A Note from Ai Jiang

Assuming our Kickstarter makes its goal -- 

Then fingers crossed we'll soon be running a guest issue edited by the absolute superstar, Ai Jiang. Check out Ai's interview about being a guest editor below, and please, back our Kickstarter!

-- Ai! What excites you about being an editor for The Cosmic Background? How do you feel about flash fiction as a form?

-- The Cosmic Background has published several writers whom I admire and are acquainted with, and I love how TCB welcomes the surreal, the strange, the weird—all of which are things I both love to read and write. As for flash fiction as a form, I absolutely love how compact it is. It requires a high efficiency of language, with sentences that do several things at once, often requiring several rereads to truly gleam the extent of the richness and weight, while still telling a complete and satisfying story. I love the way we can also explore ambitious and experimental ideas that better suit shorter lengths like flash because they would be otherwise difficult to sustain with higher word counts.

-- Your guest issue is going to have a fun theme: Ghosts, hauntings the afterlife. You wrote Linghun, one of our absolute favorite stories in the genre -- what is it about that element of speculative fiction that you find so compelling?

-- I think we as humans are often both driven towards and away from two things: chaos and the unknown. In that humans tend to be self destructive, but at the same time, strive towards avoiding our own downfalls. With the unknown, we tend to be extraordinarily curious beings, yet, we our fear is often on par with our curiosity in how we avoid the unknown and inexpicable as much as we’re drawn towards it. I think the idea of ghosts, hauntings, and the afterlife is much like the latter: something we both fear and wonder endlessly about.

-- How can writers submitting to your issue win you over? Do you have any pet peeves? Or anything you wish you could read more of?

I love experimental works, fiction that pushes the boundaries of perspective, form, intent, structure. I want something raw, something that resonates deeply with the writer, because more often than not, readers can always tell just how much of the writer goes into the story, how much care they put into the work. As for pet peeves, I don’t think I have any specifically. Tell a good story, and I will eagerly await as the audience.