ABOUT
Marissa van Uden loves wild places, wild creatures, and Weird horror. She grew up in Aotearoa New Zealand, has lived in Munich, Berlin, and Los Angeles, and now resides in a cabin in the woods of rural Vermont. When she’s not working on stories, she’s usually sitting by the pond watching the beavers, taking photos of fungi and lichen, or communing with chickadees.
Marissa is the editor of Strange Libations: Dark Cocktails anthology, the forthcoming anthologies Strange Machines: Dark Manuals (Apex Books) and The Off-Season: An Anthology of Coastal New Weird (Dark Matter Ink). She’s also an acquisitions editor for Dark Matter Magazine and an associate editor at Apex Magazine. Her stories appear in Dark Matter Magazine, Los Suelos and Zero Dark Thirty. She’s an active member of the HWA and EFA.
TESTIMONIALS
Marissa is a consummate and talented editor, always challenging me to look at my own work with fresh eyes and think again how to make it better. I attribute much of my growth as a writer in the last two years to working with her, and I count it a privilege to have had that opportunity. I cannot recommend her enough.
Marissa is a fantastic editor. … Her line edits are some of the best I’ve seen. I highly recommend her.
Marissa has reset my bar for creative collaborators. From the firm guiding hand, to the side conversations about literature, to the different points of view she was able to get me to look at my own work, our time together was invaluable.
It’s kind of creepy, how you get in my head and know what I mean even when I write it badly. Some authors I know resent the edit process, but it felt empowering to share the vision with you. I learned more during these edit sessions about my own weaknesses and how a reader views my words than I have in any other experience.
Your work is extraordinary. I can’t even begin to enumerate what I like about it. It’s all wonderful.
Working with Marissa as a developmental editor was a wonderful experience from start to finish. She identified story issues that had escaped both me and my critique partners and made her suggestions with such insight and enthusiasm that I was left energized rather than anxious about the revisions ahead. I have no doubt my book is much stronger thanks to her guidance. Can’t wait to work with her again!
RECENT POSTS
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Fantasy tastes of habaneros and honey…
I stumbled across this beautiful quote by GRRM on why he writes fantasy - how great is this? It so perfectly captures my love for fantasy, science fiction and all its wild colors. We fantasy readers are the children who dreamed of hunting the forests at night and...
The Cities of Dead
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HP Lovecraft’s THE SHADOW OUT OF TIME
I recently re-read HP Lovecraft's The Shadow Out of Time for an SFF Audio Podcast episode. It's one of my favorite Lovecraft stories because it's got all that obligatory cosmic horror, primordial masonry, and "unguessable horrors" (as Lovecraft calls it in...
MERMAIDS AND THE VAMPIRES WHO LOVE THEM by Debbie Goelz
"Everyone knows mermaid blood is like vampire crack ..." I had a reeee-diculous amount of fun helping the brilliant Debbie Goelz with early developmental edits on this gorgeous and funny YA novel. Mermaids and the Vampires Who Love Them is -- if you can't tell from...
BORNE by Jeff VanderMeer (book review)
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