that I will slide into your dms and say, hey, have you seen this submission thing? Or have you seen this like grant, that would be great for you. Um, you know, just a heads up, because yeah, I just, if I can leave this world a little bit better than how I entered it, in some way, then you know that's a life well lived. I'd be okay with that.

That's a beautifully positive card to end on, and I do have a bonus question to ask. This is from my wife, who's very interested in your upcoming romance novel, the Unlikely Pursuit of Mary Bennett. What inspired it?

Well, two things. One is that my agent suggested that I write romance, which I just laughed. I said I don't write romance and she said you do, there's romance in almost all of your work. And I went away and thought about it and realized that much like other areas, she was totally right and that's annoying. So I was like, okay, well, let me write a proposal for you then let's see how that goes. I don't know if you're correct and, um, we sold it pretty immediately. So I was. I was surprised, but not at the same time. I probably should have clocked it beforehand. I have always been a huge fan of Austin, um, and I was actually just uh, posting on Blues ky.

Today there's a, an article in the Guardian about retellings and a lot of new book covers for kind of older things, but I thought there had been enough retellings. I wanted to do a continuation and also my fiance is a great fan of Austen, although, as in many other respects, she's incorrect that Austen's best book is not Persuasion, it is Pride and Prejudice. We will argue about that. I would like to do a Persuasion continuation for her someday, but mainly it was also written as a labor of love to her. The characters fall in love over the meanings of flowers, and it's all very tender and romantic and at every point I was thinking you know how can I best amuse her? What would make her happy to read this? And of course there's.

I got to do little letters at the start of many of the chapters from characters that you might know. One of my favorites is from Mrs Bennett and she is exactly how you would imagine. She's like so sorry, your husband died. Anyway, all about me, my problems, my life is really hard and just no one really gets me. Anyway, thoughts and prayers, and it's just fantastic to be able to, to be allowed to do something like that.

But I also thought mainly the idea came from. I understand the point of Charlotte Lucas in the original text she is there as this kind of mirror, this contrast to Lizzie, um, so we get to see how most people end up and most women end up. But I always thought charlotte was just read kind of queer to me and I thought like, oh, wouldn't that be kind of interesting to explore what would happen there if we gave her the opportunity to have a second chance. You know, in the, in the first, in the original text, she's very much like.

This is my last chance. You know I have to marry him. I'm a burden to my parents and to everyone. There's a lot of pressure on her. And what if we take away some of that pressure but we apply it in different ways, with some time and experience and sort of wisdom of being out in the world? Is she going to make the same choices and keep herself in this little box, or is she going to make choices that will maybe break her out of that? Will she do it for a period of time and then return to this safe, comfortable confines that she knows? Is she willing to do a little more? Because I've always seen her as a character who had to play it safe. She didn't have any other opportunity, so I was really curious to see what would happen if she had the option not to.

If she had the option not to. Yeah, I think, given that my bookshelves at the moment are too deep and I also have books arranged around the top in the way that you do when you're short on space, I think this and Sunbathers are going to be a reason for me to get some more shelves. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. From weaving eerie, surreal tales to exploring love and longing through the written word, Linza's journey is one of bold imagination and fearless storytelling. Whether through the dark corridors of horror, the tender embrace of romance or the dreamlike twists of speculative fiction, Her work invites us to see the world and ourselves differently. With the unlikely pursuit of Mary Bennett on the horizon and a PhD exploring the power of storytelling, Lindz continues to shape literature in unexpected and profound ways. I'll speak to you later in the next episode of Tarot Interviews.