The Tenerview with Red Tash!

Mar 25, 2014 by admin

Meet Red Tash, a quick-witted, sassy-pants writer who I know you’ll come to love as much as I have! Like most of the authors I’ll interview here, I met Red on Twitter . . . something about Russian gypsies and potato vodka. Now? I can hardly wait to introduce you!

Red Tash, ever darling.

Red Tash is a writer, avid reader, former rollergirl and Future World Power. As a professional journalist, she learned how to build stories around facts that conveyed the often gritty emotions of the human experience, from the joys of achievement to the gut-punching drama of tragic loss. The same arc of story has been the focus of her fiction since publishing the best-selling dark fantasy titles Troll Or Derby and This Brilliant Darkness over the past two years.

Red loves social media, roller skating, hanging out with her best friend & partner Tim, and their four ridiculously amusing children. She would do just about anything to live at Hogwarts and has her fingers crossed for Portal 3. In a previous life, Red wrote the nationally syndicated column on parenting and family life called Guerilla Mothering. Now she writes novels, short fiction, comic books, and a lot of grocery lists. She crams in all her work in between homeschooling and soccer mommin’ it around town.

Red is always swearing off Facebook, but ironically, it’s the best place to catch her. Be sure to pester her about sequels to her books there!

You can follow Red Tash on Twitter and Facebook. You can also subscribe to her blog and her monthly newsletter.

In Troll Or Derby, fifteen-year-old Roller Deb is singled out by town bullies for both her skates, and for being different. When her popular homecoming queen of a sister is kidnapped by a scuzzy drug dealer, Deb must flee the trailer park in which she’s grown up, and rescue her. Along the way, Deb becomes enmeshed in the magical realm of trolls and fairies, and the blood-thirsty version of roller derby at which these beings excel. But spending too much time among the fairies comes with a price. Will Deb choose to save her sister, with the aid of a mysterious troll? Or will she be lost to the lures of roller derby, and this magical new realm, forever?

What inspired your latest book or book series?

Troll or Derby!

Right now I’m working on Troll Or Park, the sequel to Troll Or Derby. I’ve always been enamored of fairies, and I used to play rollerderby. I think I was literally skating when the idea to make fairies and trolls play derby entered my mind. From there, the characters really took charge, and this second leg of their adventure is pretty much writing itself, just like the first one.

If I were to ask the main character of your latest book what you least understood about her or him, what would he or she say?

I think Deb would say that I don’t understand what it’s like to be a fierce fairy badass, and she’d be right. I am a pretty tough chick, but I’ve never stuck a sword through a troll and eviscerated him right down the middle, belly-to-brains. I imagine that’s pretty heavy lifting, so to speak.

What lessons has writing taught you about life in general?

That our first instincts are usually our best. That haters gonna hate. That we all have the right to be here, to express our essence, and to be proud when our work turns out EXACTLY how we want it.

What’s your favorite quote?

I have so many. Oscar Wilde and Maya Angelou are responsible for many of them. Probably the sagest thing I ever came up with myself was “The quest for perfection will murder your spirit.” When I gave up perfectionism, I began to learn acceptance for myself as a human being, as well as for others. That paved the way to grace, which paved the way for a more compassionate life. That enriched all my relationships and has made me more confident in myself. That path started with the simple realization I was killing myself trying to be perfect, so I pasted that quote (even though it was my own!) to the top of my blog where I wrote every day about my life. It guided me. I helped me grow. A decade later it’s just a law that I know to be true.

What is perfect just the way it is?

Lordy, what a question. I want to say “everything,” because I suppose deep down at the heart of me I believe we are all where we are supposed to be, living the life we are meant…but I recognize that is a privileged viewpoint and that child sex slaves or prisoners of war being tortured would surely disagree with me. I suppose the only answer then is that there is no perfection, and that the pursuit of it will murder one’s spirit. 😉 There are some emotions that are perfect, for a brief window. Those magical, glowing moments of happiness in the arms of a loved one. The feeling of holding your newborn baby for the first time. The joy at seeing an old friend. There are some moments that are perfect because they are bliss. But I stand by my statement, in general, about trying to achieve perfection.