Pushcart Prize nominated Kay Sexton has had more than a hundred and fifty short stories published. Recent credits include the anthologies “Mexico, a Love Story,” “Tell Tales III,” and “Tales of the Decongested;” Two Tall Tales and One Short Novel, in which she is one of three authors; and the journals Ambit, flashquake, MiPoesis, Lichen, and Mindprints. Kay was also a finalist in the University of Hertfordshire’s Writing Award, a runner-up in the 2005 ESSP short story contest judged by Sarah Hall, the author of The Electric Michelangelo, and a runner-up in the 2004 Guardian fiction contest judged by Dave Eggers. Kay has a regular column at Moondance and blogs at Writing Neuroses.

You make a living as a freelance writer, which, to me at least, is incredibly impressive. How hard is this to do? Where do you find writing jobs that pay?

Well nobody told me it was supposed to be hard, although scratch a living is more accurate than ‘make’. I only started writing fiction in 2003, so my massive ignorance about the world of publishing was invaluable; I had no idea you weren’t supposed to get published, or get paid, or be able to live off fiction, so I blithely went ahead and did all those things. If I’d known then what I know now I would have stuck to the day job, believe me!

Finding writing jobs that pay? That’s a tough one. You spend the first year working your net, milking every acquaintance you have, cold-calling people who just might hire you, and nothing happens. Then three people ring, each wanting a vast amount of work done by the same impossible deadline and you take the all the work and live on caffeine pills and adrenaline until it’s done. They take four months to pay, which is fine, because you have nothing to do for sixteen weeks but chase the invoices, because nobody offers you any work, and so it goes. Slowly though, it starts to balance out. Now I edit fiction for two places and write non-fiction for two more, on a monthly invoicing basis, and only have to take freelance journalism if it sounds interesting. The rest of my hours are devoted to chasing fiction publication, which is like chasing writing jobs that pay (see above) but exponentially tougher for infinitesimally small sums of money – but it’s a lot more fun.

What other jobs have you had?

Um. In absolutely no order: glamour model, funeral parlour receptionist, charity chief executive, breakfast cook, problem columnist, nudist colony manager, factory hand, environmental activist, recruitment consultant, yoga teacher, lion cage cleaner, waitress, butterfly netting sewer, cook, editor, life coach … that’s all I can remember off the top of my head.

Do you find a lot of opportunities for reprints or do most markets prefer unpublished work?

Reprints are hard work, but worth pursuing – especially in genre work where I find a story can easily place three times. The knack here is to build a relationship with your favourite reprint markets so that they use your stuff regularly; often under a slew of names, which is cool as long as they paypal the money to the right name! And of course you have to not be precious about writing works of outstanding genius. I write for money. One hour in an eight hour day I write for me – just like any working person who uses their lunch-break to write their novel. It just happens that in the other hours my job is also to write, but I write what people pay me for, which isn’t always what I’d opt for myself. But I’m not complaining – I’m a lucky writer, I think. To be doing this for a living? That’s heaven, even if writing about alien abductions set on deserted baseball fields (or whatever the day’s fiction commission might be) stretches me past my limits. It’s amazing how those limits expand when the bills need to be paid.

Two Tall Tales and One Short Novel, a book you co-authored, was published in July. What is the title of your contribution? What is it about? Are the tales and novel linked in any way?

My novella is called ‘Smokin’ the Queen’ and actually picks up the story told in ‘Funeral Games’ which can be read at Storyglossia. It’s about what happens to a young black man who loses his only friend and mentor and makes a journey into the British countryside to try and preserve his own sanity. And it’s about the unlikely nature of friendship, and the power of music. And bees. No they aren’t linked, we responded to a submission call and were chosen by Paul Blaney and Rebekah Lattin-Rawstrone, who also run a wonderful initiative of writers reading their own short works aloud at Foyles bookshop in London –working with them has always been a pleasure and teaming up with the other two novella-ists (ugh, is there a better word?) Lucy Fry and Heidi James, to read from TTTaOSN was an absolute joy.

Give us a plot summary of the novel you’re currently shopping around to agents. What has the agent hunt been like for you?

Second question first. Tough. But I don’t have a ‘giving up’ gene, so I keep going – I’ve come close twice, but no coconut yet! As for the current novel “Gatekeeper” is about how a young woman faces the challenges of balancing her personal life and her belief in environmental activism when a wolf pack is illegally released in the Scottish Highlands.

Your new novel is about “pornography and rivers in 1920s Hampshire.” How do these two topics merge?

The link is that they are both issues that have changed a lot since then. In fact, while pornography could get you sent to prison in 1922, now its illegal discharge of waste into rivers that will earn you a jail cell – part of what I’m exploring in the novel is how things that once seemed depraved can now appear charming (look at a 1920s dirty postcard, you’ll see worse on MTV at nine in the morning) and things that once seemed harmless (dumping in rivers and massive urban building) now strike us as dangerous and wrong. But the real link is a young man who is a covert pornographer and who uses his secret vice to save a river from destruction – with terrible personal consequences.

You write a column for Moondance. What is your angle? How often does it appear?

Well, there are themes for every issue, and I just ponder those and see what my weird mind throws up. It appears four or six times a year, and I’ve just realised I don’t know which – I simply wait for somebody to remind me that my column is due and then I write it.

Tell us about Ren Holton and Carmel Lockyer? What do they write? Where have they been published?

Carmel pays the bills! She writes commissioned erotica and without her I’d have to go and get a day job again. Ren is altogether weirder and writes horror and science fiction.

Carmel’s work has appeared recently in Scarlet Magazine, the Black Lace anthologies, the Xcite anthologies, at audible.com and at Ruthie’s Club.

Ren’s recent credits are: Apex Digest and SciFantastic, Deathgrip: Exit Laughing, Shadow Plays and a podcast at the Late Late Show and there’s work forthcoming in North of Infinity and Strange Pleasures #6.

You have a passion for environmentalism. How do you exercise this passion? Does it run over into your writing?

I do and it does. I can’t write without ‘knowing’ the place my story is set in, even if it’s another world and a lot of my stories have a strong environmental theme. I also freelance as an environmental journalist, so my passion gets fed a rich diet of pure research and new data. Above all, I believe that we need to work harder to preserve the world we live on, and in my fiction I try to convey something of the beauty, versatility and necessity of every component of our planet from algae to eagles.

You live in the UK. Are you a tea drinker? How do you feel about coffee?

”I like coffee, I like tea …” more seriously, when I’m in the States I drink coffee because your tea is frankly awful, but when I’m in the UK I drink tea because our coffee is purely atrocious.

After a long, hard day, how do you relax?

I run or do yoga, walk my dogs in the countryside or work in the garden. I live near Brighton beach where I can watch beautiful people interacting, browse beach-front galleries or drink smoothies while listening to live jazz, while just a couple of miles away are beautiful and underused footpaths across the South Downs – a person who couldn’t find a way to relax with that kind of entertainment on offer would be hard to please indeed!