PseudoPod 551: Alisonby
Seras Nikita.
“Alison” is a Pseudopod original.
SERAS NIKITA is a writer of horror fiction living in Oakland, California. She works at vfx house Tippett Studio, where she handles public relations and virtual reality outreach. During her career Seras has worked on films such as Cloverfield, Ted, the Twilight series, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and many more. She has acquired an unfortunate amount of information about which household products most closely resemble common bodily fluids (Cetaphil. The answer is usually Cetaphil.) She loves her Nighthawk motorcycle, but it’s currently not running so if any horror fiction fans / motorcycle mechanics in the East Bay want to take a look she’ll trade them a scary story.
She works on a series of stop-motion short films with her mentor Phil. The project is called MAD GOD. The website is
madgodmovie.com. She’s also a painter, using a technique called spit-shading that uses saliva instead of water to control the viscosity of the ink. You can see some paintings, and also commission work at her website,
violetsarered.com.
Says Nikita: “I just began submitting my short stories for publication recently. I know three extremely talented writers, and they all write very thoughtful literary fiction, mostly essays. They know a lot about themes. Exchanging writing with them feels like showing up to an art class where everyone else is a classically trained oil painter except me and I’ve got a ziplock baggie full of those jumbo crayons you get with the kids’ menu at Applebees. It makes me happy to have my work read on Pseudopod, because it makes me feel like there are people out there who enjoy crayon drawings just as much as they enjoy oil paintings. There aren’t as many layers, and they’re much simpler and easier to interpret. But they can be beautiful in their own way, if you press hard enough. Having stories published helped me realize that. Thank you for listening to my story, and thank you Pseudopod and Alasdair for all the hours of entertainment over the years. See you later!
This week’s reader –
Dagny Paul is a lapsed English teacher, failed artist, and sometimes writer who lives in New Orleans, Louisiana. She has an unhealthy (but entertaining) obsession with comic books and horror movies, which she consumes whenever her five-year-old son will let her (which isn’t often). Dagny is Assistant Editor of PseudoPod.
Info on Anders Manga’s album (they do our theme music!) can be found
here.
Alison will live her whole life in Folkston Georgia, forty miles from Waycross and as close to the Okefenokee as you can get before the ground starts filling your footprints with scab-colored water. She will wake each morning to the thickness of the swamp sucked up into the air around her. She will eat dinners of fried fish, and balls of corn fried with onions. Twice she will be hospitalized with blinding migraine headaches that are actually overdoses of aerosol insect repellent, ferried to her bloodstream via a bad habit of biting her nails and chewing the torn skin beneath them.
Listen to this week's Pseudopod.
