I first encountered Christina Engela as an editor for a US-based indie publisher. Engela immediately stood out from the rest for several reasons: one, an abundance of good humor, boundless wit and creativity that reminded me of some lab-created hybrid of Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman, Herge, Mark Twain and Monty Python; two, the woman’s clear ease with prose style, which lightened my editorial duties considerably—there was very little wading through nests of convoluted, pretentious underbrush to get to the story; and three, her being an adult and not the kind of entitled drama queen that haunts the fringes of the indie world.

The South Africa-based editor, author, and mastermind behind an impressive collection of horror, fantasy, and science fiction novels, Engela has established herself as a gifted and imaginative storyteller. Her vibrant characters and thought-provoking settings transport readers to extraordinary realms, where the boundaries of reality are pushed to their limits.

But Christina’s contributions go beyond the realm of literature. As a staunch advocate for human rights, Christina actively supports the LGBT community. She fervently believes that authors often fail to represent Sexual and Gender Minority characters authentically, resulting in harmful stereotypes. In her work, Christina defies these conventions, crafting characters that defy expectations and challenge societal norms, regardless of their sexuality or gender.

I recently bounced some questions off her to go deeper into the mind behind the stories.

Q: Your work is a fairly unique hybrid of different genre elements, as diverse as fantasy, science fiction, horror and even Westerns, with a big dose of humor. Why do you choose to write in these genres?

A: Believe it or not, the first time I tried to write a novel, I was just 12 years old. The subject? Well, it was about a group of Roman soldiers in Germany… and as it turned out, the subject required a tad more maturity than I had been blessed with at that time! My specialty writing interest really has always been sci-fi though, so I dropped that story to work on honing my skills in that genre instead!

Over time, I started to work out that it’s not so much a specific genre that suits me, but my own style of storytelling and so when I write a story, I use elements of what I feel fits the story. That’s how the Quantum Series came to have a secretive, underground subculture of vampires living among humans, and how I wrote a series in which the crew of a starship travels around space investigating paranormal events! I suppose the biggest factor in this proclivity is that writing is fun for me – I enjoy it. If someone writes a story they hate working on, it will show, and hopefully people who read my books will enjoy them as much as I did writing them!

Q: In addition to your fictional work you have published a book of your philosophical and ethical thoughts, as well as posting these thoughts frequently on social media. Whom do you hope to reach with your philosophy? If you could boil it down to an essence, how would you describe your ethos and your overall message?

A: I often joke that when I write (or post my writing on social media) it’s like taking that item and throwing it out into the void… as you know I have a history in activism, and so I ended up with an amount of material, thoughts and opinions – “aha” moments and so on – and I share them for a multitude of reasons. Hopefully people will see some of these items and they may reach them, cause them to think – or make them laugh and put them in a good mood, and make their day more bearable. At the most, they might even change someone’s mind about something they were dead sure about – like a personal prejudice, and that would be a good thing, I think.

I would have to say my ethos is primarily libertarian. I despise bullying, I reject conformity, I embrace individuality, and I view groupthink with the same sort of suspicion you might reserve for mystery bottle of unidentifiable preserves found at the back of your fridge with no expiry date on it!

Q: Yes, I hate that mystery bottle with a passion! So, Do you plan your works or do they spontaneously bubble out of you? Also, do you set aside time for writing like a job, or do you write when inspiration strikes?Set featured image

A: There are a few things that spontaneously bubble out of me, fortunately writing is one the better ones! It’s a mix and match really. Some books just form in my thoughts as I’m writing them—appearing on the horizon like a pilot star, and so the keyboard becomes the wheel and all I have to do is steer the story. In other cases, I spend more time plotting out a story plan, characters, situations, dialog etc. before I even start writing.

Q: What do you do for a day job? Do you enjoy it? Does it contribute to your writing and inspire it in any way?

I’m currently the corporate communications officer of an entity I’ve been employed at for many years. My job is varied and interesting, but also routine and occasionally stressful. It’s often insanely busy, but also there are a lot of quiet lulls. I’m not sure I “enjoy” it exactly, but I enjoy meeting challenges – and above all, I enjoy being able to put food on the table! I have to say though, that working in that environment has definitely contributed to many of my stories in terms of enrichment through adding to my own experiences and inspiration, many of which some people have some trouble believing have any basis in fact!

Q: Your parents were both authors. Tell me about them, their work, how they inspired you and how you have continued their legacy.

Both my parents played different roles in setting me off down the path to becoming a writer. If I may differentiate, my dad inspired me to write, but my mom encouraged me to write. The difference being one was more passive, and the other more active. There was no doubt at all that my dad was a talented writer. He wrote over 30 short stories, and near as I can figure out, all of them were dramatized for Springbok Radio during the 1960s and 70s. He also finished three novels between 1965 and 1984, but he never got to have that “best seller” he craved, even though he hung onto that dream until he died in 1985.

My mom was a hardworking typist who worked from home, and supported the family. During her lifetime she wrote around 300 poems in Afrikaans (her native language) which she later also translated most of them into English. Although she did try to have them published a few times during the 1960s, she found no success. She didn’t really talk about it, and I suppose she’d already given up on all her dreams by the time I came along. I didn’t find out she was a poet until I was already nearly finished with primary school.

While I was growing up and exploring my own writing interests, I received a huge amount of interest and support from both my parents. Instead of reading me bedtime stories, dad used to sit with me and we would make up stories together and have hours of fun! Mom used to coach me with poetry when I started high school and used to give me a lot of vital encouragement in my writing although she didn’t fancy sci-fi much, so she found that to be a bit of an obstacle. She died in 2013.

In about 2005, when I discovered self-publishing, I published Dad’s books on Lulu. Today, all but one are available on Amazon—there’s still one I need to finish editing and formatting. Some years after my mom’s death I also compiled her poems into two volumes, an English version and an original Afrikaans version, and published them via KDP. For me, this was the least I could do for them after all they’d done to inspire and support me.

Q: What are the major challenges of working as a South African author, and what would you like the “first world” to know about the conditions you work under?

A: I often wonder if people who read my books ever realize the circumstances under which they were written! Let me explain: Living in South Africa is a mixed bag of fortune and misfortune. On the one hand we have all sorts of laws here protecting us from persecution or exploitation that many first-worlders don’t. On the other hand, we also have a major corruption problem, insanely high crime and a failing economy (our currency, the Rand, has been at junk status for several years already), and for about ten years now we’ve had to endure a thing called “loadshedding”, which means rolling electricity black-outs. Sometimes we are left without electricity anything between 4 and 8 hours every 24 hours – which means that a laptop is a must – as is keeping it charged!

Another drawback of being an indie author in South Africa is that our options in how or where we want to self-publish our books are much more limited. ACX for example, still doesn’t allow authors from SA to operate an account to be able to contract with narrators to create audiobooks, and I have no idea when or if this will ever change. In the meantime, I’ve still managed to get 22 of my books turned into audiobooks via third parties like “Moon Books Publishing”, and then later “Peever Publishing”. KDP also didn’t allow writers from South Africa to register on their platform until as recently as 2021, so after my previous publisher “Moon Books Publishing” (a small indie press) died in January last year, I was finally able to self-publish via KDP for the first time!

It’s also hard to meet with fans, or to arrange book signings, or attend cons because most of my readers are actually located abroad. Also, my books are harder to come by in my home country, mainly because buying physical books costs so much with the currency conversion, and they have to be ordered off Amazon. Paying for services like editing, formatting, cover design and the like also becomes a major problem when your local currency is circling the drain at around R19 (ZAR) to the $1 (USD). I see it is R18.70 today. That means for every dollar a service provider asks for a particular service or item, we need to multiply its value over 18 times to calculate the value in Rands – and believe me, when I see people say “It’s only $50!” while calling me a “cheapskate,” I’m already working out how much food or other necessities I can get for R935.12! So, do I really need that service/item from overseas – or could I use it to pay for one and a half tanks of gas for my car instead? That’s basically why I ended up having to do everything myself all along – and the things I didn’t already know how to do, I had to figure out for myself! That’s why I do my own editing, cover design, formatting – and also (unfortunately) marketing.

Payment options are also limited due to my location, for example, some publishing platforms will only offer specific payment options that might not be available to me in South Africa. I can use PayPal, but there’s only one bank in the entire country that will allow South Africans to withdraw money from your Paypal account – and the arrangements and process are so vague, obscure and bizarrely obscure to figure out, that it almost gave me an embolism just interrogating the staff at various branches of First National Bank!

Q:Your wife Wendy is also an author. Do you critique each other’s work or collaborate in any way, or do you keep those spheres separate?

A: Wendy is my constant emotional support and writing soundboard (poor thing), because she has to put up with awkward behavior – like bursting out laughing for no apparent reason (while writing or even while thinking about writing), writing at strange hours of the day or night, and asking her questions like: “how does this sound?”, “What do you think of this idea…” and “Do you mind if I read you this paragraph?” We’ve often helped each other out in various ways when it comes to our writing – for example, it was her suggestion that I turn a short story I wrote into the Panic! Horror In Space series, and I helped her out by editing and publishing her poetry collection for her. She again helped me sort out my mother’s poetry collection by copy-typing it from the original hand-written notes, and so it goes on. Her interests have shifted recently, more towards building her new prospective career as a gaming streamer on Twitch, but even so we still bounce our ideas off each other like a game of “Pong”!

Q: How do you address gender, sexuality and diversity in your work? Do you see your fiction as an extension of your philosophical writing, or is it all part of a larger project?

A: I treat these aspects of any character as part of their nature, as I would any other features of their characterization. Sometimes I’ve focused on these aspects as part of whatever story they appear in. I’ve included a lot of LGBT characters in my stories, particularly in the Quantum Series. One of the reasons I’ve done this is because I noticed a scarcity of LGBT characters in fiction – in books, TV series and movies, except as stereotypes or as convenient plot devices, which actually just annoyed and irritated me. As far as I was concerned, LGBT characters deserve to be heroes and leading characters too – and not portrayed in a way that makes it look as though the only reason they’re even there is because they’re LGBT etc.

For me, the most important part is that the character needs to be believable as a person, and their experiences as a gay man or woman, or transgender individual follow secondary to that to round them off as a character. Mainly I write LGBT characters in leading roles in some of my books because I want to show readers that LGBT people can also be action heroes, warriors, leaders, protagonists – and occasionally, deliciously devious villains.

The last part of your question struck me as quite interesting! You see, when writing characters of this sort, I draw deeply on my own personal feelings and experiences – as a transwoman, as former male, as a woman who is married to a woman – as well as my background as an LGBT rights activist, so it comes from all those places, amalgamating as I work! I suppose when I retired from active participation in human rights organizations, I started to put my hopes and dreams of making the world a better place into my writing instead. Someone once called Quantum “sci-fi advocacy”, and I had to laugh because I couldn’t disagree. I discovered recently that there’s a genre called “transgressive fiction”, which I immediately felt I identified with on many fronts – although I don’t think it describes all my works – but I’d have to say a lot of it falls under that genre.

Q: Tell me about some of your academic research and writing, particularly about the cultic groups and beliefs.

A: Honestly, I didn’t set out to be an academic writer at the beginning! What happened was, in 2010, after several years of identifying with agnosticism, following my departure from Christianity, I started to find Wicca interesting. After reading a few books on the subject and doing some online research, I discovered there was a Wiccan coven meeting in my general location – so I met with them and joined them. For several years I was a member of the Circle.

Of course, one thing being another – and me being a human rights activist as well, it wasn’t long before I started being an activist for freedom of religion as well. By 2012 I had become a member of the South African Pagan Rights Alliance (SAPRA) committee, which I was until sometime in 2018. During that time, in the process of exploring my self, I discovered new and interesting points of view and social groupings and identities and interacted with them, online in most cases – and also offline in a few others.

In the past 13 years, I’ve rubbed elbows with occultists of various ilks, including Wiccans and Druids and general Pagans, to Satanists, self-identified vampires and weres. It’s fascinating to learn what makes these identities tick, and to explore them, and then also to find out exactly how much being said about them is true, how much is false – and to be blunt, the more I’ve learned about them the easier it is to understand people who move within these circles. In fact, I’ve often felt compelled to come to their defense when I see them faced with bigotry and persecution – which is why I initially joined the SAPRA.

It was through SAPRA that I wrote my first academic piece “Satanism: The Acid Test” (1912), and although I didn’t do it entirely alone; I had a lot of support from the marginalized groups covered by that document, who assisted me with research to complete it. STAT as it’s called is still a unique academic piece in that —unlike a plethora of other academic documents written by people judgmentally explaining Satanism, Paganism and the Vampire community/identity from outside—it carefully and meticulously explains these identities as they are understood from within them.

Following STAT, I also published another 6 papers on various topics relating to the prevailing misunderstandings of Satanism as a group of new religious movements.

Q: What are some of the main influences on your work?

A: There have been so very many! The very first time I tried to write a story, I was about 5 years old—and it took the form of about two short paragraphs, inspired by one of those terrible Hammer horror films featuring Dracula! I grew up reading, and I read a lot of books as well as comic books. My favorite comic books were Tintin and Asterix. In terms of books, as a teen I read (and re-read) every single Biggles book (by Captain W.E. Johns), a ton of sci-fi anthologies at the school library, and movie/series adaptations of Star Trek (James Blish), Space 1999, and so on. Starman Jones and The Door Into Summer by Robert A. Heinlein are two books that stuck with me to this day. The Technicolor Time Machine and Star-smashers of the Galaxy Rangers by Harry Harrison are another two greats that had a marked influence on my writing. I’d like to add Douglas Adams to the list, but to this day I’ve still never read a single one of his books, even though I have several them on my shelf! (The shame, I know!) although I enjoyed the movie adaptation of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy tremendously. I find it flattering that my own writing style has often been favorably compared to his! Movies like The Good, The Bad & The Ugly, the Alien franchise, and Event Horizon left a mark on me. “Firefly” also threw me something of a curve-ball in terms of my writing focus, and in fact, its flavor is all over the planet Deanna in the Quantum series.

The author who had the biggest influence on me by far, is Terry Pratchett – mostly for his Discworld series of novels. The moment I first read The Color of Magic in 1991, the die was cast, and I knew, that was the sort of writer I wanted to be.

Q: What made you want to be an author?

A: As a toddler I used to play at my dad’s feet while he sat writing – not on a laptop as I do, or at a typewriter, but physically writing with a pen and paper. I also remember sitting with my dad sometimes when he listened to a radio show when one of his stories was about to be broadcast on Springbok Radio. I’m not really sure why, but for some reason, I always wanted to be a writer like my dad! I suppose many kids experience that, but I’m not sure if I would’ve felt that way about anything else he did, if it weren’t writing! It’s difficult to imagine I would’ve felt inspired to follow in dad’s footsteps as, say, the paymaster of a construction company, or a security guard… or even as a policeman. And yet he was also all those things at various times of his life – although he was mostly unemployed due to being an alcoholic. I think it’s mainly because I really enjoyed telling stories as a child, making things up and using my imagination.

Q: What are your self-diagnosed strengths and weaknesses as a writer?

A: Strengths:

I’d have to say first of all, determination. I’m driven to write and create stories. Without it, I would probably have given up trying to make headway long ago. I’m like the Terminator: I simply will not stop. I may take short breaks to catch my breath though – oh look, ice-cream!

My sense of humor. Together with my determination, it will get me through pretty much anything.

My language ability. I never studied a minute in English class, never took notice of all the fiddly rules of English mechanics teachers scribbled on the chalkboard – I always just did it naturally. Pity I couldn’t do that with any of my other subjects though, right?

My love for storytelling. I love to inspire people to feel better about themselves, or about the world. I love to help people who’ve lost hope, to feel it again. I like to entertain, to inform, and to guide people’s thoughts and feelings along a storyline, and then to hit them with a surpise or a shock, or to present them with a mystery that leaves them boggled – and then to surprise them with a solution to the problem that nobody even thought of!

Weaknesses: I was once described as “verbose” by an editor who ripped all the best parts out of a story I submitted to an anthology, but honestly – as I see it, half the story isn’t the same story as the whole story.

Over-confidence… I’m probably nowhere near as good as I think I am.

Q: What are some of the challenges you face as a self-published author? What would be the ideal publishing setup?

A: My greatest challenge as a writer I think, is that I (or rather, my books) aren’t getting noticed as much as they could be. Social media marketing is very much a numbers game, and the tragic part of that is, in order for your posts (about your books) to be visible to more people, they have to be viewed by more people. It’s kind of like, if I had some bacon, I could make bacon and eggs – if I had some eggs. I’m not a marketer or a publicist, but I also have to take care of all that stuff myself too, because nobody else is going to do it for me, right? Especially not for free, which is about all I can afford to… well, afford.

This is exacerbated by the scale of my listing – I have written over 40 books now, and if I need to spend $$$ on promoting all of them, it’s just not affordable especially in the light of the exchange rate. I suck at marketing, and I really don’t like marketing… although I’m slowly starting to do a little better at it. Even so, it’s an uphill battle and it still feels that I’m shouting into the void and nothing much ever comes back. I guess that’s why they call it ‘the void’ huh? The last publisher I had was a small press called Moon Books Publishing, run by Brandon Mullins. It was basically a one-man operation, but let me tell you something, Brandon was more than just a talking head—he was a friend I chatted to on messenger every day. He supported me, he was also a fan of my work, and he believed in me. If it weren’t for him, I wouldn’t have 22 audiobooks out today. Best of all, he used to accommodate my whims and eccentricities—if I wasn’t happy with something, say a book cover I’d made, I’d make a new one and send it to him with a request to update the book on Amazon, and he’d do it. Sometimes he’d also design covers and promotional material for me, and he did marketing too in his own way.

Unfortunately, publishers like Brandon are far too rare, and he sadly passed away in January 2022, which marked my return to full-time indie publishing. That said, I’m not sure what form an ‘ideal publishing setup’ would take, honestly, but it would probably include having my own marketing team and an advertising budget. …and now I’m feeling like I’m writing a letter to Santa Claus… “Dear Santa, please could I have a red wagon, and a motorbike, and while we’re at it, a movie or series contract for one of my books?”

Q: What is your all time favorite work of yours and why?

A: That’s a tough one! I’d have to say that every piece I’ve written is my favorite at the time I completed it – until the next one! But if I really had to pick from all of them, I’d have to say it’s a tough call between “Demonspawn” and “The Time Saving Agency.”

Q: Tell me about your current projects.

A: I’m currently in a ‘recovery period’ after having just finished Freedom Inc. which was 100,180 words in just over 6 months! I still have five other stories still waiting to be finished! There’s A Nine in Time, which is the tenth book in Quantum—and you might recognize the title as being a punny reference to the old saying “a stitch in time saves nine”. Another unfinished project is “Where Darkness Softly Treads, the next title in the Galaxii Series, and then three unfinished standalone novel, Harm’s Way (a sci-fi story set in a future world, about a domineering corporation trying to silence a former undercover police detective by sending a robotic assassin after her), Sabertooth Dreams (a story centering around a twenty-something vampire and her circle of friends) and a horror story called “Pets” (about a local police detective who stumbles onto a case that leads him gradually down a bizarre, supernatural rabbit hole). While I’m on my break I’ll decide which one I’ll be working on next!

You can learn more about the author at her website Christina Engela.