1.- Could you introduce yourself to Jamreads’ readers?
Hello I am Eliane Boey, an SFF writer living in Singapore. I’m the author of Club Contango, out soon from Dark Matter INK, as well as the novella collection Other Minds, and short stories in Clarkesworld, the Penn Review, and others. 

2.- How did you start writing?
I’ve always been a reader, but I didn’t start writing until 2019. I started with literary short stories, and wrote a gothic thriller that is best left in the drawer. I wrote my first science fiction short two years later, and since then I’ve not looked back. 

3.- Your first publications were mostly short stories. How is the process of writing a short story for you?
For short stories, I generally try to get the skeleton down in a day. I’ll keep adding to it over the weeks that I work on it but I like to start with a map of what I think will happen. Even if how the story actually turns out might be quite something else! 

4.- What was the original idea behind Other Minds? What made you choose this kind of setting?
I wanted to write cyberpunk set in a world that was familiar to me. It was so fun and also a bit terrifying to imagine the ambitions and fears that we have today taken to their extremes in the high-functioning dystopia built on ill-executed good intentions, that SE3 is.

5.- Did you find it challenging to create those two novellas to connect in the same world?
Other Minds contains the novellas Signal\Tracer, and Carrier. The former takes place in 2050, and the latter in 2086. So that’s plausibly within our lifetimes, and they are connected thematically by ambition and creation. Carrier takes place almost entirely on a spaceship so I didn’t have to put in much work for the city, but you can see the developments of the same ideals from the first novella. 

6. What inspired you to create Club Contango?
In 2023 I, published a short story in Dark Matter Magazine #16, Contango, about a woman who finds a way to trade human futures. I knew I wanted to take that idea and go further with it. What if you bet on your own future? What position would you take? And what kind of person would do that? And what could go wrong? I am also a fan of the film Boiler Room, so it kind of came together for me that way.

7.- Connie Lam is a character that I find easy to empathize with. How did she evolve from her inception to the final moment?
I don’t think she evolved so much as she demanded to be written. Club Contango is Connie’s story. It begins with a bad gamble, an underground micro-casino, a string of bad debts, and even worse decisions. It took someone like Connie to carry that and yet–I hope!--hold onto the reader’s sympathy.

8.- Which part of writing Club Contango ended up being the most challenging for you?
Connie Lam battles maternal depression, but the mood of Club Contango is noir with a good amount of humour. The biggest challenge for me was achieving that gallows humour while doing justice to the character and condition.

9.- I find the idea of betting against the odds of your life quite curious. Was this an idea from the original draft or a later addition?
It was always there in the beginning. I thought of that gamble when I was trying to imagine what a person who kept on losing but wanted to look that failure in the face, laugh at it, and maybe even earn from it, would do. 

10.- As a writer based in Singapore, do you find it to be an extra barrier to be published as an ESL writer?
I grew up with English, but English as commonly spoken in Singapore is a localised form known as Singlish. The dialogue I give my characters doesn’t have any of that Singaporean slang or structure. Maybe one day I’ll write some of that into my novels.

11.- Which other pieces of media would you recommend to people that enjoyed Club Contango?

Some books I’ve recently enjoyed that also explore the cultural habits of the space set are Lavanya Lakshiminarayan’s Interstellar Megachef, Victor Manibo’s Escape Velocity, and Edward Ashton’s The Fourth Consort

12.- What can we expect from Eliane Boey in the future?
I hope to have another Tracerverse novel out in the near future! Meanwhile I’m working on an urban fantasy, and I’m returning to cyberpunk with a standalone novella on the back burner.