Hello and welcome to this Track of Words author interview, where today I’m welcoming CL Farley to the site to talk about her upcoming novella The Invisible Girl, which is due out in February 2024 as part of Luna Press Publishing’s Luna Novella series. I’m really pleased to be able to interview the three authors from the 2024 series, and I’m looking forward to each of the novellas! If you like the sound of a story set in South Africa and populated with unreliable narrators and uncertain realities, then The Invisible Girl might just be the book for you – read on to find out more about it.
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Track of Words: To start things off, could you introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your writing in general?
CL Farley: I’m a writer from South Africa who has loved reading and speculative fiction since childhood. I started writing because I couldn’t find the book I wanted to read and I’ve been journeying down the rabbit hole since then.
I like to write with a touch of literary style and love to explore the ways that sci-fi and fantasy can intersect. One of my favourite aspects about writing is character creation and I tend to enjoy my process of putting together an amateur psychological profile for my characters just a little too much.
ToW: Your novella The Invisible Girl is coming out in February as part of the Luna Press novella series for 2024 – congratulations on the publication of your debut! Could you tell us a bit about this book, and what readers can expect from it?
CLF: Thank you! It’s a rather surreal and eerie story about a young woman trying to survive as an outcast in a post-apocalyptic world. My main character, Maggie, has a form of trauma-induced psychosis and readers should expect to feel a little disoriented at times as her perceptions of reality shift throughout the story.
ToW: I read on your website that you originally wrote this as a short story, before revising it into a novella. What prompted you to make that decision, and how did you find the process of expanding on the original story?
CLF: Honestly, most of my best story ideas are born out of my irritation and/or frustration about something. In this case, I was frustrated with the way neurodivergent narratives and neurodivergent characters are portrayed in media and stories.
I wrote the original short story because I wanted to use elements of magical realism to render a more accurate depiction of what life can be like for people who live with psychosis and hallucinations in general. I wrote the story, refined it, and sent it off to L. Ron Hubbard’s Writers of the Future contest (where it eventually received an Honorable Mention for that quarter) just like I’d planned. But Maggie was still haunting me. I needed to continue the story, so I did.
ToW: The Invisible Girl is described as “a collection of strange visions and slippery thoughts”, and on your website you mention “unreliable narrators” and “uncertain realities”. What draws you to this sort of storytelling?
CLF: For starters, it’s fun. If you break it right down, every person’s idea of reality is based entirely on how their brain interprets their perception of the world surrounding them. Even something as basic as grass being green can become totally inconceivable if you have a certain type of colour blindness.
I love playing with this, and using story characters to explore how our deepest and most personal understanding of the world (and reality) can shift in accordance with the way we perceive the situations we find ourselves in. I took this to extremes with Maggie, my main character in The Invisible Girl, but this interplay between objective and subjective reality is an element I always look at in my characters.
ToW: What are your goals, or aims, for this story? Is there anything in particular that you hope readers will take away from it?
CLF: When I was younger, trying to make sense of the world while grappling with my own neurodivergence, books and stories were my safe place. The characters within them offered insight and a sense of comfort while their adventures gave me a different place to escape to for a few hours.
Books made me feel less lonely and helped me learn to accept myself. I would love it if my stories could do the same for somebody else.
The Invisible Girl is one of three Luna Novellas coming in 2024
ToW: Could you tell us a bit about your usual writing process? And was there anything unusual about working on this story from a process perspective?
CLF: I’m a plotter so I usually start with research and compiling all the ideas I want to work with into a plot document. I then try to turn that into a workable first draft as quickly as possible. Once I’m happy with this draft, I revise it to add depth and refine the details. Every story is a little different and I like to leave myself room to incorporate new ideas, but this is my most basic process.
I didn’t do anything differently process wise when writing The Invisible Girl, but some aspects of writing it were a bit unusual. The story is set in a real place in the city I grew up in and it was interesting to imagine how those real world settings would change following a magical apocalypse.
The close character perspective also presented its own difficulties. I like to ‘get into’ my characters much like a method actor might, and there were times when writing Maggie into being was mentally and emotionally taxing. I would cry for her while writing, and walk away feeling exhausted. It was challenging, but well worth the effort.
ToW: To finish off, can you tell us anything about what you’re working on next, or what you’re hoping to write soon?
CLF: I’m currently revising the sequel to an epic fantasy novel titled The World-breaker’s Name. The first book is about a warrior turned scholar who must unravel the secrets of a cursed healer’s brand to save himself from a magical infection.
Where The Invisible Girl is intensely focused on one person’s narrative and way of seeing the world, this series is more about the interactions between characters, and how ancient secrets and forgotten knowledge can come back to bite you.
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CL Farley is a South African storyteller who favours speculative fiction and neurodiverse narratives. Her work received a Silver Honorable mention in the Young Writers of the Future, 3rd quarter 2022, and an Honorable Mention in the Young Writers of the Future, 4th quarter 2022.
Find out more on CL’s website.
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Thanks so much to CL for chatting to me for this interview! The Invisible Girl sounds fascinating – if this has piqued your interest, you can find out more in this blog post on the Luna website, and by checking out the trailer for the three novellas on YouTube.
Keep an eye out too for more interviews talking to the other authors involved in 2024, including this one with Knicky L. Abbott!
The Invisible Girl is out on the 19th February as part of the Luna Novellas series – check out the links below to pre-order* your copy:
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*If you buy anything using one of these links, I will receive a small affiliate commission – see here for more details.