Anders lives in California, and while he believes life is an uphill climb, he believes the climb to be worth it, at least most of the time that is. Uphill climbing can be even easier, he has found, if you bring your own internal, portable staircase with you. Unfortunately, it took him an embarrassing number of years to figure that one out, not that he actually does it all that often.

Why write? Well, he has been a lot of things in his life, and now it occurs to him he ought to be a writer. At least he ought to try it while he still feels he has something that absolutely, positively needs saying. “Mellow” and “author” are two words not often seen side by side. So far, he has not succumbed to debilitating bouts of mellowness.

Another reason for writing is that Anders likes creating small intricate things, setting them into motion, and pushing them out into the world to fend for themselves. Writing is a very good way to do that. Also writing is a reminder that life is gritty and gnarly, and that everyone you see around you, every day, has a story – often with a great deal of hidden pain, joy, satisfactions and defeats, and that understanding those stories is part of the reason we’re all here. Life is a mind-boggling struggle.

And lacking anything even slightly resembling the gray and limitless winters of his childhood, writing is also Anders’s way of constantly wrestling the relentlessly sunny disposition of the West coast to the mat until it cries uncle.

Living life is an art. Struggling with boggling through writing can be an art too. Each is definitely its own reward. At least that’s his opinion, and he’s sticking to it.

But to get back to something more closely approximating the topic at hand – Anders is drawn to conflicted characters, LGBT themes, magical-realism, science fiction, and experimental fiction. But mostly he finds himself helpless when faced with compelling narrative, demanding protagonists and multi-layered meanings. Stories, like ogres, have layers, among other things – qualities he hopes to propagate at least a little with his own work, such as it is, adding his own small ripple to the rolling waves of human experience flooding the virtual and print world with voices and tales in the early 21st century.

It’s an amazing and fantastic time to be alive right now, if narrative delights you. And it does, for Anders.

Author Site: Anders Flagstad Website