Daily Inspiration: Meet Nikki Nelson-Hicks

Today we’d like to introduce you to Nikki Nelson-Hicks.

Hi Nikki, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
What are the key ingredients that create a storyteller?

It’s usually a combination of a lonely childhood, a keen sense of imagination, and a curious brain that won’t stop wondering “What if?”, topped off with a huge dollop of trauma.

A lot of us don’t make it out of childhood but I was one of the lucky ones. I was taken in by teachers that molded me, gave me a stage to perform on, and the encouragement to keep creating my own worlds.

Those were the golden days.

Time went on. I graduated high school and was told to put aside all those fancies. Dreams like that aren’t for people like us. You are poor, uneducated, with no prospects. The best you can hope is to get a job, keep your head down, get married, pray he doesn’t abuse you, pop out some kids and wait to die.

I ate those lies for decades until I decided…..fuck that.

I knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to write stories. So, I threw out some hooks and pulled up a fledgling writers’ group, Nashville Writers Group, at Meetup.com. It was 2004. I met up with four other people on the covered porch of Bongo Java. I remember it was cold and wet. There we were, four people, huddled up under a canopy, with the same dream: to write stories.

We started up the group and, like a bell, we found others. Humans are a storytelling race by nature; I believe that with my whole soul. By 2016, the Nashville Writers’ Group had over two hundred members. Together, we put out four anthologies (I edited Comfort Foods: Not Your Momma’s Cooking, a horror anthology), participated for decades at the Southern Festival of Books and, I like to think, launched several writers’ careers. Or at least gave them a place to play and be free of judgment.

Fast forward to now. I have several books under my belt in genres that range from Mystery to Steam Punk to Horror to a genre I called Voodoo Noir. I have been interviewed on several podcasts, been invited to speak on panels at conventions, written a play that I had the privilege to see performed, and written several screenplays (one of them, Angel Bar, won Best of Genre at the 2018 48 Hr Film Project), and, best of all, I am still writing. I am currently working on two short stories for anthologies being released by small presses within the year and a collection of short stories that I hope to publish under my own house, Third Crow Press, called Politics of Children & Other Stories of Revenge.

Sometimes I like to think back on that morbidly depressed woman back in 2004 and take stock of all that she has done (and best of all, what she still plans to do!) and it takes my breath away.

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
Once I got out of my own way, things were a lot smoother.

I’m luckier than most, I guess. My family supports my writing career. Primarily because when Mama isn’t writing, Mama ain’t happy and when Mama ain’t happy NOBODY IS!

This path I’ve chosen is never easy. Creating stories out of nothing is a certain type of magic; it’s never easy. I often compare it to shooting up heroin. It takes a lot of jabs but once you find that vein, it’s liquid gold!

Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
I am a writer. I have been described as the “Undisputed Queen of the Warped and the Weird” and the “Unholy child of H.P. Lovecraft and Flannery O’Connor”.

I dip my pen into a plethora of genres from Horror to Holmesian, from Supernatural Detective Pulp to Weird Western. If asked to describe what brand of horror I write, I prefer the term, “Quirky Spooky”.

My list of work includes Jake Istenhegyi: The Accidental Detective series (Voodoo Noir), Sherlock Holmes and the Shrieking Pits, Rumble (Horror/Monster Story), The Galvanized Girl (Feminist Steampunk, The Perverse Muse (Mystery with a tinge of horror), The Problem at Gruff Springs (Weird Western), Revenge of the Blood Red Maid (Steampunk-ish) and a collection of horror stories, Stone Baby and Other Strange Tales. Her next collection of stories, Politics of Children and Other Stories of Revenge will be released in 2023.

I’m proud of all my work but the one that rises to the top as of late is The Perverse Muse. It’s a scary little story I wrote about Edgar Allan Poe that answers a question not a lot of people ever seem to wonder: Why do all the women in his life die?

Recently, I was at a lecture about the author that was given by a distant cousin of Poe and I gave him a copy of that story. That took so much nerve!

What sets me apart from other horror writers is that I do a lot of research. I mean… I get in down in the trenches.

When I lived in Muscat, I searched for Djinn in the Spirit Caves of Oman and collected talismans and pre-Islamic Zar rings that were used in exorcism rituals, I have done my share of ghost hunting and slept in a haunted room in Iowa where four children were axed to death. My love of the macabre started in early childhood and continued into adulthood and I love to use it in my stories.

What makes you happy?
As I get older, it is the simple things that I crave more than anything else.

However, as anyone who knows me will attest, I am happiest (and most stable) when I am deep in a project, working on a story and the words flow. (Ah! and we’re back to that heroin metaphor).

But, if I can’t have that, a glass of good Cabernet, a bonfire, and a bunch of good friends are really all I require to be happy.

I am a simple soul.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.nnhbooks.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nikcubed/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nikcubed
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikki-nelson-hicks-774b562b/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/nikcubed
• Other: https://linktr.ee/nikcubed 

Image Credits
Brenna Gael Hicks (Stone Baby cover) and Jeffrey Hayes