The opening monologue, which I linked to above, reveals the transparency in which Ferguson consistently conducts the show. He conceded that he was slightly bothered by the dust-up on NBC involving Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien. Coming out of that, it got Ferguson thinking about the dynamics of his television show and itching to try a show without a studio audience (an aspect of his normal show that he fully concedes he appreciates and feeds off of on a regular basis).

If anyone doubted his being inspired by Snyder’s old format, Ferguson eliminated that possibility with the closing line of the monlogue, quoting Snyder’s traditional line to his audience: “Fire up a colortini, sit back, relax, and watch the pictures, now, as they fly through the air.”

CBS did not post the entire episode, but I’m sure if you look through You Tube, you might find snippets here or there. But for now, I provide you the five-minute snippet CBS was kind enough to post. Should I find out they will be replaying the episode, I will try to post a note here or on my Twitter account (TalkingwithTim).

One last thought on this experiment, to echo Entertainment Weekly’s Ken Tucker, who wrote a great analysis of this episode: “I vote for one edition a month of The Late Late Show in this format.”

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.

In the interim, please feel free to enjoy these interviews I recently did for Robot 6 with Jim Ottaviani, Michael Dowers, James Kochalka, Jim Rugg and Ho Che Anderson.

Today they posted Seven Cayamo 2010 Artists Share Their Favorite Moments, be sure to read it, particularly if you’re a fan of Steve Earle, Katie Herzig, Glen Phillips, Lissie, Luke Bulla, Rachel Yamagata, or Vienna Teng.

What amazes me most about the list is realizing how many things I missed, while I was busy seeing other incredible musical acts.

In addition to mentioning the podcast, I want to heartily recommend that once the Oscar ceremony starts you should head over to Screen Grab, Creative Loafing’s Movie and TV blog where Holman and others will be liveblogging the event. I’ll likely be lurking in the comment sections, making snide asides as the show or the blog inspires me.

Business of Science Fiction

Normally I try to incorporate the interview subject’s latest project in the interview headlines, but Mike Resnick has so many books on the cusp of being released (or already released) that I did not want to focus upon only one. This email interview covers a wide range of books, including The Business of Science Fiction: Two Insiders Discuss Writing and Publishing (Set to be released on March 6); The Buntline Special (Pyr) and Blasphemy–as well as a variety of other topics. My thanks to Resnick for his time and to Kevin J. Anderson for putting me in contact with Resnick.

Tim O’Shea: When you and Barry Malzberg started collaborating on columns a number of years ago, did you ever envision it could grow into a full fledged book?

Mike Resnick: It wasn’t why we began the column, but once I saw that it was popular and continuing, yes, I always assumed there’d be a book.

O’Shea: Are there any central ways that you hope readers benefit from The Business of Science Fiction? Are there certain books that helped you when you were first starting out as a writer or were the lessons you learned something that had to be experienced firsthand–not in a book?

Resnick: We’ve got a combined 90 years in the field, we’ve each written or edited over 100 books, we’ve each edited science fiction magazines, I’ve been a publisher, Barry has worked for an agent…there’s simply nothing we haven’t seen, no scam we can’t describe, and we’re secure enough at this point in our careers that no one’s likely to blackball us for letting unpleasant truths out of the closet.

Most of the book for beginners were filled with idealistic misinformation. Still are, for that matter. This book isn’t quite for beginners; it appeared initially in the pages of the SFWA Bulletin, and its audience is the membership of SFWA, which means they know a little something about writing.

O’Shea: Unless I am mistaken, your upcoming Pyr book, The Buntline Special, marks your first foray into steampunk. What motivated you to tackle steampunk?

Resnick: Easy answer: Lou Anders, my editor at Pyr, asked for a “Weird Western”. I had to look up the term in Wikipedia before I knew what he was talking about. All my life I have wanted to do a novel about Doc Holliday and Johnny Ringo. I own perhaps 50 books on them, and the Earps, and Tombstone circa 1880. This may not be the book I’d been envisioning all those years, but at least I get to write about Doc and Ringo.

O’Shea: What is it about Doc Holliday and Johnny Ringo dynamics or history that has always made you want to write a novel about them?

Resnick: They were the only two college-educated gunfighters in the Old West; they could each read Greek and Latin. And they were purportedy the two best with their weapons. Doc was the Earps’ muscle, so of course Ringo was the Clantons’ muscle. I think whichever side one was on, the other would have fought on the other side, just to indulge in competition at the highest level.

O’Shea: In October, Golden Gryphon Press will release Blasphemy, which is partially described as five short stories–”all conversations elaborating the philosophies of God, Jesus, and the Wandering Jew, from the perspective of Resnick.” Are the stories inspired by current events, or do they reflect ideas you’ve been contemplating for a number of years?

Resnick: Blasphemy is actually an omnibus volume of stories and novels that could reasonably be considered blasphemous by the religious. It includes The Branch, a novel about the true Jewish Messiah who shows up about 50 years from now; Walpurgis III, about a planet populated by Satanists and covens which comes face-to-face with what it’s been worshipping; and 5 short stories, 4 of them humorous, in which God or Jesus have speaking lines. Don Maitz has produced a great cover painting, in which your blasphemous author (me) is the main focus.

O’Shea: You have worked with a number of different publishers over the years. When developing a new project, how do you and your agent decide which publisher to offer a book?

Resnick: I made up my mind a long time ago that I would only work with editors I liked, and I’ve stuck to it. Usually – not always, but usually – I choose the editor and pitch my book, and once we get to the point where he or she wants it, I turn the negotiations over to my agent. Doesn’t always work that way, but usually it does. And once I’ve dealt with an editor or publisher, it’s not unusual for them to request a certain type of book, as Pyr just did with The Buntline Special, or Watson-Guptill did with a trio of Young Adult novels I wrote for them a few years back about the creation of certain classic paintings.

O’Shea: Given your vast body of work, you have the ability to choose to only work with editors you liked. From your perspective what essential things does an editor need to do in order for you to like and want to work with them?

Resnick: It’s not that difficult. Throwing money at me instantly puts me in your corner. But I also want an editor who understands what I’m trying to do and is enthused about it. If they treat it as yard goods, we’re never going to do business.

O’Shea: In terms of Starship: Flagship, your book from late 2009, what inspired you to develop an alien character that thought he was Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield?

Resnick: Initially I just wanted it to be diverting, something to wake the reader up – but I quickly saw that this character had a lot of possibilities: he’s the biggest fence on the Inner Frontier, so he has tons of connections; his obsession with Dickens is amusing if not overdone; and he’s an arrant coward, which means that once in the series he gets to overcome his cowardice in a meaningful way. Useful secondary character. You know, until I heard the Audible.com audio version, I never pictured him with a British accent, but of course he has one.

O’Shea: When you hear one of your books in an Audible.com or audio book format,does it ever inspire you for other ideas to explore with your characters or settings in future adventures down the road?

Resnick: Sorry, but no. Never.

O’Shea: On a related Starship: Flagship front, have you had a chance to hear Sci Fi Songs musician John Anealio’s The Ballad of Wilson Cole?

Resnick: Yes, I have. And it’s always a kick when someone is so inspired by your work that they create a filksong, or a masquerade costume, or anything like that. John did a fine job, and I hope he was properly rewarded.

O’Shea: You have frequently collaborated with other writers on short fiction, what attracts you to collaboration in that form of literature? What is it about Lezli Robyn’s storytelling approach that makes you two such strong and frequent collaborators?

Resnick: I’ve had 42 collaborator, so yes, it’s obvious that I enjoy collaborating. It’s a way of bonding with a friend who is a few hundred or a few thousand miles away; it’s a way of seeing how other writers, writers you admire, attack their stories; and it’s a way of bringing more expertise and insights to any given story. Back in the early-to-mid-1990s I collaborated on eleven stories with Nick DiChario, but usually I collaborate on just a single story. Then I started collaborating with Lezli Robyn. I’ve never met anyone else who sees things exactly as I do, who words things precisely the way I do, whose insights are as much in tune with my own. She’s the only collaborator I’ve had where, when I proof the galleys, I truly can’t tell you who wrote which parts. We’ve done 6 stories together in the past year, and I think we have 3 or 4 more, plus a YA novel, on tap for 2010.

O’Shea: What were some of the writing insights that you gained from those 11  stories with Nick DiChario?

Resnick: Nick was a beginner back then, and the insights I got from him were artistic, not technical. Remember back in the 1960s when there were a bunch of books out introducing readers to science fiction, and there was always a chapter of comparisons: if you like Clement, try Asimov; if you like Sheckley, try Tenn. And then you’re come to R. A. Lafferty, and it would say, in essence: if you like Lafferty buy everything you can find of his, because no one else writes remotely like him. You could say the same then and now about Nick; his worldview is totally unique, and no one else sees things the way he does.

O’Shea: Over the years, you’ve constructed many characters and worlds. When developing a new character or plot, do you ever find yourself having to step away from the character or plot element and revising because they become too similar to a previously established work of yours?

Resnick: I go out of my way to avoid it. Tor asked for a sequel to Santiago for 17 years before I came up with one that I thought was sufficiently different that it wouldn’t seem like a replay. I waited eleven years to write Kilimanjaro, a companion piece to Kirinyaga, to make sure it wasn’t just more of the same. And cetera.

And then Claire Small (who I interviewed back in January) gave me get a listen to the title track for her upcoming release, How Do You Like Love?–due out on May 18, 2010.

I’m not trying to make everyone jealous, by the way, actually she’s made it available for everyone to download for free. Just go to her site and enjoy.

I was hoping to see a few shows on the first day of the cruise, but even I was surprised I was able to work five concerts into one day. I was banking on getting to see Katie Herzig and Emmylou Harris in concert on the first day–but I lucked out and was able to see John Hiatt, Edie Carey and Darrell Scott perform as well.

Ultimately, when all was said and done–I actually saw Hiatt perform four separate times over the course of the cruise. There are numerous other artists I got to see and learn about for the first time. A few of them, I really hope (can’t promise) to be able to interview in the coming months. If nothing else, I hope to interview folks at Sixthman, who organized the cruise.

And if I’m lucky, I’ll get to go to Cayamo 2011. But for right now, I am grateful for getting to be part of Cayamo 2010.

The Devil's Alphabet

A couple of weeks ago, after I interviewed comics writer/prose novelist Chris Roberson over at my other online home, Robot 6, we got to discussing novelists that he would recommend to feature here. One of the first names he mentioned was novelist Daryl Gregory. Roberson was kind enough to get me in contact with Gregory who was willing to discuss his latest novel, The Devil’s Alphabet. Before starting the interview, let’s delve into part of his bio: “Daryl Gregory’s first novel, Pandemonium, appeared from Del Rey Books in 2008 and won the Crawford Award for 2009. It was also a finalist for several other awards, including the Shirley Jackson Award and the World Fantasy Award. His second novel, The Devil’s Alphabet, appeared in November, 2009, and was named one of the best books of the year by Publisher’s Weekly.”

Also, here’s some background on the novel itself: “Switchcreek was a normal town in eastern Tennessee until a mysterious disease killed a third of its residents and mutated most of the rest into monstrous oddities. Then, as quickly and inexplicably as it had struck, the disease–dubbed Transcription Divergence Syndrome (TDS)–vanished, leaving behind a population divided into three new branches of humanity: giant gray-skinned argos, hairless seal-like betas, and grotesquely obese charlies.

Paxton Abel Martin was fourteen when TDS struck, killing his mother, transforming his preacher father into a charlie, and changing one of his best friends, Jo Lynn, into a beta. But Pax was one of the few who didn’t change. He remained as normal as ever. At least on the outside.

Having fled shortly after the pandemic, Pax now returns to Switchcreek fifteen years later, following the suicide of Jo Lynn. What he finds is a town seething with secrets, among which murder may well be numbered. But there are even darker–and far weirder–mysteries hiding below the surface that will threaten not only Pax’s future but the future of the whole human race.” My thanks to Gregory for his time and thoughts.

Tim O’Shea: In addition to naming you in a manner that allowed you to avoid being called junior, do you think your parents unintentionally helped make your name more marketable for when your began your writing career?

Daryl Gregory: Wait, would my name be more unmarketable as a “junior”? Growing up, I thought it was pretty lame as it was. That’s why for my first publication — a science fiction story that appeared in “Rambler Roundup,” the Marion Hills Elementary School newsletter, when I was in fifth grade — I used the pen name “James Clark Savage,” Yes, I’d been reading a lot of Doc Savage.

We should explain to your readers that my father’s name is Darrell — note the subtle change in spelling — and that he also has a different middle name. So I’m a phonetically near-junior. The marketing genius of this — and I have to believe my parents planned it — is that it gives me something to talk about in interviews like this one.

O’Shea: You sold your first short story in 1989 and published your first novel in 2008. Had you been wanting to write a full novel since the late 1980s or creatively did you want to hone your writing skills through short stories for a number of years before tackling novels?

Gregory: For more than ten years, between selling my first batch of stories and returning to the field in the new century, my only goal was to get some — no, *any* writing done at all. I was working full time, my wife was getting tenure (she’s a professor at Penn State), and we were raising babies. I was lucky to get ten hours a week to write, and I spent most of that on a long, unsellable novel. I was lost in a sea of words, and I could not figure out how to shape the thing. There were scenes and characters and ideas I loved (some of which I later transferred to short stories), but structurally and plot-wise, it was a mess.

When I did carve out some time to write, I went back to short stories. I feel lucky that in my genre there’s a market for short fiction, because it did allow me to figure out how to tell a story. More specifically, I learned what kind of stories I wanted to tell.

And what kind is that, you ask? (Thanks for asking.) I became attracted to what I call N+1 stories. They’re almost all set in the real world, with one difference: perhaps demonic possession is a regular occurrence, or an epidemic of some new prion disease erupts.The nearest I’ve gotten to the future is a couple of years. I hear it’s nice, though.

O’Shea: Anyone that visits your website can tell you have a sense of humor. How challenging is it to ration the level of humor you put in your stories–so it strikes the right balance and does not undermine the drama or suspense of the story you’re trying to tell?

Gregory: The sad part is how little comedy I get to put in. Many of my stories are just plain grim. I don’t know why they come out that way. I should ask my wife.

But it is challenging to find the right place for humor in a story. For me, the humor only works when it comes out of character. Is this funny line something the character would really say or think in this situation? My default mode is psychological realism in the face of situational surrealism, so a lot of my characters can only give deadpan responses to the outrageous things going on in the story.

O’Shea: The old saying goes “don’t judge a book by its cover” but at least one reviewer was drawn in by the cover to The Devil’s Alphabet.

Gregory: So I’ve got one!

In that case, the cover did exactly what my editor said they were hoping it would do: pop out from the shelf and prompt someone to pick it up. I don’t know what kinds of covers make a book sell. I only know what I like and don’t like, and often those don’t have anything to do with how it works as a marketing piece.

O’Shea: Not every writer has a psychologist and professor of counseling psychology for a spouse. When writing, do you ever get to tap her wealth of knowledge for stories and/or is she one of your beta readers when a story is in development?

Gregory: I do use her expertise. I write a lot of stories about quirks in neurology issues in consciousness. A couple years ago I wrote a story about sociopaths, and she was able to hand me two books off her shelf — very handy. Also, psychologists and therapists keep showing up in my stories, not just because of my wife, but because so many of our friends are shrinks.

O’Shea: Why set the story in Tennessee, as opposed to another state?

Gregory: Tennessee is my second home state. I grew up in Illinois, but my parents and all my relatives are from Tennessee. When I was growing up we went back there on vacation every year. That’s why The Devil’s Alphabet is written from the point of view of an “inside-outsider.” Paxton, the main character, grew up in that small southern town, but he’s been gone for a long time. He thinks he understands the way his town works, but he really misunderstands everything.

O’Shea: How much does pop culture inform your work?

Gregory: In some of my short stories, and in my first novel, Pandemonium, pop culture is almost the main topic. Pandemonium was about mash-ups, taking everything I loved — science fiction, golden age comics, pulp, rock and roll — and throwing them all together to see what came out.

But in other stories I deliberately leave pop culture out of it. With The Devil’s Alphabet, for example, I wanted to create a more timeless book, so I removed almost everything except for a few David Bowie references.

O’Shea: Back in mid-January, you found out that your book was one of the finalists for the Philip K Dick Award. Was there a delayed elation after the initial shock of finding out you’d been nominated, since Dick’s work is of such importance to you (in addition to the impact of the honor itself)? How much do you think has it elevated interest in the book?

Gregory: What delay? I was immediately happy. Thought it’s a bit ironic, because Philip K. Dick’s books, especially Valis, was a huge influence on my first novel, Pandemonium, but for this book I went with different models.

I don’t think these awards do much at all to sell more copies, but they do elevate interest among a subset of SF readers who follow these things. Thanks to the blogosphere, the award press release tends to be recopied and posted everywhere, so maybe that will put the book on someone’s radar.

Jo Walton did a blog post over on Tor.com about how the PKD award is primarily useful not for who wins, but for its nominee list, because it highlights interesting books that were released in paperback that would probably be overlooked. The shortlist might help people find something interesting to read.

O’Shea: Who were the easiest and hardest characters to write in the book and why? Along those same lines, what scene or story element did you most struggle with, in terms of false starts and frequent revision?

Gregory: Pax, the main character, was by far the hardest to write. His problem is that he loves his father and his friends, but he’s been hurt, and his strategy is to disconnect and push them away. On top of this, he’s slowly becoming addicted to a strange substance that his father produces (through blisters in his skin– that old cliche). Pax doesn’t know himself very well, and what he does know — about himself, as well as his family and friends — is constantly being called into question. So in every scene I was trying to divine his psychological state. How engaged is he? Would he be callous here, or open up a bit? Does he even know why he’s acting the way he is? And when will he figure out what needs to be done, and then do it?

A writer friend of mine called him Hamlet (a comparison I now intend to bring up constantly), and I heard from readers who grew impatient for him to take arms against his sea of troubles.

O’Shea: Who edited the book, and how much from your perspective did the book improve from their input?

Gregory: My editor is Chris Schluep, and he’s great. I turned in a very odd book that my previous editor (Fleetwood Robbins, who’s now at Wizards of the Coast) had purchased, and thank God Chris understood what I was trying to do. (At least, he *told* me he understood. Maybe that’s what you say to sensitive writer types.) Chris had a light touch in the editing, but he saw ways to make the book stronger, mostly in terms of information flow. When do we learn this? Is there a way to meet this character earlier? On the next book, if I blow it, he may have to come in heavy and slap me around, but so far we’ve been on the same wavelength. That’s been a huge gift.

Given how much of a Shawn Colvin fan that I am, I’m shocked I’ve not run across Carey before. I’ve never heard anyone sound so much like Colvin–and as you can guess that’s a compliment, not an insult. She has her own distinctive songwriting style, however, and I look forward to seeing her perform live next week.