An hour-long conversation with Anna Mocikat, the award-nominated, internationally published author of the Behind Blue Eyes cyberpunk series, as well as the Tales of the Shadow City series, and the MUC series.

Websitewww.annamocikat.com

Twitter@anna_mocikat

Facebook@amocikat

Instagram@AnnaMocikat

Anna Mocikat’s YouTube Channel

Anna Mocikat’s Amazon Page

The Introduction

Anna Mocikat is the award-nominated, internationally published author of Behind Blue Eyes, the Tales of the Shadow City series, and the MUC series. Born in Warsaw, Poland, she spent most of her life in Germany, where, before becoming a novelist, she graduated from film school and worked as a screenwriter and game writer for more than a decade. Her MUC novels, published by a major German publisher, were nominated for Germany’s most prestigious awards for fantasy and science fiction.

In 2016, Anna moved to the US, where she continues her writing career in English. She lives in Greenville, South Carolina.

The (Lightly Edited) Transcript

So, Anna, welcome to The Worldshapers!

Hi, Ed, thank you very much for inviting me.

OK, I’m going to tell what happened because . . . we started, and I realized about five minutes in that I had pressed record. So, this is take two.

Well, you’re human, you know. You’re not a cyborg or something like that. So, you’re entitled to making mistakes. That’s OK.

I don’t mind telling listeners. I’m a stage actor, and if there’s one thing you learn as a stage actor, it’s that what audiences really like is to see something go wrong.

Oh, yeah, definitely. That’s also why all the fail videos are so, so popular on YouTube. People love it just to watch how people fail with whatever, right?

Blooper reels and all that sort of thing.

Fall from a bicycle or all kinds of stuff, that’s just the best. You know, you laugh about something and are happy it didn’t happen to you.

So, I guess I should repeat again what I said the first time around, that failed to record, which is that my only connection that . . . we’ve never met, but I’ve been to Warsaw, and it was a long time ago when it was still a communist country, Poland, in the mid-1980s. And I went there as a singer with my choir from Harding University in Searcy, Arkansas. So, we went down there with a bunch of Southerners, we were in Poland, and it was a very interesting tour all over Europe. I mean, it wasn’t just Poland, obviously. We were in Hungary, and we came through Checkpoint Charlie when we came out of Eastern Europe into Western Europe. And if you told me in 1987 that that wall would be gone a year later, it would have I wouldn’t have believed it. So, I’m glad I got to go then, but I’m glad it’s not like that now.

Oh, yeah, me too. Definitely. I think everybody is.

So, we will start by taking you back into the mists of time, as I like to say, to when you were growing up and how did the whole writing thing come about for you?