All about her writing and inspiration

Who is Samantha Tano?

Samantha Tano is a science fiction author based in Rhode Island. After starting out in journalism as an award-winning reporter, she moved to Denver, Colorado, and worked as an award-winning development editor for a non-fiction press. Writing has always been central to her life through short stories, microfiction, fan-fiction, and novels. Her microfiction has appeared online in Deep South Magazine.

What is her book In the Valley, A Shadow about?

The frontier planet Celestine, millennia from now. It was supposed to be the furthest Alix could get from the Xypha Corporation, that all-consuming entity at the heart of humanity’s interstellar expansion.

After the Xypha forward station arrives in orbit, Alix, a transgender pilot, finds herself out of work and her ship grounded. She’ll do anything to pay off her mounting debts so she can fly again—even if it means killing for the meanest crime boss in the Isidis Valley.

As Xypha’s influence grows, Alix is trapped in a web of betrayal and politics that threatens more than just her life.

Armed with a pair of Plasveld-7s, a sharp wit, and with the love of her life by her side, Alix embarks on a deadly path across the valley. Can she flee Xypha’s creeping shadow, or is it time to stop running and stand her ground?

Interview

What inspires your writing?

I really want to write stories that feature people like myself: queer and trans. So often these stories focus on our suffering and struggles as trans people (rightfully so!), but also we deserve to appear in novels, movies, TV shows, all media, as just a part of the normal fabric of life.

I also take a lot of inspiration from books and movies I love. In the Valley, A Shadow, is very much inspired by Sergio Leone Spaghetti Western films, as well as things like Star Wars, Cowboy Bebop, and more.

What drew you to writing?

I have always been creating stories in my head, with toys, and things as a kid. I was the youngest child, so the majority of my time at play was spent alone. I had to create things all by myself. I started writing short stories at a very young age. I was an avid reader as a kid, so really I just wanted to do that, create books like those I loved reading. So I would write stories by hand or on a typewriter and staple them together to make a little book.

How did you choose which character to centre the story around?

I started In the Valley, A Shadow back in 2020 when I got laid off during the early pandemic. I wasn’t out then, but I wanted to write a book focusing on a female character, since I had never done that before. So, Alix was always the main character, but things really changed when I came out and started transitioning in 2021.

What was your process for writing your book?

I really have to write in chronological order, and I’m pretty much a “pantser.” I don’t do any outlining, but I do daydream a lot. I imagine scenes pretty vividly, and play them over in my head on repeat. But also this book was altered pretty dramatically by my transition.

I wrote a full 100,000 word draft in 2020, which I tried to query for trad publishing. But eventually, after starting my transition, I sat down and rewrote the entire thing from scratch in late 2023. I changed almost everything about the plot and eliminated some characters, and added others. Alix is a transgender woman, so that also had to inform a lot of things in the story. I had a new, clear scene at the climax, so that pulled me along and I just had to figure out how to get to that point.

What is your approach to world and character-building?

Like I said, I’m a pantser, so I wing it a lot. Most of my world-building is done in the moment while I’m writing, through physical descriptions of places, landscapes, and little details of the world the characters inhabit. I’m not really sitting down and building out a whole detailed reality in a separate file, or anything. Most of this remains inside my head.

I’m also a fairly understated writer, I’d say. I like to mention details of things, but not hand-feed answers to the reader. I mention a lot of wildlife and flora of the planet Celestine in the novel, but I’m not spending time elaborating on it. The reader will fill in those gaps with their own imagination, and use context clues, I hope. World-building is one of my favorite things to do by passing mention, drop a little detail here and there, but my love of Tolkien and his prose means I love spending time describing landscapes.

For characters, obviously I draw on archetypes that appear in the genre or in things I’m taking inspiration from. But I also think, “how can I add a little twist onto this archetype we all are familiar with?” Some characters in the novel are very much archetypes that I want to have fun with: the Thin Man villain is totally inspired by villains in the aforementioned Spaghetti Westerns, even down to not having a name, such as Angel Eyes in The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly. Felix is the robot/android sidekick, but I wanted him to be as human, if not moreso, than many characters around him.

Did you have a favourite moment in the book to write?

I love writing action scenes! My daydreaming process really turns things into a cinematic in my head. I’m autistic so a lot of things happen in my head, and on repeat, so that helps me really focus on movement, and work out how things like “gun” fights and fist fights happen. As opposed to writing broad strokes of the action, I really like to get into the details. The climactic fight, I don’t want to spoil anything, but Alix takes on an entire gang of enemies by herself, and leads into a hand-to-hand final showdown was the one scene I had so clearly in my mind from the beginning. 

Which of the characters do you relate to the most and why?

Obviously there’s so much about myself that I put into Alix, whether true, or aspirational. She’s a trans woman, so there’s obviously that experience, but she also is kind of a tough onion, with a lot of layers, but there’s a wounded child down there in the center. I think a lot of us have that wounded child that deserves to be healed. But, Alix has a lot of flaws too, especially when it comes to how she handles injustice. In that way, she is a bit of a representation of the dark side, the intrusive thoughts, when I look around and see what the world is doing to transgender people, and the innumerable crimes against humanity going on in the world right now.

Has writing and publishing a book changed the way you see yourself?

I am autistic, and have ADHD, so one of the biggest struggles I have on a day-to-day basis is with Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria. I’ve always wanted to be a published author and really needed “validation” from the Literary and traditional publishing world. I studied literary fiction in college, so I thought that was who I wanted to be as a writer.

But I realized in this process that wasn’t really me, but who I think people expected me to be: especially as I was pretending to be a cisgender, heterosexual male. Writing Alix in 2020 helped me come to terms with my identity, and gave me permission to explore and examine a female identity. So, in a way, this book helped me realize who I am, and in turn, after coming out, I had to start over and write Alix as a transgender woman, because it was important to me to create that representation for myself.

I’m really kind of in disbelief sometimes that I actually was able to pull this thing off, in spite of things like RSD, persistent demand avoidance (another aspect of my autism), and gender dysphoria. But it really felt like an exercise in finally claiming myself to self-publish this thing.

Are there any books or authors that inspired you to become a writer?

Oh without a doubt. J.R.R. Tolkien, Jules Verne, John Steinbeck, Mary Shelley, Oscar Wilde, E.K. Johnston, Sam Maggs, and so many more. I grew up reading classics because I owned these illustrated versions of them that were focused toward children. The Call of the Wild, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Sherlock Holmes, and things like that.

What advice would you give to a writer working on their first book, and what advice were you given?

Just keep going. You can do this. I think there’s so much “writing advice” online now, but I don’t find much of it very relatable because it seems so neurotypical to me: write every day, set word count goals, the first draft is supposed to suck, just write it regardless. Those things actually turn me away from writing because they trigger my demand avoidance.

If they work for you that’s GREAT!!! But they are not RULES. I think a lot of writing advice is given with the air of “this is how to be a writer.” There is no one way to be a writer. If you write, you are a writer. You aren’t “aspiring”—you are a writer.

The best help I found was on Threads, just seeking out other indie authors who went through the self-publishing process. It was so foreign to me, and honestly, it has such a bad reputation as being invalid, or that it’s bad writing, which it absolutely isn’t. My advice would be: find your peers wherever you can and just find people who will validate you, encourage you, and give you those pep talks.

What’s your favourite writing snack or drink?

Since I don’t keep a specific schedule or have any kind of ritual around writing every day, or anything like that, I don’t really have a specific drink or snack for writing. But I am the neurodivergent “beverage goblin”, too, so I’ll often have a glass of water and a soda nearby. I’m not much of a snacky person though, so I don’t have much in the way of traditional snacks in the house.

Do you play music while you write — and, if so, what’s your favourite music?

Sometimes, if the mood is right. In general I love listening to classical film scores. Since I took a lot of inspiration from western films, a lot of the vibes for my novel come from the incredible music of Ennio Morricone. I created a playlist for In the Valley, A Shadow, which features a lot of his work.

Who has been the biggest supporter of your writing

My wife, Kelly. She’s the first person in my life to encourage my writing, not as a “career” to make money, or as a “discipline,” but just as an art. We bonded over our love of reading and books, so she’s always been someone who appreciated my work, and she was someone I respected immensely, so when she told me back when we were just friends that I was a good writer, I believed her. Without her support and validation, I don’t know that I would’ve had the drive to keep writing.