Heartland

I love the mixture of absurdity and accuracy in writer Mark Teppo‘s bio (from his site): “Mark Teppo suffers from a mild case of bibliomania, which serves him well in his on-going pursuit of a writing career. He also owns a pink bunny suit. Fascinated with the mystical and the extra-ordinary, he channels this enthusiasm into fictional explorations of magic realism, urban fantasy, and surreal experimentation. Maybe, one day, he’ll write a space opera. With rabbits.” We delve into a range of products in this email interview. My thanks to Teppo for his thoughts/time and to friend of the blog Allison Baker for introducing me in contact with Teppo. One of his collaborations, The Mongoliad, actually had its official launch earlier today, be sure to visit the site.

Tim O’Shea: As an urban fantasy author, I’m curious did you grow up in a city? What is it that attracted you to writing in the urban fantasy vein?

Mark Teppo: I grew up in a speck of a town out in the Mohave Desert, and spent a better part of my formative years in a towns under 100,000 people. It wasn’t until I moved to the Seattle area going on twenty years ago that I really arrived in a city, proper. I grew up on a diet of thrillers and mainstream mystery fiction, which always seemed to take place in big cities. In the classic “write what you know sense,” this is what I knew: all the action took place in the cities. As for the fantasy part, well, I didn’t think I knew enough about international politics and guns to write a convincing thriller.

O’Shea: In a recent essay about your writing, you said of Lightbreaker, the first book in the Codex of Souls series: “I was going to write an urban fantasy book without vampires, lycanthropes, zombies, angels, or demons.” When and why did you realize you wanted to approach the book without vampires, lycanthropes, zombies, angels, or demons?

Teppo: In the original version of LIGHTBREAKER, written more than fifteen years ago, the protagonist was both a werewolf AND a vampire. Basically, I couldn’t decide which, and when I came back to the book around the turn of the millennium, I realized that (a) the market was already filled with both, and (b) I couldn’t really wrap my head around the vampire mythology in the 21st century. The old, Bram Stoker-era, vampire rules make little or no sense in the modern era, and being chained to them seemed like a real chore. Plus what I was really interested in was magic and religion, and it didn’t take much to see the easy solution to all my problems.

O’Shea: You recently released the second book in the Codex of Souls series, Heartland. In returning to the Codex of Souls series, were there certain characters or dynamics of the series that you were most looking forward to working with again?

Teppo: HEARTLAND is a continuation of the story started in LIGHTBREAKER, and was a book that I wrote five versions of before I figured out how to edit a manuscript. In many ways, I’ve been carrying around both of the books for a long time, and I’m very happy to have them behind me now. There was a lot of emotional baggage with the character that was really tough to not let flavor the work, and I’m fairly pleased that I managed to strip out most of it in HEARTLAND.

That said, I’m really looking forward to ANGEL TONGUE and KARMA KISS (books 3 and 4) as they’ve never been plotted or written. They are completely new territory for me, and I like the idea that I have no better idea what’s going to happen than the protagonist. I have some idea, but the journey of getting from the beginning to the end is always a marvel. I like to punish the characters a lot to see how they’ll react, and it’s always a fascinating evolution. I know where ANGEL TONGUE and KARMA KISS go (and where the series itself is going), but the details are going to be fun to uncover.

I like that I’ve closed the loop on the protagonist’s relationship with a person from his past; I’ve got someone new in mind for him, someone that I hope will stick around for a few books, and I’m building her background to be quite different from his. It’s the oldest trick in the book–throw together two incompatible elements and see what happens–and I’m embracing it shamelessly.

O’Shea: When one has a distinct vision of a universe or concept, as you do with the Codex of Souls series, is it more flattering or frustrating when readers interpret your intention with a plot or a character in manner you never intended when writing it?

Teppo: I had a friend IM’ing me every day as he read LIGHTBREAKER, and it was fascinating to watch the evolution of his understanding of the protagonist, and he offered a number of insights into the character that hadn’t concretely occurred to me. I think I learned as much about the character as my friend did, which proved to be useful when I was doing the final touches on HEARTLAND.

I think everyone will interpret a creative act differently; I think that’s part of the magic of sharing these sorts of things. You don’t all have the same understanding of the impetus and meaning of a piece of work, and part of my job as a writer is to make something that resonates for a lot of people. But I can only get better at making these resonances by paying attention to other people’s reactions. It can be frustrating, yes, when people seem to mis-interpret the work, but part of what I have to ask myself is this because I wasn’t clear enough? What can I do to make the next work more clear?

I’ve always cited Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles and Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun series as seminal works that I enjoy coming back to time and again because there are always aspects of their work that I FINALLY understand in the latest reading. It’s not crucial that the reader completely syncs with my intention; I’d rather it give them something to think about (above the visceral entertainment of the experience, of course), and perhaps it will drive them to try something new or come back to the work again later and discover something else in it.

O’Shea: For aspiring writers, I think the arduous creative process in your work is something they should take note of–and appreciate the patience it took for you to get the first two books of the Codex of Souls series written. As you note in this blog post: “Drafts of the first two Codex of Souls books go back more than a decade”. How taxing was it for you to keep at the books, working and revising them over the course of several years?

Teppo: We shopped LIGHTBREAKER for about three years back in the day, and the main frustration at that time was that the urban fantasy market as we know it today didn’t exist. I was an untested writer writing something that no one could pigeonhole, and every rejection we got cited a different genre as where it would be placed. I took five years or so off in the interim (to sulk, mainly, and to indulge in some writing about experimental and electronic music). When I came back to writing fiction, I had a better idea of what I really wanted to do, as well as an awareness of the hard work it would entail. I found a new agent (rather, he found me) who was understanding about my desire to rework the book, and after that it was a matter of finding the right publisher.

I didn’t have any doubt that we’d sell it the second time around. It still took a few years, but we were being patient about who we shopped it to during that time. Like any book, by the time you actually see it in print, you’ve touched every word several times and it’s always nice to be DONE. It took another year before I stopped being able to cite chapter and page when someone mentioned a line from the book, and now I can actually pick it up and be pleasantly surprised by parts of it.

Every time I came back to the manuscript, it was clear what needed to be done, and so it was a part of doing the work. Taxing, yes, in that it gets very detail-oriented, but that’s the ugly grind of being a writer. I actually like it. I used to abhor editing and the detail work, but now I enjoy the fine-tuning that comes at the end.

It’s the first two weeks of a new book that I really dislike.

O’Shea: Can you recall when your interest in magick and the occult took root?

Teppo: I studied religion and mythology in college, when I wasn’t playing D & D. Somewhere in there, I stumbled upon Aleister Crowley as well as The Fields of the Nephilim, an English band whose earlier work was based around the legends of the Nephilim and Sumerian rituals. These days, I think The Fields of the Nephilim are the best example of chaos magick rituals set to music, but then I’m pretty biased in my love for them.

Eh, let’s be honest, I was a goth kid who was more into ritual and magic than wearing black and wanting to be undead.

O’Shea: Did your parents instill your serial bibliophilia in you, or is that something you nurtured all on your own?

Teppo: There were always books around when I was growing up. Every room had a bookcase or two in it, and every trip we took as a family included stops at bookstores. It was the way of the world, I thought. When my wife and I were shopping for our first house, there were certain houses that I would have this near pathological reaction to–I just didn’t like them–and it took me a while to realize that it was because they didn’t have any books in them. One place had their single bookcase shoved in a back closet. Creeped me out.

O’Shea: How did you end up as chief creative officer at Subutai Corporation? Is this your first collaboration with Neal Stephenson and the other officers in the venture?

Teppo: It’s my first collaboration with everyone. We’ve all know each other–either directly, or by one degree or so of separation–for a couple of years now, and the project grew organically out of some random conversations about a project (like they do). I was the detail-oriented writer guy who didn’t have a book due in the next six months, and after a few months of doing the work, everyone agreed that the position was a good fit for me. Kind of boring, really: I showed up, did the work, and will keep on doing it until someone turns out the lights and tells us all to go home.

O’Shea: Subutai Corporation’s first major project is The Mongoliad, an experimental fiction project designed for smart phones. How experimental will it be, do you all plan to push the boundaries of the platform with typography or in what way do you hope to experiment?

Teppo: It’s not terribly experimental in what it is: a serial adventure novel. What’s groundbreaking about it is the primary manner in which we’re delivering it to our readers–via smart phones and other mobile devices. The technology–and, more importantly, this generation’s adoption of that technology–has reached a point where we all have devices that are capable of reading things like serial fiction. I don’t think people like to read any less than they have in the past, but they are living much more mobile lives and the opportunity to sit down and read a book–or to read something on a computer screen–is rapidly becoming a luxury. It’s just not the sort of activity that we have TIME for anymore, at least, not in its previous iterations. We still have lots of down time when we’re waiting for a bus or for an appointment or a meeting–there’s no end of waiting–and what we’re doing now in that time is staring at our mobile devices.

Secretly, we’re all hoping some good, rousing serial fiction will magically show up on our screens. In the meantime, we’ll play another hand of Solitaire or update our Facebook status or try to send a tweet.

What these devices do is keep us connected with all our friends in this real-time virtual environment, and when you’re this hyper-connnected with your friends, you have a relationship with everyone that is based on very little filtering and is very immediate. If you’re all reading the same serial fiction and it provides mechanisms for sharing and discussions built-in, then the ability to have that next-day watercooler discussion–you know, how we used to stand around and dissect last night’s episode of Lost–becomes real-time. We’re all chatting and commenting about the fiction immediately after it is released.

Wouldn’t it be great if this discussion actually had an impact on the course of the story?

O’Shea: Is there a finite end point for The Mongoliad or do the creators have no idea where it will end at this point and want the story to evolve based on user response?

Teppo: We’re going to break it into seasons. It’s an arbitrary term, but the concept of a TV season is the closest match to what we’re envisioning. We do have some overarching plans for the entire world, but for the short term, we’re going to play things close to our chests and evolve the story as the audience seems to like it. The splash page for The Mongoliad mentions “Foreworld,” and that’s our umbrella name for our version of history because we’ve already scoped entry points that aren’t in the 13th century. We’ll run it as long as people care to show up and read, and we’re cognizant of the perception that the writers of Lost had to deal with (that there was no end planned), and so we’re going to try to iterate through cycles well enough that people feel a sense of closure at regular intervals.

It may be dangerous to have me in charge, as I fully believe that (a) you should leave the stage before you’re thrown out, and (b) writers have no dearth of good ideas, and so I don’t see any problem will wrapping up a story line or killing a character that people like–as long as it is done well. Everyone overstays their welcome eventually; it is just a matter of sensing when it is time to go before everyone else does.

Hal Duncan

I always appreciate when a friend of the blog broadens my area of knowledge by suggesting an interview subject. This week, thanks to a suggestion from Allison Baker (of MonkeyBrain Books), I present my interview with self-described strange fiction writer Hal Duncan. Here’s a snippet of Duncan‘s bio: “A member of the Glasgow SF Writers Circle, his first novel, VELLUM, won the Spectrum Award and was nominated for the Crawford, the BFS Award and the World Fantasy Award. As well as the sequel, INK, he has published a poetry collection, SONNETS FOR ORPHEUS, a stand-alone novella, ESCAPE FROM HELL!, and various short stories in magazines such as Fantasy, Strange Horizons and Interzone, and anthologies such as NOVA SCOTIA, LOGORRHEA, and PAPER CITIES.” In addition to discussing his theories on fiction as well as his work in general, he and I also discussed a musical recently produced that was written by him–and the experience of writing a screenplay. I always thank folks when they give me the honor of their valuable time, but I have to give Duncan an extra big thanks for the level of detail and consideration he gave to his answers.

Tim O’Shea: Your first novel, Vellum, was translated into several different languages. How much were you involved in that process? Can you think of any country where you were pleasantly surprised to find readers took strongly to the book?

Hal Duncan: With some of the translations I’ve had no involvement at all; with others there’s been a lot of back-and-forth. They’re not the easiest books in the world to translate by a long shot, I know; there’s all manner of poetic techniques, dialect, wordplay, even a mixture of mythical, historical, and alternate-history settings that means passing references could be authentic history or utterly spurious. I regard my translators with a mixture of shame at what I put them through and wonder at the fact they’re tackling it. So if there’s anything I can do to help, I’ll do it. It’s fascinating to see the process anyway.

The response in Finland has probably been the most pleasant surprise. Not so much the feedback about the translation itself, because Nina Saikkonen is one of the translators I’ve worked closely with, and knowing how much she’s put into it, I knew it was going to be excellent; and there was already a lot of support in Finnish fandom from the response to the UK edition. I got a guest of honour invite came from a convention organised by Finns even before the book was out there. And the novel is fairly outré in some respects — I’ve referred to it as cubist fantasy, and I’m only half-joking — so it was awesome to find sf fans passionate about work that plays fast and loose with genre conventions, focused on that more than the bestseller material, inviting someone like myself rather than an obvious popular choice.

And while that gave me a lot of confidence in how the translation would go down with Finnish fandom, the response beyond that has been way more than I expected. When it was launched at the Helsinki Book Fair, it sold like crazy, sold out twice so new stock had to be brought from the warehouse; before I left the country it had gone to another print run. The coverage was superb too — front page of the culture section of the Helsingin Sanomat, which is basically Finland’s London Times. This may just be a marker of the culture in general. I was over again in June just past, because the translation had won the Tahtivaeltaja prize, and again there was good media coverage — newspapers, a radio interview, a tv interview that hit the nine o’clock news a few weeks back. Maybe it’s not the response to the book per se, but that degree of receptiveness was totally unexpected and wonderful.

O’Shea: There’s been two novels in the The Book of All Hours series, do you have any interest in doing more–or are you content to stick with the two?

Duncan: I’ve returned to some of the characters, and I probably will again, but The Book of All Hours is complete with those two works. Structurally, I couldn’t really expand the series, even if I wanted to. Each book is in two volumes and each of those four volumes is thematically based on a season and a time of day — Summer/Day, Fall/Dusk, Winter/Night, Spring/Dawn — so tacking on a sequel or prequel would just screw up that structure. No, the only way I could expand it would be to break it apart and expand each volume into its own book — which *would* be theoretically possible, right enough, since the narrative is a sort of mosaic structure anyway. And, of course, I could then expand those four books into a trilogy each, so you had one for every month to keep with the seasonal cycle structure. And then…

But that would, of course, be nuts. No, I think I’ll stick with the two as is.

O’Shea: In 2008, you released Escape From Hell!, which was published by Monkeybrain Books. How did this project come about with Monkeybrain?

Duncan: Two drunken evenings over cocktails. The first was at a World Fantasy Convention — in Austin, I think — where I was hanging with Chris Roberson and Allison Baker of Monkeybrain, drinking white russians and smoking on the hotel bar verandah. Which is pretty much how I’ve spent most WFCs since my first, where I met them and we immediately hit it off in our mutual love of fine cocktails, cancer sticks and good craic. Anyway, there was a conversation going on, if I remember right, about how we were all fed up with books being monstrously huge, and wouldn’t it be great to have one of those nice 150 page paperbacks like you used to get back in the day, something you can just pull off a shelf and read in an evening. There was a bit of amusement at me being enthusiastic, given the doorstop size of Vellum and Ink, but somewhere along the way, or sometime after that — conventions can get a bit blurry — Chris ended up inviting me to do a stand-alone novella for them. Something short and sweet, to be marketed like a paperback, aimed at the bookchains. I was well up for it, so I went away and started work on a novella. Unfortunately, I ground into the dirt on it, and was still nowhere when the deadline arrived. Which is where the second drunken evening came in.

That was a night with my mate Mags in the pub, Mags being a graduate of film studies, working for a small tv production company at the time, and basically a huge cinema enthusiast who’d be well happy to direct a movie. So over dry gin martinis we were kicking around ideas for The Most Awesome Movie EVAR! — big, bold, pulpy fun. It might well have started with me pitching the title and characters — a hitman, a hooker, a hobo and a homo — with a manic glint in the eyen. I can remember Mags being insistent on various things that you had to do in a movie, and me being equally insistent that no, you couldn’t kill off character X, or play out this or that relationship a certain way, because that would be just *too* damn formulaic. Somewhere along the way, we ended up with enough of a framework that I went away and blasted down a quick overview. I fleshed out a bit, added some more twists and scenes, but I didn’t think much about it after that, until I realised I’d got myself into a dead end with the novella for Monkeybrain. There’s kind of a received wisdom that novellas are easier to translate to movies than novels, because they have about the same level of narrative, so I figured the same should be true in reverse. Rather than leave Chris and Allison in the lurch any more than I was doing already, I bit the bullet, fessed up that the novella I’d been working on was dead in the water, and pitched Escape from Hell! as a replacement.

I still ended up taking an inordinate amount of time getting that novella written, I have to admit. I’m immensely grateful to Chris and Allison for their forbearance.

O’Shea: You recently blogged about Wizard’s Tower Press–do you intend to release some of your books through them at some point?

Duncan: I’m not really the one to say. It’s Cheryl Morgan’s press, so it’s a matter of her intent rather than mine, but I know and respect Cheryl as a friend from the convention scene, so I’d be very happy to work with her if I pitched an idea that she liked. And it’s certainly got a focus that appeals to me, when it comes to the e-book market and anthologies highlighting new and minority writers. The latter in particular; I don’t really have anything that jumps out and says, “hey, this should be an e-book,” but editing anthologies is something that appeals generally, and the extra dimension only makes it more so. Again, though, it’s not like I have a killer idea for a theme.

Still, I *can* say that the magazine side of it, Salon Futura, is something I’ll certainly be sending some non-fiction into down the line.

O’Shea: In general, how important are Kindles and the like to authors like yourself, who embrace technology?

Duncan: Actually, despite my background in programming and sf, if you saw the phone I had up until a few months ago, I’m not sure you’d describe me as embracing technology. I blog and tweet, write in Scrivener on my laptop, and spend way too much time on Wikipedia when I’m not obsessively checking my email, but most gadgets don’t really excite me a lot. With the technology I do immerse myself in, it’s mostly about the software and systems, the ergonomics and aesthetics of the interface; hardware is just a means to an end. I want Expose on my Mac, but I don’t care that much about having a camera on my phone.

So while it’s clear that e-books are the shape of things to come, I’ve been dubious of the actual e-book readers available, which seem stupidly expensive and below par. As a medium, absolutely, I think any author who doesn’t engage with e-books is making a mistake, and I’ve happily dabbled — making short stories available in digital formats online, with some non-traditional approaches to getting paid for them — but up until recently the hardware has all seemed very… zeroth generation, prototypes of what I’d really want.

Publishers abrogating control to automated conversion software doesn’t help. Nor does seeing one of the founders of the epub format publicly dismiss typography. I’ll happily read a basic MS for work reasons, but if I’m reading for enjoyment I want a quality of experience that’s dependent on decent typography. The reports of atrociously substandard products being punted out, e-books that look like they’ve been typeset by a retarded monkey — exactly the sort of thing Cheryl’s talking about aiming to address actually — have left me thinking of most e-readers as… well, meh. They’re like the printer I had for my ZX Spectrum as a kid, where the roll of paper was about the width of a till receipt; strictly speaking the functionality of printing was there, but it wasn’t exactly going to print you a resume you’d want to use in a job application.

But the iPad is a game-changer for me here. It’s something that grabs me as a reader because it has exactly what those other e-readers lack in terms of a professional finish. As a writer too, I care that *my* work is presentable to readers; I can actually produce a resume I’m comfortable using in a job application, so to speak. And looking at it from a business perspective, I think it opens up the market. I know I want one, and I can name friends that would never buy a Kindle but might well own an iPad before me, the same as they own iPods and/or iPhones — and these aren’t Apple acolytes or gadget fiends, by any means. So I see this as the real start of something. And after seeing some demos of how children’s picture books and non-fiction can utilise the interactivity of touchscreen technology… well, I’m not sure yet how you might apply that to narrative in a way that’s more than just a novelty, but it is a radical transformation of the medium.

O’Shea: You’ve written extensively on literature–in general as well as in analysis of genres and subgenres. Most importantly you analyzed the category “strange fiction”–and in fact you call yourself a strange fiction writer. What is your hope/interest in defining yourself in such a manner (and exploring the concept as a definition)?

Duncan: Partly I’m just walking away from the overload of definitions. Within the community of readers and writers, labels like science fiction and fantasy have become enmeshed in a turf war of tribes, bitter boundary disputes. It’s like rock and pop were at war with one another, with some insisting that the mere presence of harmonic backing vocals made a rock song actually pop, or somehow polluted its purity. Those terms have become such nominal labels that you can’t talk about works of strange fiction without someone vehemently disagreeing that the work you’re talking about is validly described by whatever label you apply. So I’ve abandoned those rotted names to the tribes, to squabble over among themselves.

I don’t see much value in them in terms of marketing either. Terms like sci-fi, science fiction or fantasy all function as brand images which are loaded with preconception to outsiders. For many, I’d say, those terms will be used the way an aged aunt might describe Mogwai as “that heavy metal you listen to.” They conjure up tightly delimited genre conventions and an adolescent audience. They conjure up the equivalent of spandex and mullets. The actual range of approaches is really more comparable to indie — could be anything from Mogwai to Belle and Sebastian, in a melting pot of genres like garage, punk, glam, folk, pop, disco, and so on — so this brand image is immensely inappropriate. It’s not a good way to sell the fiction.

If I had my druthers in terms of branding, I’d apply the label indie fiction — on a parallel with indie movies and music, where this now refers to an independent style as much as independence from the corporate structures. The point is, this fiction’s key feature is actually independence from the constraints of realism, the presence of quirks that flavour it with a distinct strangeness. Within that you’ll get very commercial fare — just as some indie bands are pretty formulaic — but the selling-point for sf has always been “something different” rather than “more of the same.” The films of the Coen Brothers are actually a good comparison point: this is fiction for people with eclectic tastes but a general desire for something not locked into grim realism. Reorganise the shelfs in the bookstores, and you could connect the works with their core audience far more effectively, I’d say. At the moment it’s like trying to sell Belle & Sebastian in a Heavy Metal section that many of the people who’d appreciate that band’s music will simply avoid like the plague. Sadly, I’m not the Emperor of the Publishing Industry or the King of All Bookstores, so I don’t see that happening.

If I can’t affect the branding though, I can at least clear away the rotted names from the critical discourse, and talk about how fiction works, about how one particular type of fiction works, regardless of what it’s labelled. Or at least I hope I can. I think you can actually disregard the boundaries as a starting point and look at what narratives do in precise linguistic terms. You can address writers like Franz Kafka and Kelly Link in the same breath without any concern for the literary territories they’re associated with, because we’re talking about technical features of the text that are as substantive as alliteration. To look at this stuff as strange fiction isn’t a genre approach; it’s simply looking at that fiction which is strange, where strangeness can be precisely defined in terms of a particular linguistic quality sentences possess — alethic modality aka subjunctivity — which is, in non-jargon, the possibility or impossibility of the events described by it. Are they logical impossibilities, contradictions-in-terms? Are they metaphysical impossibilities, breaches of the laws of nature? Are they temporal impossibilities, breaches of known history or known science? And there are other types of modality — matters of should and might rather than could — which you can bring into an analysis. If you include horror as a mode of strange fiction, you kind of have to, which brings tragedy into the scope as well.

In the full system, I think there’s a capacity to get to grips with any narrative in terms of strangeness, and to look at how that strangeness drives it. It becomes a model of narrative dynamics itself. It’s really only of interest if you’re into literary criticism, analysing how texts work, but I’m fascinated by that sort of techincal gubbins. And if I can’t brand myself as an indie fiction writer, at least when somebody asks me what kind of stuff I write, I can say, “strange fiction,” and then just throw out some benchmarks — “like, there’s Escape from Hell!, which is sort of Escape from New York meets Jacob’s Ladder. But there’s also Vellum, which is like James Joyce crossed with Michael Moorcock.” And so on.

O’Shea: In developing the column Notes from the New Sodom, does it sometime help you indirectly in how you approach your fiction writing?

Duncan: I don’t know. There’s maybe an element of clarifying my thoughts on this or that by articulating them properly, but I’m not sure what I’m focusing on makes that the kind of thought that feeds back into the craft. It might be different if I was doing more critique, but largely I’ve been dealing with those turf wars or political issues like segregation in the media, so it’s more of a cultural commentary at the moment than anything else. Where it does stake out an aesthetic stance, to be honest — where challenging the false dichotomies between positions automatically becomes a position of opposition in its own right — this is largely an attitude I’ve already thrashed out over the last few years, in more off-the-cuff posts on my blog. I think the columns are really end-products — or even by-products. Like if I’ve started a column on something, that means it’s already processed past the point where it’s going to factor into my writing. I’ll already have been thinking about how my fiction might tackle segregation, for example, by the time I tackle it in a column.

O’Shea: In addition to fiction, you also are a poet. Are there ever ideas you explore in fiction that you decide to consider in poetry as well (or vice versa)?

Duncan: Themes more than ideas. There’s definitely an overlap in a very general way, in terms of subjects I tackle. Granted, I tend towards the big topics — sex and death, humanity and religion — but even the particular takes can be very similar, down to the sort of imagery I use, the tropes I’ll play around with, like the figures of Dionysus, Orpheus, Lucifer. And where some of my fiction is fairly heavy in poetic technique, much of my poetry has a strong narrative element. I’ve got some short stories that are pretty experimental, so heavy on the poetic and rhetorical techniques — alliteration, rhythm and such — that they’re heading towards verse. Meanwhile my taste in poetry is for writers like Blake, Yeats and Stevens, where there’s a sort of oracular thing going on, a vision playing out; and my own writings reflect that.

There’s even one unpublished work that’s gone back and forth between fiction and poetry. It started out as sort of Joycean narrative, intended as part of a novel long since abandoned. I went back to the material later, and got some stories out of it, but this part of it didn’t take shape properly so I started treating it as poetry instead. I ended up taking out the line breaks after, and felt it sort of worked as a short story now… but not quite. So currently it’s a poem again. Similarly, I just finished reworking another orphaned novel-scene into a long poem. This one, at least, I’m happy with as poetry.

Usually though a story idea has a form that’s distinctly story-shaped. It’s a tale, or it’s a conceit that suggests causal ramifications, conflicts and resolutions, and that oracular poetry I like doesn’t really work that way. It’s not epic in the classical sense. It’s “The Second Coming” rather than “Paradise Lost.” So there is a point where ideas end up going one direction or the other. Like, I’m not going to write a poem about a hitman, a hooker, a hobo and a homo breaking out of Hell. And I’m not going to write a story based on the core image of a poem like “The Fiddler and the Dogs.”

O’Shea: Some of your other most recent work has taken you in new directions, as you recently had a musical of yours staged in Chicago–and you’ve recently completed a screenplay. By your own admission these are departures from your typical creative output, how did these shifts in creative gears come about?

Duncan: The musical came out of a three day fling that left me smitten, writing sonnets and everything, only for him to not return my calls afterwards, the bastard. Not being the sort to go stalker-boy, but definitely being the sort to sit up drinking in some dive bar into the wee hours, I threw myself into a week of absinthe and misery. I figure performative devastation is the best cure for heartbreak; don’t wash, don’t eat, drink and smoke constantly and rail bitterly at the gods and fates to the extent that even *you* can’t take yourself seriously any more. So somewhere in the midst of emulating a character from a Tom Waits song, I ended up actually writing, to all intents and purposes, a Tom Waits song — two indeed, “That Great Big Sanatorium in the Sky” and “Tango for the Dead.” And somewhere in the midst of imagining that character, he sort of started asking for a story.

Thing is, I had a bunch of other songs I’d written a while back, mainly daft punk numbers with titles like “Suck Me, Fuck Me, Chuck Me,” but I can’t sing or play any instruments, so these songs attach in my imagination to an imaginary band, Fagsmoke, invented as part of a character’s backstory. These were his songs. So suddenly I find that character (Jack) sitting beside my Waitsian waster (Chorus) in a bar, and telling him why *he’s* there, also wallowing in drunken misery. One of these songs, “Nowhere Town,” becomes a thematic core, while another, “Junkie for the Sound,” attaches to Jack’s lost love (Puck.) Before I know it, I’m writing medleys of the two, reprises, a big ensemble number, and an even bigger medley-*and*-reprise as the grand dramatic finale. In less than a week, I have a fully formed “gay punk Orpheus musical” — Nowhere Town.

Which is to say, I have all the dialogue and lyrics written down, and all the music in my head, with no way to communicate it. Can’t sing, can’t play. A friend with actual musical ability tries to help me out, but it’s a lost cause; I’m just making noise at him. Painful noise.

Fast-forward a year or two though, and I switch from PC to Mac, start messing around with GarageBand and discover that one of the piano loops in their library is the exact refrain I had in mind as the basic theme of “Nowhere Town.” Long story short, I find that by layering tracks upon tracks of cut and spliced loops, I can actually construct the music for all the songs. I still can’t sing to put vocals on them, but I have instrumental versions of all the numbers in the show. So I mix them down to mp3s and stick them up on the blog with the libretto as… a curio for readers. Only then, a while later, these college kids in Chicago, Beth and Ben, email. They’ve read my books, follow the blog, caught the musical and fallen in love with it. Is it OK if they stage it through their university theatre group? Hell, yeah! I say.

Of course, they still had no idea how the lyrics were meant to sound, so I had to rope in mates who could sing, and put them through a hellish process where I recorded my godawful attempt at it, they sang back what they thought I was going for, and by a process of trial-and-error we eventually got to mp3s with their vocals on the numbers. Over in Chicago meanwhile, the musical director, Tristan, has to try and turn what I’ve given them into something performable. There’s no sheet music, just these mp3s and GarageBand project files — where the basic melody might be constructed from three or four piano tracks, from the way they combine. But at the end of the day it worked. They did it, and they did a fucking immense job of it. It was a Mad Folly from start to finish, but this musical written in the head of a tuneless wastrel on a week-long bender actually made it to the stage. Which is kinda awesome, I think.

With the screenplay, I’m kind of hoping that I haven’t exhausted my luck when it comes to Mad Follies, cause that’s a similarly unlikely candidate for fruition — a high school movie based on As You Like It, but with the female character gender-switched to male. Like, think of it as the gay Ten Things I Hate About You. It’s called Whatever the Fuck You Want. Cause, yeah, a Hollywood studio’s going to *love* that title.

This left-field project came about from an experience that dropped my jaw. A while back, I blogged reviews of two little indie flicks I’d seen — The Curiosity of Chance and Were the World Mine– both set in high schools, with gay kids as the main character. One I say is the best high school movie John Hughes never made; the other is a musical riffing on A Midsummer Night’s Dream. They’re both a lot of fun, if you like the idioms. They’re both a cut above some of their competitors despite the microbudgets — zingier script and acting in one, edgier music in the other.

Anyway, in a discussion that emerged in comments, I ended up having to defend these from a po-faced commenter dismissing them as cinematic candyfloss. He was arguing that Were the World Mine just looked vapid in comparison to, say, The History Boys. I was arguing that these weren’t aiming to be The History Boys, that these were good examples of their genres and, crucially, used gay protagonists in utterly populist idioms — which is a big step forward. I mean, serious cinema like Brokeback Mountain is all very worthy, but what’s out there for the 14 year old who wants the gay Ferris Bueller? Movies with gay central characters aimed at a mature audience have been mainstream since My Beautiful Launderette, and that was decades ago. But where are the popcorn flicks with gay central characters? Where’s the boy-meets-boy version of Ten Things I Hate About You? Still, to make sure I wasn’t talking through my arse about the absence of such, I did a quick Google on “gay kid” and “high school movie.” And got my own post on The Curiosity of Chance as top hit.

I know my own blog stats, and they’re not that high. And that’s hardly an exotic combination of strings, so the fact that it doesn’t lead to *something* with a higher profile — an IMDB page, reviews, whatever — that’s shocking to me. And if I do the same search right now, the top five hits are all me talking about this in various places. The top hit is now actually the post where I talk about the Google results. Just awesome.

So I basically realised that the movie I was looking for simply didn’t exist. It’s not hard to imagine, I think. Just picture Glee as a movie rather than a series, focused on Kurt rather than Rachel and Finn. Not as an indie flick filmed in Belgium, like The Curiosity of Chance, but made within the Hollywood studio system, aimed at the multiplexes rather than the gay film festival circuit. A movie like that could be pretty big with the right names and budget attached. But it’s not out there.

Rather than just bitch about it though, I figured that what a writer does to try and remedy a situation like that is write; and thinking about the classic Shakespeare-update strategy, As You Like It is a perfect candidate for that treatment, and for a gay spin. Hell, the screenplay wrote itself when I got down to it; Shakespearean pastoral translates to a high school movie with just the gentlest nudge. Whether there’s even the remotest chance of it getting made though, I deeply doubt. It’s been punted off to my agent, who sent it on to his co-agent for film and television rights, so it is actually somewhere in LA right now, but that just means it’s another screenplay in LA. I dont hold out much hope, to be honest.

Mind you, I didn’t think the musical would ever get made.

O’Shea: Do you have an interest in doing more of either types of work?

Duncan: I don’t see myself doing another musical any time soon. Writing songs is a real rarity for me; once in a blue moon I’ll get a tune in my head and scribble down the lyrics, but not being able to sing or play an instrument, it’s kind of pissing in the wind.

I could definitely see myself doing more screenplays though. I’m half-tempted to adapt Escape from Hell! into a screenplay, since it was originally envisioned that way. (Hell, in writing it, I was totally picturing two of the characters as played by Samuel L. Jackson and Lawrence Fishburne. They’ve never been in the same movie together, you know, and how awesome would that be?) And generally… I can easily imagine future works aimed in that direction. You might expect screenwriting to be a bit unsatisfying for a word junky — for someone whose fiction is heavy on the prose style and poetic technique to work in a form where that craft is confined to dialogue. But I loved the structural work in writing Whatever the Fuck You Want; I liked fitting the narrative into that three-act shape, making sure the narrative beats were evenly spaced. It felt a little like working in some tightly-defined poetry structure, like crafting a sonnet. There’s something kind of formal about screenplays that appeals.

O’Shea: What’s on the horizon for you creatively?

Duncan: I’ve got two projects I’ve been working on for way too long, so I need to get my head in the game and get them done and dusted. One is the next big novel, a retelling of the Epic of Gilgamesh set in three time-frames — mythic, historical and futuristic. It’s a similar approach to Vellum and Ink, actually, a sort of cubist take in which the same story is playing out in three narratives. But it’s demanding a lot more gestation time than it has a right to. The other is a sequel to Escape from Hell!, with the equally John Carpenteresque title of Assault! On Heaven! I have a third and final installment brewing as well: Battle! For the Planet! Of the Dead! Given the shameless pulp approach, I reckoned I had to increment the exclamation marks for each installment. I’m not really getting into the zone with that either at the moment, so I’ve been doing a lot of short fiction in the meantime. None of this is contracted at the moment, at least, so I’m not tied into slogging through them to make a deadline; if something else comes along that *does* just write itself, I can grab the inspiration and run with it.

Some of those short stories are looking like they might shape up to a larger project too. I came up with a conceit at the end of last year that has a lot of scope in it, I think. It’s sort of a punky city-urchin take on the Lost Boys from Peter Pan, with huge dollops of Michael de Larrabeiti’s Borribles. Stories are set throughout history around the idea of “Scruffians,” kids who’ve been stolen from minority communities, bought from workhouses, or similar, and “Fixed.” They don’t age, don’t change, always return to the state in which they were Fixed… which makes them very useful as slaves during the Industrial Revolution, say. Some escape and set up in squats, try and rescue others. There’s a Waiftaker General — like Peter Cushing as the Witchfinder General meets the Childcatcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. It sort of masquerades as children’s fiction at first sight but gets really twisted in all manner of ways. Anyway, I’ve got a good number of stories out of it so far, a good few more lined up to be written, and a narrative arc emerging between them. I was experimenting with releasing them online for Paypal donations, but the ball didn’t keep rolling in terms of meeting the targets, so I’m thinking about where to take it from here. For now they’re available via the blog for free download from a fileshare site.

The Office of Shadow

Novelist and comics writer Matthew Sturges recently spared some time to discuss his 2009 novel, Midwinter (2009) and its sequel, The Office of Shadow, which was released in June by Pyr. The Office of Shadows is “a group of covert operatives given the tasks that can’t be done in the light of day … The new leader of the ‘Shadows’ is Silverdun. He’s the nobleman who fought alongside Mauritane at Sylvan and who helped complete a critical mission for the Seelie Queen Titania. His operatives include a beautiful but naïve sorceress who possesses awesome powers that she must restrain in order to survive and a soldier turned scholar whose research into new ways of magic could save the world, or end it.” Discussing the mechanics of Sturges’ approach to his novels made this interview quite enlightening for me.

Tim O’Shea: Do you still get a kick out of reading the Library Journal review of last year’s release, Midwinter, which included the line: “Joining Neil Gaiman in making the crossover from comics to prose fiction, Sturges represents a strong, new voice in fantasy.”?

Matthew Sturges: I’ll take any review that puts my name along with Neil Gaiman’s in the same sentence. I realize that it doesn’t create an actual equivalency, but it’s definitely a nice thing to read. It’s true, though, that there aren’t many writers who do both prose and comics. As far as being a “strong new voice in fantasy,” again I’ll take it, but it’s hard to feel “new” when I’m three months shy of forty.

O’Shea: When constructing a strong lead like Mauritaine, do you draw upon any historical or fictional for inspiration?

Sturges: It’s been so long since I actually came up with him that I have a hard time remembering. I think I first conceived of Midwinter in around 1999, so much of the thought process around it is lost to the ages. The central theme of the novel was always this notion that trust, loyalty, and faith were all points along a continuum, and we all live our lives committed to things at different levels. Mauritane was meant to be an exemplar of loyalty, a guy who had thrown in his lot with the notion of Queen and country and was utterly unshakeable in that commitment. And then, of course, the whole plot of the novel is setting him up to have that loyalty tested to its breaking point. So really the primary inspiration for him was this notion of exploring the tensile strength of human loyalty, and everything else came from that.

O’Shea: At the time you committed to write Midwinter, was it with the assumption that it would be the first in a series–or merely with the hope of more installments, depending on how well Midwinter performed?

Sturges: When I first wrote it, I was just excited at the idea of completing a novel. The idea that anyone would ever read it, let alone publish it, didn’t even enter seriously into the equation. But I definitely left a big hook in the end of that novel, with a basic knowledge of what that hook was connected to, so that if I ever did get the chance to write
more books in that world that I’d have an idea of what happened next. And of course, by the time I actually sat down to write The Office of Shadow, the whole world revolved around that hook and nothing that I thought I knew about what would come next actually came to pass. But that hook remains; the ending of the series is implicit in it. (If you’re curious, it’s the comment that Titania makes to Silverdun regarding the girl Faella.)

O’Shea: How long did it take you to construct the core Fae mythology and what were some of the more challenging aspects of its planning?

Sturges: Interestingly, Midwinter was conceived when I was in the Clockwork Storybook group with Bill Willingham, Chris Roberson, and Mark Finn. That was a shared world, and it was very common for us to share ideas, characters, and concepts with each other. So some of the ideas that you see in Midwinter are actually things that Bill Willingham came up with. I think the main ones are the victory braids—the braids that elves tie in their hair after they’ve killed an opponent in battle—and the notion of Mab and Titania as opposing sovereigns. This was an idea that he’d put forth somewhere in something that he’d written and I thought it was interesting, so I ran with it.

When it came time to write The Office of Shadow, I felt like it was proper to take as many of Willingham’s ideas out of it as I could without messing up the continuity. Not because he asked me to; he was very gracious about it. It just seemed like the right thing to do.

Anyway, all of the world-building aspects just sort of sprang up as I went. I seem to recall taking a very, very long time to write the book so there was plenty of time for it to simmer. I’d also written a number of short stories for Clockwork Storybook that were set in the same world; all the stuff about the Western Valley and the Gossamer Rebellion, the dragon Achera and Uvenchaud, these were all stories that I’d told elsewhere, and they became backstory for Midwinter.

O’Shea: In an interview about Midwinter with Lou Anders you said:
“As the world grows I’m getting more and more interested in how magic evolves in a fantasy world, how old assumptions are questioned and paradigms challenged and changed. I think there’s a lot of great fodder for storytelling there.”
How has the magic evolved between Midwinter and The Office of Shadow?

Sturges: There’s an enormous progression in the understanding about what magic is that forms the backbone of The Office of Shadow. It’s very much a story about the evolution of ideas, and about overthrowing paradigms. I came at the idea kind of obliquely, wondering what would happen if an Einstein-like character appeared in a fantasy world; someone who didn’t just advance magic, but actually advanced the understanding of what magic meant. I was totally fascinated by this guy, but in the end he actually doesn’t even make it into Office of Shadow except by reputation.

One of the things I play with a lot in these books is the notion of magic as an analogue of science. In the past there was a Newton of sorts, a fellow named Alpaurle, who set the rules for how magic “works” that went unquestioned for many, many years. Until something came along that contradicted him.

Overall, I definitely spent some time honing the magic system in the world when writing the second book, now that I knew someone was actually going to read it. I won’t say that I made up Midwinter as I went along, but it was definitely written more…organically than I would write now.

O’Shea: Of the characters in Midwinter, were there certain ones you were happy to utilize more in The Office of Shadow?

Sturges: I knew very early on that Silverdun was going to be the protagonist of Office of Shadow, because this book was about faith, about how you become what you believe in. Silverdun’s struggle with faith was something I always really liked about him. So many of us struggle with faith in real life, but you very rarely see protagonists in stories who really struggle with that sort of thing outside of religious fiction. Really, just between you and me, everything in the Midwinter books is about religion if you know where to look. So Silverdun seemed like the guy to deal with that.

He’s also an unlikely fantasy hero in that he’s not really certain exactly who he is or what he wants. Unlike Mauritane, who’s totally driven by very clear priorities, Silverdun at the beginning of Office of Shadow has just realized that he’s made a huge career mistake, and has no idea what to do next. Others make that choice for him, and then he has to decide whether to embrace it.

I also knew that Faella would be coming back, and playing an important part in the story. She was deliberately created to seem like a minor character, when in actuality she’s probably the most important person in the whole world. But that comes later…

O’Shea: Back in late January, you tweeted:
“I am doing the final final revisions on the new novel THE OFFICE OF SHADOW as we speak. Then I guess I’ll start the next one.”
From this tweet, I have a few questions. What kind of bugs are you working out of the book when you’re in the final final revision stage–and is there a final final final round of revisions? Is it more exhilarating or overwhelming to realize when you start one novel and fully realize it’s time to start a new one?

Sturges: At that point, I was at the stage where I’d done all of the big changes that my editor Lou Anders had asked for, and I’d gotten back the final notes from the proofreader. A good proofreader is one who’ll catch all the weird little continuity errors and nonsensical questions and contradictions that nobody else notices, and ours, Deanna Hoak is definitely ones of those. In a big fantasy novel written by a sloppy writer like me, there tend to be bits where the spellings of characters names maybe change spellings over the course of a book, that kind of stuff. Fortunately there wasn’t anything huge to fix at that point.

There is, in fact, a final final final revision stage—it’s the one you go through after the book has already been published and you realize things that you ought to have fixed but didn’t realize until you saw it in print.

As far as starting the new one, I think you get to this place with a novel where you’re just so fucking sick of it by the time you’re done that the idea of doing anything even remotely like it makes you want to throw up. It was months before I even entertained the notion of writing a third book.

O’Shea: What can you tell me about Silverdun and his operatives?

Sturges: The notion was that they were going to be The Sandbaggers in fairyland; realistic, tough, pragmatic people who had a job to do and damn well did it. I didn’t want to do James Bond-type spy stories, but something more along the line of James Le Carre. That was the idea, but then you start writing and it takes off in its own peculiar direction.

Silverdun is sort of in charge of this trio of operatives whose job it is to gather intelligence and do sneaky things in order to stop the Unseelie Empire from using the Einswrath weapon, which is the Faerie equivalent of a nuke,  essentially. Silverdun’s closest comrade is Ironfoot, who’s a military grunt who, through an odd set of circumstances, became a university professor. His boss is a fellow named Paet, who’s the guy who’s been there and seen and done everything and nearly got himself killed doing it. And then there’s Sela. Sela is my favorite character in the book, the one who was such a pleasant surprise of a character in that I wasn’t quite sure who she was when I started writing, but she really grew into someone interesting. She has a very special set of talents that make her an excellent spy, but everything about her is just so sad.

O’Shea: Chris McGrath did the covers to both of your PYR novels, did he consult with you in developing them?

Sturges: I think all I really did was describe the characters and the setting, and he did everything else. I was just grateful that he did it, because they’re such beautiful covers.

O’Shea: How much more comfortable were you with exploring the nuances of the Fae dynamics in your new book, The Office of Shadow, compared to Midwinter?

Sturges: For me it was really a question of experience. I’m a much more confident writer than I was ten years ago, when I started writing Midwinter. I didn’t have a clue what I was doing when I started that book, and only had slightly more of a clue by the time I finished it. Now, after having been a full-time writer for a few years I’ve got a
few more tricks up my sleeve and I know how to avoid the obvious mistakes. In some ways that made it much more difficult, because my standards are a lot higher now, but that’s as it should be, probably. As far as exploring the nuances, I realized early on in writing the second book that I had some work to do in terms of filling out the world and making sense of some things. That was fun—it was like filling in the missing pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. And going back into the world and remembering the little bits that I’d forgotten, finding all of my old notes and the Fae-English dictionary and all that stuff, that was great. There were a couple of continuity errors in Midwinter that I sweated buckets over when I went to write the sequel, specifically a geographical gaffe that I made. I spent an entire day redrawing the map of The Seelie Kingdom to explain how the River Ebe could possibly have its headwaters at the city of Estacana and still be a river that you would cross on the way to Estacana. And then I realized that I was the only person on earth that cared and drew a dogleg on the map.

O’Shea: When juggling the demands of comics and prose writing at the same time, how do you divvy up your work schedule? Do you split your workday between comics and prose–or are certain days of the week spent on comics, and other days on prose?

Sturges: I tend to write in big chunks of one versus the other, because the switching costs in terms of mental approach are so big. If I’m in a prose-writing frame of mind, I can’t think in comics, and vice-versa. It’s very uncomfortable to me to switch between the two, so what I tend to do is spend a long stretch of time working on a prose project and let all of my comics work get backed up, and then apologize profusely to my comic book editors and then spend a good stretch of time doing comics. It’s really just a question of apologizing to the right editors at the right times.  Fortunately, most editors are so used to hearing excuses from writers that they tend to handle it well.

O’Shea: Is there anything about the novels you’d like to discuss that I neglected to ask you about?

Sturges: Only that the real stars of these books are the message sprites. I think those gals alone are worth the cost of the books. Not that they could support a book on their own, but I really do love those little things.

The Galilean Secret

I am grateful to my parents for many gifts, but I rank my Catholic education/upbringing and intellectual curiosity as among some of the best. While Evan Howard, the author of The Galilean Secret (released last month), are not of the exact same religion (he is the pastor of the Community Church of Providence [Rhode Island), given that we are both Christians and that he is even more intellectually curious than myself (as well as the owner of a doctorate in theology from Boston University)–well it made for a great interview. In this email interview we discuss his novel–which is described as follows:

“When Karim Musalaha, a Palestinian on the run, seeks refuge in a forgotten cave near Qumran, he discovers a half-buried clay jar that contains a fragile scroll. His quest to discover its origins takes him on a high-speed chase through hostile Jerusalem and West Bank neighborhoods. Caught between his brother’s relentless ambition for martyrdom and the forbidden love of a Jewish woman with ties to the highest levels of the Israeli army, he must choose between honoring his father and betraying him to serve a higher purpose.

The scroll’s message also resonates with Judith of Jerusalem, a first century Jewish woman who, under the cover of darkness, gallops into the desert with the brother of the man she was betrothed to marry. When her allegiance to the burgeoning Zealot revolution pits her against the Roman occupiers and their priestly collaborators, Judith sees the cruelty of war and realizes her mistake. But is it too late for her to escape and find forgiveness? A letter written by a mysterious Galilean rabbi holds the answers, but the Romans have placed a price on his head. Should she risk her life for a rabbi she hardly knows, or risk her soul for a cause and a man whose beliefs she now rejects?

Bound by a letter that spans two millennia, both Karim and Judith will either succumb to hatred, violence and hopelessness, or reveal a wisdom that could save us all.”

I’m grateful to Howard for his valuable time and thoughts, as well as Kelly Hughes for facilitating the interview. Go here to read the first chapter.

Tim O’Shea: Tackling two plots with historical complexities in one book is fairly ambitious. How much revision/aggressive editing was involved in the pursuit of balancing the respective narratives and their unique pacing for both stories?

Evan Howard: The decision to include plots in two different time periods came about unexpectedly.  As a first-time novelist I didn’t plan to use this method because of the difficulties involved, but readers of an earlier version of the book (which I had self-published) expressed frustration that I hadn’t resolved what happened to Karim, the Palestinian student who appears in the first chapter, the action of which takes place in the present.  Since the rest of the novel happens in the time of Jesus, at first I resisted developing Karim’s story because I thought it would be a very complicated undertaking, but the more I thought about it, the more I saw that having two time periods and multiple plots could make the novel more multi-dimensional and increase its suspense.  This process required that I write fifteen new chapters and blend them with the historical material.  It took me about seven months to do this and involved a great deal of revising and editing along the way.  Once I entered into this process, I found it highly challenging but also a lot of fun—like working on a giant literary jigsaw puzzle.  Since there is a lot of action in both stories, the issue of pacing wasn’t a major problem.

O’Shea: Given the passion and strong opinions that go hand and hand with topics like Israel & Palestine, was there any hesitation on your part to delve into such complex and volatile matters in your novel?

Howard: The divisions and conflicts in the Holy Land today and throughout history were part of what drew me to this setting.  It’s a land with so much promise but also so much tragedy, and that’s part of what makes it a fascinating setting for a novel.  It feels as if there has been a narrative of anguish superimposed on this land.  The conflicts have been with us for so long that they seem impossible to solve.  Writing The Galilean Secret was a way of offering an alternative narrative—one that dramatizes the possibility of hope, healing, and reconciliation.  It’s true that there are potentially many pitfalls that await an author who chooses to write about Israel and Palestine, but the potential rewards made the risk worth it.  I kept thinking of Alan Paton’s novel Cry, the Beloved Country, which is set in South Africa under apartheid.  Paton took readers into the emotions of that troubled land in a way that motivated them to work for change.  Art can sometimes have a cathartic effect that helps to inspire a new narrative of transformation, but creating it requires accepting controversy as part of this important work.

O’Shea: Which of Jesus’ disciples did you most enjoy writing in the book?

Howard: Oddly enough, it was probably Judas Iscariot, although I was also drawn to the stories of Nicodemus and Mary Magdalene, but neither of them was among the Twelve.  Judas fascinates me because he’s such a complex character in the Gospels.  His light drew him to follow Jesus, but his darkness eventually extinguished the light.  Originally, like all of the disciples, he came to Jesus with great idealism, believing that the Messianic age had finally come, but then he became disillusioned, his greed took over, and his life ended tragically—an all too human story.  I was also captivated by the question of why he betrayed Jesus and wondered if it was just because of disillusionment or greed.  Could there have been an element of jealousy involved, arising out of his experience of unrequited love?  To me, seeing the story in this way made it all the more real and relevant to the thorniest dilemmas of life.

O’Shea: What about the dynamics between Jesus and Mary Magdalene do you feel you most effectively tapped into and communicated in your story?

Howard: The Galilean Secret encourages the healing of our intimate relationships through its fresh perspective on these dynamics. Neither the canonical nor the noncanonical sources provide detailed information about Jesus’ relationship with Mary Magdalene. Most of us are familiar with the two extreme positions on this matter—the church’s traditional claim that the relationship was only platonic, on the one hand, and on the other hand, the view of revisionist scholars, novelists, and filmmakers that Jesus and Mary were husband and wife and had a child.

I see problems with both of these views.  The traditional position puts forth a celibate Christ who never wrestles with his sexuality. Since most of us do wrestle with this essential component of being human, we can’t relate well to a Christ who doesn’t fully enter the struggle with us. On the other side of the spectrum, it’s hard to believe that Jesus was married because the nearly unanimous verdict of biblical scholars is that there’s no credible evidence to support such a notion.  The Galilean Secret explores the middle ground.  It presents a Christ who, as the Epistle to the Hebrews states, “was tempted in every way as we are, yet without sin.”

In The Galilean Secret, Jesus and Mary Magdalene struggle mightily with their attraction to one another, and the struggle forces them to ponder what it means to be created male and female “in the image of God,” as stated in the Torah.  The way toward healing and wholeness emerges from Jesus’ spiritual wisdom and his insights into how we can find God’s love and light in all areas of our lives, even the most perplexing ones.  My novel invites readers to ponder how Jesus’ relationship with Mary Magdalene challenges us to integrate the masculine and feminine in ourselves and in the image of God.

O’Shea: How hard is it to write about love, when one’s addressing spiritual love versus romantic love as you are in this story?

Howard: Love has many different manifestations, a fact that the Greek language highlights by using several different terms for our one English word “love.”  There are different nuances of love, two of them being spiritual versus romantic, but because these two sometimes feel the same, it can be extremely difficult to distinguish between them.  In Greek, the word for spiritual love—the love of God–is agape, and the word for romantic/sexual love is eros.  A major theme of The Galilean Secret is the trouble and tragedy that result when we get spiritual and romantic love confused.  These expressions of love both originate in God and they are present in the best dating and marriage relationships. But it is also quite possible to develop romantic feelings for the wrong person at the wrong time, and when these feelings are mistaken for spiritual love, they can cause terrible heartbreak.  It’s a very emotional experience to write about such situations; in that sense, doing so is difficult, but the insights gained from the undertaking can also be quite therapeutic and helpful.

O’Shea: When delving into religion-based fiction, in some ways do you hope it serves to bolster someone’s religion when they read your writing?

Howard: I wrote The Galilean Secret out of my personal search for spiritual truth and for healing and wholeness.  I hope that the book will challenge and inspire others in their searches. I also hope that it presents an interpretation of Jesus that makes him more relevant and accessible to searching people.  I heard the well-known atheist Christopher Hitchens interviewed on C-Span recently and he painted all religions with a broad brush, declaring them equally harmful.  I hope that The Galilean Secret will help people who hold such views to give Christianity another chance.  The Jesus presented in the novel is very human but at the same time a messenger sent from God.  The people who encounter him find their lives transformed, and through his revolutionary spiritual movement, the hope of peace comes to the world. How could anyone, even an atheist, not be drawn to such a fascinating individual?  It has been said that Jesus must have been a historical figure because no one could have invented such a unique and multi-faceted person. The Galilean Secret is particularly provocative in suggesting that part of Jesus’ spiritual genius came from his integration of the masculine and feminine in both his person and his religious teachings.

O’Shea: On the flipside, do you think an agnostic or an atheist has the opportunity to be just as engaged in the novel as a religious reader may be?

Howard: An agnostic or atheist reader could definitely become engaged with this novel, provided that they bring an open mind to the process.  An online video features the prominent atheists Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett. In viewing the video, I noticed that although these atheists don’t believe in God, they believe that spiritual experiences are real. I would think that any inquisitive person would want to ask where these experiences come from.  Do they derive entirely from a person’s particular psychological type or history?  Are some people more prone to having spiritual experiences than others?  If we are honest in our quest for truth, how can we rule out that these experiences might come from the creative spiritual being that Christians and other theists call God?  The Galilean Secret explores the nature of these spiritual experiences as they relate to the human quest for love.  The life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth are critically important to this quest because he brought humanity a fresh interpretation of love and died dramatizing its meaning.  Agnostics and atheists, like everyone else, need to love and be loved in order to find meaning in life.  The Galilean Secret explores the question, Where does love come from and how we can we better understand its many dimensions?  Only by asking and attempting to answer such questions can we find the love that we all crave.

O’Shea: Were there ways that in writing the book you found aspects that allowed you insight into things you were trying to teach at the church you pastor?

Howard: The short answer is yes, but writing a novel allowed me to go into much greater depth than I could in a sermon or Bible study.  Although there are some similarities, sermons and novels are different forms of communication.  Listeners to sermons would quickly get impatient and bored if the preacher used the time to ask deep questions and not give clear answers.  A story, on the other hand, is much more open-ended.  The best novels don’t offer black-and-white solutions to human problems.  They tell stories that must be interpreted by the reader, and often multiple interpretations are possible.  Hopefully readers of The Galilean Secret will receive a much richer, more nuanced, and ultimately more challenging and inspiring interpretation of love than I could ever communicate in a sermon.

O’Shea: In a modern age, do you think folks are more or less likely to believe that religion has the power to change the world (in a positive way)?

Howard: In his book When Religion Becomes Evil, the Christian theologian and ethicist Charles Kimball makes the point that religion is arguably the most powerful force in the world.  He says this because religion brings out both the very best and the very worst in people.  Out of love for God, people feed the hungry, care for the sick, establish orphanages, work for peace and justice, and engage in all manner of humanitarian and altruistic activities.  On the other hand, people enslave other people, oppress women, start wars, and become suicide bombers in the name of their God and their religion (to name just a few abuses).  Unfortunately, in our media-saturated world, the images of evil being done in the name of religion gets seared into viewers’ minds and they forget all the good that is done in its name.  This leads to a great deal of cynicism about religion in general.  The only way to change this is for people who practice their faith in an ethical and humane way to keep doing good works until evil religion becomes a thing of the past.  It will be a long journey toward God’s new world of love, peace, freedom, justice, and provision for all, but we must keep working toward that new world, and I hope that The Galilean Secret will help in some small way.

I’m just one of many folks that respects Wallace’s intelligence and lament his passing. He gave a hell of a lot of himself on the written page.  I was recently reading his thoughts on life, which he boiled down into a commencement speech, (and which later became the 2009 book, This is Water). Consider this thought on page 48 of the book.

“Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education, least in my own case, is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract thinking instead of simply paying attention to what’s going on in front of me.”

I have to mull that one over for awhile. I may need to hang it on my wall.

I really have nothing else to say, except that–hey, if you know me–and if you’re ever suicidal: Please don’t. I’ll miss you. That’s not an effort to be glib on my part. I hope that someone in my circle of friends remembers that I wrote this sentiment, when they’re feeling overwhelmed. And if you have someone in your life that battles depression, support them. It can be maddening for all parties involved at certain points, but it’s amazing what a little simple moment of caring can do. We can’t stop all suicides. That’s impossible. But maybe if we all pay attention to what’s going on in front of us, we might help someone that we might not otherwise note.

Heroes for My Son

I’m of a firm opinion that Brad Meltzer is always writing, be it in his head or actually writing–or thinking about writing. Known for his numerous bestselling works of fiction, Heroes for My Son, is Meltzer’s first non-fiction book. Here is how the book (released May 11)  is described at the project’s blog: “When Brad Meltzer’s first son Jonas was born eight years ago, the bestselling writer and new father started compiling a list of heroes whose virtues and talents he wanted to share with his son. Abraham Lincoln, Rosa Parks, Jim Henson, Amelia Earhart, Mohammed Ali…and so many more, each one an ordinary person who was able to achieve the extraordinary. The list grew to include the fifty-two amazing people now gathered together in Heroes for My Son, a book that parents and their children—sons and daughters alike—can now enjoy together as they choose heroes of their own.” It’s been awhile since I’ve gotten a chance to interview Meltzer, the first time for this blog in fact, and I’m always happy when I get to pick Meltzer’s brain.

Tim O’Shea: Sometimes when folks make “best of” or ranking books of any kind, they have to brace for the readers who ask “why didn’t you include?”. Not only are you braced for it, in fact you are inviting folks to tell you about their heroes. This did not surprise me as you always have figured out ways to get your audience involved in your work. Two questions, are you enjoying getting people’s stories about heroes even more than you expected? When did you first decide it was a priority to get the audience so engaged?

Brad Meltzer: The idea of including a spot in the back of the book for people to include their own heroes solely came from my belief that there are heroes everywhere. I love that fact. And I want to hear more. Why not use the hive mind?

O’Shea: My wife was reading the book the other night and she was wondering–where did the “be nice to the fat kid” life lesson find its origin?

Meltzer: I was friends with that fat kid. And even got in a fight for him. Scariest moment of my schoolyard life.

O’Shea: After years of swimming in the land of fiction, what’s been the most enjoyable aspect of writing inspirational nonfiction of this kind?

Meltzer: Doing something for my boys. There’s nothing NOTHING like doing something just for your kids.

O’Shea: Speaking of inspiration, are there certain inspirational writers that informed your approach to this project?

Meltzer: Not even sure I know any. I just — as always — write what I like — and then hope that people like it.

O’Shea: Charity has always been an element of your writing–and this book is no different. Had you always intended to include several charities (as represented through the heroes) in the book, or is that an element you decided to capitalize upon as the project evolved?

Meltzer: Funny, I hadn’t even thought of that. I just picked people I admired. Didn’t realize how many were “charity.”

O’Shea: Was the plan always to end the book with your relatives that were your heroes?

Meltzer: Always. That’s the point. The best heroes are often the ones already in your life.

O’Shea: How did you decide the arrangement of heroes as they appear in the book? I was particularly struck by the fact that Houdini is sandwiched between Harriet Tubman and Jackie Robinson.

Meltzer: Thanks. I’m particularly proud of Houdini next to the other great escape artist. The publisher kept asking, “What’s the order that you’re using?” But to me, it had no real order than “this seems right.”

O’Shea: Some of your heroes are names that are new to me and/or seemingly somewhat obscure. Were there some heroes that were more challenging to research than others?

Meltzer: Rosa Parks, Jim Henson, Einstein, Mr. Rogers…some of these people have been written about so often — but there’s always something new to find. The hardest were people like Eleanor Roosevelt or Thomas Jefferson, who litterally have a library of biographies.

O’Shea: Given the format of the book, you only have about a page to capture the heroic nature of each subject. How challenging was itto be that economic with your words on each subject, while still being able to capture the full scope and essence of the person’s heroism?

Meltzer: I wanted the book to read like poetry. There’s a real rhythm to the entries. These wereen’t just the stories of great people. These were the singular moments that made them great.

O’Shea: Is there anything you’d like to discuss about this Heroes project that I neglected to ask you about?

Meltzer: Please please please — if you’re reading this, go to www.HeroesForMySon.com and send us a hero that you know and love. I’m writing Heroes For My Daughter right now and need the material.

Bad Developments

I learned about the writing of Nathan Walpow when interviewing Gary Phillips (over at Robot6 back in 2009). In addition to discussing his writing (including the recently serialized Bad Developments), Walpow and I touched upon FourStory (a housing advocacy site that supports “fair living conditions for everyone”). As detailed at FourStory: “Nathan Walpow’s Joe Portugal mystery series includes four novels; the latest is The Manipulated. His short story ‘Push Comes to Shove’ was reprinted in The Best American Mystery Stories series and he has a story and song in the recent book/CD combination A Merry Band of Murderers. Nathan is past president of the Southern California chapter of Mystery Writers of America and a five-time Jeopardy! champion.” My thanks to Walpow for the email interview (which took place in late February).

Tim O’Shea: Your first book was published when you were 50, how many years before then had you been pursuing professional writing?

Nathan Walpow: Eight or nine. I began writing in the early ’90s, when my acting non-career became too unbearable. I was idly leafing through the UCLA Extension catalogue one day, and came across the short story classes, and thought, Hmm, that sounds like it might be fun. I sold maybe seven or eight short stories, wrote one novel that I couldn’t sell and most of another that I couldn’t finish. Then someone said I should try a mystery, and I said why not, and there you are.

O’Shea: Can you take me through the evolution of the Joe Portugal mystery series?

Walpow: I wrote the first book, The Cactus Club Killings, on the write-what-you-know principle. I figured I’d have enough trouble with the mystery elements that I didn’t want to add on learning about cops or PIs or anything like that. So I wrote about an amateur sleuth who collected cacti and other succulents. Because I collected cacti and other succulents, and supposedly that was the kind of “interesting” background people liked in amateur sleuth series. I had no intention of the hobby being important to the story beyond the first book – it was to be like Nero Wolfe and his orchids – but when Dell bought the series they wanted it to be “botanical mysteries.” So for the second I did a bunch of research on orchids and the book became Death of an Orchid Lover.

I didn’t want to do botanical-family-of-the-month, so the third book was to be called The Petal Pushers and to be set in the Los Angeles Flower Market. But between the first and second I got caught in a paperback-author purge at Dell and they dropped the series. I fiddled around with a thriller for a while, then UglyTown – an L.A. small press – said they’d like to pick Joe up. Neither they nor I wanted to keep up the botanical stuff, so it went into the background as I originally intended. The third book, One Last Hit, is about mysteries surrounding Joe’s attempt to put his teenage band back together, and the fourth, The Manipulated, involves the death of a Hollywood producer and gets Joe involved with L.A. behind-the-scenes bigwig John Santini.

O’Shea: In October 2009, Random House released two of your books as ebooks, are you pleased to see your work being released for new literature/technology platforms?

Walpow: Hell, no. I mean, theoretically, it sounds great, but it’s … but a little history first. After I was with UglyTown and it was clear Dell had no further interest in me, I asked for the rights to the first two books back. And they said, no, we can’t, because we’re reissuing them as trade paperbacks. Those trade paperbacks sold for $19 and were nothing more than the mass-market originals blown up in size, with a new price and ISBN number stuck on the back. Since they didn’t re-typeset them but merely expanded them, the print was blurry. And they weren’t sold in stores – they were print-on-demand. Hardly any have sold. But since they were “in print,” Dell could hold onto the rights to the books in case I ever wrote a blockbuster and my name was worth something.

I view the e-books as a followup to the trade paperbacks. Just another way to keep me on their rolls. I doubt they’ll sell more of these than they did the trade paperbacks.

O’Shea: How does a mystery writer come to be involved in housing advocacy?

Walpow: In my day job, I worked as the webmaster at a smallish bank. They were doing their annual report, and wanted to interview some customers for it, and since I was a writer they thought I ought to do it. One of the interviews was Project Access, an organization that put social services on-site at low-income housing developments. One of the interviewees was Jon Webb, the executive director, and he learned I was a writer and read a couple of my books and we became friends. He wanted to do a housing advocacy site, but didn’t know what form it should take, and we kicked it around for several months. Then Washington Mutual bought the bank and laid me off and it was a good time to start the site. We decided we’d approach advocacy sideways – not with just straight-on reporting of developments and statistics (though we have some of that) but more from a human perspective: what’s life like for those who need housing? And how are other people approacing those people’s needs? And we knew we wanted to include art and fiction and any other non-traditional means to show what it means to get and keep a roof over one’s head.

Before long we realized transportation and housing were so closely related that we needed to cover the need to get from one place to another too. And after that we decided to expand the focus: how do you ensure everyone has an equal chance to achieve the basic needs, including not only housing and transportation but also equal treatment under the law and in every other respect.

O’Shea: How much more of a struggle is it to be a housing advocate in a down economy–or did the stimulus packages help your advocacy work on some level?

Walpow: (I got some help from Jon Webb, the man behind FourStory, on this one.) The economic woes of the last couple of years certainly haven’t helped things, but difficulties in getting affordable housing built started earlier, around 2006, when rising prices and drying up of funding sources combined to make things tough. Housing advocates liked that stimulus money was going to buck up the equity market, but it’s still a rough period; simply put, fewer deals are getting done. We just have to concentrate harder on illuminating the situation and on being resourceful and ride things out until money’s more available.

O’Shea: What were some of FourStory’s accomplishments in 2009, and what lies ahead in 2010?

Walpow: In 2009 we achieved a five-feature-articles-a-week schedule. We resurrected the weblog, where we put our shorter and our more time-critical stuff. We launched our first webcomic, Bicycle Cop Dave, written by Gary Phillips and drawn by Manoel Magalhães. (The second episode will start in March.) We doubled our hit rate.

In 2010 we hope to have more serialized fiction. We’re introducing more regular contributors and bloggers. We’ll be using Facebook a whole lot more and (gasp) maybe using Twitter. Probably our most exciting plan for the year is the trip to Cuba in March. The whole staff is spending a week there and reporting on housing, transportation, the arts, and whatever else we can lay our squinty little eyes on.

O’Shea: When did you come up with the idea of serializing Bad Developments at FourStory?

Walpow: When Jon first proposed the idea of an advocacy website, he made it clear that he wanted it to be nontraditional – not just dry reporting on developments and statistics, but instead a place to read about how housing issues affected people. At some point he said something like, “We could even have fiction.” I kept that in mind, and when I got Gary Phillips involved, I mentioned it to him. And soon we had the first chunk of The Underbelly. It was sixteen pieces long, and dealt with a homeless guy in downtown L.A. uncovering corruption in high places. (We’re big on corruption in high places.)

When that was done, I got the bright idea to write the next Joe Portugal novel as a serial. So I started Bad Developments, knowing full well that I am the worst plotter in the world and that much of the stuff I wrote would lead nowhere. But I barged ahead, continuing the story of Joe’s involvement with shadowy figure John Santini, throwing in a plan to house all L.A.’s homeless, and opening up with a porno sex scene that startled the crap out of anyone who’d read the other books. Then, maybe a third of the way through, I got Bell’s Palsy (for the second time), and I needed to minimize my time at the computer, so I gave Joe Bell’s too (using a scene I’d written years before for another book) and went on hiatus. And I never picked it up again.

Now we have The Homeless Ventriloquist by Jim Washburn running. Jim’s a longtime journalist and music critic, but it’s his first foray into fiction, and he’s damned good at it.

O’Shea: Can you site certain influences on your (for lack of a better term) advocacy fiction?

Walpow: John Shannon is the biggest. John’s a Los Angeles writer whose Jack Liffey mystery series has gotten far too little interaction. He’s also a friend of Gary’s a mine, and has contributed a few things to the site, including The Year of Five Liberations, a five-part fiction/rumination. John’s always been onto “fair living for everyone,” and his work usually focuses the subject by concentration on one of the Los Angeles area’s subcultures, ethnic or otherwise.

O’Shea: Believe it or not, I have owned Sledge Hammer! on DVD for years, not every writer can claim they once worked in an episode of a 1980s crime procedural satire. How much fun was it filming your scene?

Walpow: It was a blast. I pursued acting for almost a decade, and ended up with six days of union work (not counting extra work) and three of them were on Sledge Hammer! Because I played the court reporter, and had to be in all the courtroom scenes. So I got to enjoy being a real paid actor for a little while. I only had one line: “What’s the point? Between you and me, you don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell.” I don’t remember if we had to do more than one take. But when I was done, I went back to unexpertly pounding on the keyboard. I had a girlfriend once who was in court reporting school, so I had a vague idea of how the machine worked, but it didn’t stop one of the extras in the jury box from letting me know what I was doing wrong.

Every time I see David Rasche now – most recently, on Ugly Betty – it takes me back to those golden days of sparse auditions and silly acting classes.

O’Shea: Is there anything you’d like to discuss that I did not ask you about?

Walpow: Just that it’s been a strange ride, the past four decades or so since I finished college. My degree was in chemical engineering, and I lasted four years as an engineer before drifting into data processing, in which I’ve made my living in some form or other ever since. I didn’t realize then that I had a creative side; never would have known that I’d be an actor and then a writer and now an editor/advocate. The more I see, the more I think the whole idea of going to college to learn what you’ll do for the rest of your life is misguided. No eighteen-year-old knows what they want to do with the rest of their life. They may think they know, but life has other plans.

The Man Booker Prizes

Fellow literary nuts like myself have likely heard of the Booker Prizes. (Full disclosure, I was shocked to discover it’s actual name was the Man Booker Prizes).

Well it turns out there was a period in its earlier years, that the Prize did not award a prize for works done in 1970. Recently they decided to rectify that omission and created the Lost Man Booker Prize. While the folks behind the prize hoped to generate some interest and discussion, it’s fairly clear that they are even surprised by the level of response as noted here.

But for me, the most interesting aspect is that anyone of us can vote for who wins the prize. Here are the choices you need to consider:

• The Birds on the Trees by Nina Bawden (Virago)
• Troubles by J G Farrell (Phoenix House)
• The Bay of Noon by Shirley Hazzard (Virago)
• Fire From Heaven by Mary Renault (Arrow)
• The Driver’s Seat by Muriel Spark (Penguin)
• The Vivisector by Patrick White (Vintage)

Anything that gets folks engaged in literature is a good thing. I wonder if some other literary prize groups will see the furor and try to figure out a way to do something in a similar vein.

Footnotes in Gaza

Many folks may already be aware of it, but if you are not–Paper Cuts (the NY Times literature blog) features an author offering his or her musical playlist on a weekly basis, in its Living with Music feature. It’s a great concept that I look forward to reading every week.

I meant to mention this when it first appeared, but am now catching up on things. Graphic novelist/journalist Joe Sacco was featured last week–and I have to say I never would have pegged him for a Wings fan. Be sure to also look into Sacco’s latest work, Footnotes in Gaza.