Aimee Ogden is joining us today to talk about her novel, Starstruck. Here’s the publisher’s description:
Prish has always been a radish who knows what she’s about; chiefly, her wife, Alsing, a literal and figurative fox. They’ve woven together a cozy life around welcoming other starstruck beings into the world-plants and animals ensouled by a falling star-but when the stars stop falling, all of that unravels. Prish gives in to Alsing’s longing to move on, and their new path leads them to two unlikely companions: an abandoned human child, and, impossibly, a brand-new starstruck who is neither a plant nor an animal, but rather a chunk of anthropomorphized granite with delusions of destiny.
Join Prish, Alsing, and Otra as they journey across a magical world.
What’s Aimee’s favorite bit?
At some point in writing Starstruck, I took a perfectly good rock and gave it delusions of grandeur, impostor syndrome, chronic pain, and, yes, probably anxiety too.
In the world of Starstruck, plants and animals can be given a soul if they are struck by a falling star. The first character I came up with was Prish, a quiet homebody of a radish, through whose perspective we see the story; but the character I fell most in love with was the one I built to be a challenge and a problem for her. What happens when a soul gets crammed into something that was never supposed to have one?
“Well, good evening,” said the starstruck…person. Its body was both more
humanlike than Alsing’s or Prish’s, and less. It could have been carved by a sculptor with a tender eye for detail: the gentle point of an elbow, a round belly, five dexterous fingers on each hand and five wiggling toes on each foot. […] It had no face at all, only a rough, rocky surface on the gray basalt stone that formed its head. The bottom narrowed to a lopsided point that suggested a chin and widened from there to an uneven triangle at the top. Faceless and eyeless as it was, Prish felt its gaze on her and disliked the feeling immensely. Magic, yes, of course. But living stone? How could it be? She’d never heard of the like. “It’s lovely to meet you both.” The stone head canted to one side in puzzlement. “Or at least I think it is. I’ve never met anyone else before, so I have to assume. It is nice to meet you, isn’t it?”
From the moment she arrives, Otra is searching for her place in a world that may not have one to offer her. She lives loudly and without apparent regard for the opinions of others—taking what she wants, dressing as she likes, speaking her mind—but there is something in her seeking space, seeking approval, in other ways. What hurt my heart the most (a self-inflicted wound, to be sure) was her quiet
awareness that her lack of face bothered other people, and her repeated attempts to assuage that discomfort. For all her larger-than-life behavior, she must wonder, deep down, what it means for her to exist, and whether she was ever really supposed to in the first place.
He paused and took another look at Otra. Then he scrambled away, putting
Alsing between him and her. “What is that?”
“That is a her,” said Otra. “She is a who.”
So many of my characters end up holding a mirror to one aspect or another of my own personality, and Otra fits the pattern. A lot of us might be able to relate to the idea of painting on a face that will make other people more comfortable; or to blurting whatever was on our minds without thinking first. Or wondered whether we really belong—or have we just rudely barged into spaces and societies that would rather not share room with us?
Children seemed to delight in Otra’s attention, skipping alongside her, singing the silly nonsense songs that she made up for them on the fly. She answered their questions about her nature gamely, whether they were addressed to her with genuine interest, or, in a few cases, what sounded more like morbid curiosity: “Yes, I’m brand new! Just two days old. Or maybe some several thousand years, depending on how you do your accounting.”
But I, for one, also envy Otra the grand, bold strokes of her character. I want to paint with bright colors and not worry if they clash. I want to stop worrying what other people will say. I want to love people, places, things, all kinds of nouns really, noisily and extravagantly. I want to curl up in the space that has been shared with me and not just know but believe I should be there. This book is in many ways about love and regret—Otra has so much of the former to give, and not a single drop of the
latter, which from my perspective is a fascinating and totally alien way to navigate life. She is my saddest and dearest clown, and she would be absolutely thrilled to know how much of my mental spotlight she’s stolen from poor Prish.
LINKS:
BIO:
Aimee Ogden is an American werewolf in the Netherlands. Her debut novella Sun-Daughters, Sea-Daughters was a 2021 Nebula Award finalist, and her short fiction has appeared in publications such as Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, and Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2022. Her third novella, Emergent Properties, came out in July 2023. She would make for a very annoying ghost.