Where were you born, and where do you
call home? What do you love most about your hometown?
Me I was born in the UK and raised in South Africa, but I’ve lived in the
UK for years – the Hillfoots in Scotland then Cambridge then London, and right
now home is Edinburgh.
What do I love about Edinburgh?
There’s a great literary scene – J.K. Rowling, me, as well as that crime guy.
Plus it’s quite a small city and you’re always bumping into people you know. I
also admire that statue of a loyal dog we have hereabouts.
As a child, what did you want to be when
you grew up? How has that childhood dream affected your career?
I wanted to be a scientist and invent stuff. Hopefully I still will.
Tell us about something that has just
happened or is about to happen in your life that you would like to share.
My girlfriend just found this cool photograph of this stuffed red
dinosaur and a few other stuffed dinosaurs she used to livery, and logged into
my Facebook and made it my background.
Let’s hear about your latest book.
It’s called Invocation. It’s
out now on the Kindle – more formats coming soon. Maybe even mashed trees, who
knows!
How did you come up with the title?
With any luck it’s the first of a trilogy, so “invocation” is an obvious beginning-type
word. It’s like calling your book “START HERE!” or indeed “MUSE, HIT ME UP!”
Why did you write it?
Partly to try and write an urban fantasy where the fantasy elements all
spring elegantly from one fantastical premise, instead of legends seeping into
the cityscape from all angles. You can still get, like, a lycanthrope fey /
manga half-angel / rope golem Love Triangle giving you surprised glares of hurt
reproof round every corner! – only the idea is to get them there parsimoniously, via gentle tugs; the idea
is to sink to your imaginative non plus ultra in the legit gravity of your
slightly spurious logic. I guess it’s a constraint more often associated with
science fiction. Can you get hard urban fantasy?
I also wanted to do the “urban-ness” of UF my own way – how does the
messy influence of a concentrated population radiate into the countryside? How
does the city exist beyond its literal limits? For instance, how does the
memory, the proximity and/or accessibility of a city influence the way a
character experiences a beach landscape, or a blade of grass, or whatever? Or
what if you live in a city, but you’re just constantly staring at this one tree,
or whatever?
And what about this idea of “being a Londoner” – does it mean you carry a
fragment of that city inside you wherever you go? Or is it more just about
giving people really, really, really specific directions, which those people
haven’t actually asked for, to places
they only said they might want to go
to? Or, like, what? #WHENINLONDON probably knows the
answer.
Also I thought about taking fewer cues from hardboiled fiction and more
from the so-called “cozies” – my partner-in-crime Sam Walton has just completed
a PhD on golden age crime fiction (Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Gladys
Mitchell, those guys), and I’ve been learning via osmosis that the rep of the
Interwar Whodunit as mild, comfortable diversions – indifferently supportive of
the social status quo – is frequently
undeserved, and actually some of those novels are savage, subtle, and nang.
As with most big projects, curiosities were turned up in the course of
the writing Invocation, and I kind of
let them take over. But those were some of the early impulses, and they’re
still available as traces.
How did you choose the urban fantasy
genre?
Um, partly it goes back to what I was just talking about, about sensing
the capacity of a genre to be folded in slightly different ways. In many a
paranormal romance the most paranormal part is what she would ever see in him:
“Luke stared at me sexistly. A semi-orgasmic shiver of fear and disgust ran
down my spine. ‘There’s something I gotta tell ya, stupid head,’ he wolfed. Goddd.
Yesss. ‘I’m a tooth fairy.’”
So I dealt with that.
Choosing genre sounds like a simple question, but it’s kind of tricky for
me. Can I come back to it?
Do you have plans for a new book? Is this book part of a series?
In my head, it’s part of a thematic series. The working titles of the
next two novels are Integration and Interpellation. Integration is a space opera. It’s going to be full of blood and
sex and incredibly long-winded philosophical dialogues in incredibly green
forests. Right now I’m brushing up on some basic maths and economics which
should help me write it. Glory be to Khan Academy. Interpellation is so far indescribable. It’s about someone called
Arthur House and his friend Tamburlaine and what they get up to.
It would also be good for it to be part of a different series, a series
exploring the world and the characters. I tried to give it a sort of pilot
feel. But I don’t know if I’m ever really going to do that.
I’m pretty bad for not finishing stuff, BTW . . .
What inspired you to be a writer?
Somebody brushed up against me and did something to me. I haven’t been
the same since. I don’t know what that was.
So who is your favorite character in Invocation? Why?
Haduken Blake – I think his spark first flew up years ago, when I was
studying Shakespeare. So, this teacher
of mine surprised me by sticking up for Polonius. I wasn’t actually thinking of
Polonius when I wrote Haduken — I was probably thinking more of a new Doctor
Who, really — but I recognised later the parallels and resonances.
I had him down as this totally legit figure of fun, a chatty, prying,
cliché-prone buffoon, as thin and easily-penetrated as the arras he hides
behind, and only vicariously interesting because of the variousness of the
annoyance into which he provokes all the proper characters. But my sensei caught
my cheap scorn in his chopsticks and threw it down the mountain face like
thunder, pointing out the peril and conflict of Polonius’s position at the
periphery of kingly power. Polonius is more-or-less impotent apart from his
counsel, and haunted by responsibilities disproportionate to his influence. He’s
meant to be the custodian of all this virtue implicit in classical learning,
and yeah, he tries to be that, but he also has a nagging sense the idea of the specific
relationship between virtue and erudition on which his legitimacy is based is
not quite right. He’s a complex clownish counterpart to Hamlet, Shakespeare’s
most clownish tragic hero. Perhaps there are even certain circumstances in
which a copious flood of unhinged prolix Polonial pretentiousness is not merely
understandable and forgivable – it’s actually the best possible act?
In Invocation Haduken Blake is
more than a chief counselor, he’s da baws. But possibly not very good at it. He’s
this harried, flowery Hellenophile, full of dreams and schemes, sometimes too
sly for his own good, and a danger to those around him. The agency he’s in
charge of, Chancelhouse, seems clumsy and archaic in comparison to its rivals.
Chancelhouse used to be a quango – a quasi-governmental organisation – but now
they’re a charity. Basically their program got cut, and you can’t help but
wonder, was partly because of Haduken’s bookish ineptitude?
By the way, I sometimes wonder if the terms in which we typically
understand character – the poetics of character – are systematically false.
There’s this moment in Steve Aylett’s film Lint
in which the ink of a printed word is pried apart, and a sort of wee “word
bone” is tweezed out. I think we often semi-consciously (and often helpfully)
assume that characters work in a similar way: that they’re little scaled-down
human models, manifest in a slightly different medium from us, homunculi of
pixels or ink you could dip your tweezers into and tease out a ganglial hank,
or some tight textual correlate of coursing neurological matter. But when we
talk about a character having attitudes and feelings, or indeed having “depth”
or “coming to life” or “leaping off the page,” clearly these are metaphors, and
what they are metaphors for is
something profoundly complex and elusive.
I think until I wrote Invocation I
was a character skeptic. What is it that authors do when they create
characters? How does characterisation function? I used to think, perhaps all
authors are doing is curating proper nouns like Jacques and Melinda, whilst
tickling our innate faculty to personify.
Where such proper nouns are cocooned by deft diction and thick anthropology,
where they are interspersed to tag nuanced code-switching discourse, where they
are vaguely in the vicinity of various emotionally salient references –
basically, when the reader feels that they are in safe hands – it is really very
difficult to imagine how any author could go wrong, how their characters could
be foci of any uncharacteristic
actions whatsoever! That is, so long as a reader’s faculty of
personification is solicited, via any mechanism of trust, any warm happy
feeling or affect bribe, then character depth and enrichment supervene on any
disharmonious (i.e. never finally, truly disharmonious) activity, whilst on
harmonious (i.e. never finally, truly harmonious) activity there supervenes a
sense of how well-observed the character is, how finely detailed. At worst there is neutrality, no accrual of,
um, characterness: it’s a rainmaking set-up.
That may be a bit dense and obscure, and anyway, I’m much less of a
character skeptic nowadays. Not that the characterisation in Invocation is great or anything, it just
woke me up in some way. And I still obviously suspect that the folk/marketing
poetics of characterisation – all that believability, depth, coming to life,
care affordance – is systemically false, but I’m not quite so smug re knowing
what to put in its place.
I wonder, BTW, if some authors think of themselves as trying to write
believable relationships, rather than
believable characters? If some
authors, in summoning up the network of social life, focus on the links, not
the nodes?
Have you ever used contemporary events or
stories “ripped from the headlines” in your work?
Yep, definitely.
I think you can draw a distinction between (a) using news and current and
events “for inspiration” – a dubious custom which smacks of performative
reconciliations and unscrupulous escapism, and (b) really being painfully open
to the world we’re living in, and trying to grapple with all its confusing and
contradictory ingredients, even if the world you’re writing about is full of nice
griffins or goop golems or hamster and gerbil corsairs or whatever.
No way am I opposed to
escapism, but I think it’s good to know exactly who or what is escaping, and from
what, and what gets left behind, and whether there will ever be any return, and
what could happen in the interim, and how things may be just a little different
if there is a return.
Maybe everyone should be going around writing books in which the prison
commissioner stares a tad wildly around the vacant cell, his moustaches beating
like wings, then settles his gaze on a sexy pin-up, tears it down to reveal a
painstakingly chiseled tunnel many miles deep and howls. Meanwhile, behind him,
one of the prison screws glances down to hide his smile. Maybe that’s the kind
of escapist literature we need now. Or maybe, instead of just tying your
readers’ bed sheets together for them, you should be de-weaving and re-weaving
them into a beautiful white rope, of an almost luminous pitch, to loop around
the bed leg, and leave for the tower’s master to indicate the route taken.
Basically, I’m not sure.
Is there anything you find particularly
challenging about writing?
When a wasp or spider or moth gets in and you have to go catch them in a
jar. That can get tense. Also time, money, a room of one’s own.
Also, uh, Math Envy, or Positivism Envy, or something – sometimes it’s that
want of arithmetic precision, especially when setting out to transform some
minute, sensuous circumstance into words. For instance, strolling along the
sidewalk, sweeping your gaze along the different forms of stone, and the flecks
of impurities or whatever embedded there, and patina of bits of green glass, like
to extraterrestrial punctuation via chance grinding and lathing, all laced with
miscellaneous microscopic sidewalk jetsam, and all crisscrossed by shadows –
how do you convey what you’re seeing? Okay, you can say, “Hrun moseyed along
the pedestrian walkway, mesmerised by the pavement’s hundreds of native
constellations, till he bonked into a lamp-post, and fell into a swoon,” or
whatever, but sometimes I want to record the specific layout, the exact distances and contours of every little
emblem – whilst simultaneously remaining faithful to the fact that none of it
is a big deal for the character through whose consciousness it gets filtered
(there I go again!).
Also sometimes the subtle system of prejudice and persecution built into
language and genre conventions. You feel you are building this wonderful
castle, but all your Lego bricks are blood-soaked. It sometimes has weird
advantages though that hypothetically innocent discourse would lack. It means
you can connect things in weird ways – like you’re stacking your bricks
side-long, using their stickiness instead of their structure.
What advice would you give to writers
just starting out?
Read a huge amount. Write quite a bit too. Drink a lot of coffee. Own two
cats of different temperaments.
Have interests outside of your writing and your cats.
Keep your writing in perspective. We are not only writers. We are also,
and in the main, indie knights errant, born into this world to redress wrongs.
Do you ever suffer from writer's block?
If so, what do you do about it?
If you can’t write, read! One of the fine things about reading is that
the writing has already been done in advance.
If you mean that scenario where you type “CHAPTER ONE” and stare at the
blank page for half a day and then type the letter “I” and then scrunch up the
page – I guess nowadays you scrunch up your laptop and throw it over your
shoulder into a pile of scrunched-up laptops – no, that’s not a problem for me.
I think if that ever did happen, I’d just assume I was just no longer a
writer – maybe permanently, maybe just for now – and go do something else. I
mean, I sometimes find I can’t invent glorious machines, or waltz beautifully
in time, or checkmate my friend Jonathan, but I don’t exalt it as evidence of
Inventor’s Block, or Waltzer’s Block, or Grandmaster’s Block.
“His prawn ate my horse, I must have Grandmaster’s Block!”
However, writer’s block could
be a problem in two circumstances. The first is if there’s some kind of
deadline looming, and you feel you might let someone down (or let yourself go
begging, if you’re one of the few folks who makes a living through writing).
The second is if you’ve already devoted a lot of time and effort and you’re
like 75% or 99% through with something, but you can’t work out how to tie it
all together, or you suddenly lose interest and just long to play with a
Frisbee. Those two circumstances, yeah, those can be really frustrating. I
haven’t worked out how to deal with them. Probably the answer is for everyone to
get together and develop some kind of rioters’ bloc.
What about the Jo Walton who is the
author of Among Others, Tooth and Claw, Ha’penny and so on? Have you read her books, and what did you make
of them?
I don’t know Jo Walton’s work terribly well, but I did enjoy Among Others very much. I’d recommend
it, and not just for F&SF fans. There’s typically sprawling and wayward review of it slowly spreading on
my blog (Lorraine Concern). I’ve also liked some of Walton’s Tor.com articles – such as the
one where she buys fifteen Trollope novels and Iain Banks’s The Crow Road, and the one where she
spreads the word about David Graeber’s fantastic Debt: The First Five Thousand Years.
If guess if I do the next book, Integration,
through a legacy publisher they may want me to adopt “Jo Lindsay Walton.” Or Jo
Luna Walton, or whatever – obviously their focus is in fashioning a recognisable
brand with strong reputational point of difference. Anyway, that may never
happen! Part of the “Iain Banks / Iain M. Banks” story involves a publisher who
believed Iain M. Banks might be confused with Rosie M. Banks, and so confiscated his M. I guess the rule was he
could have it back when he’d reinvented space opera, or something.
Who is your favorite author and why? What
books have most influenced your life?
So tricky! Just now I mentioned Steve Aylett, who has been quite
important to me. He’s a brilliant writer who deserves many more readers. You
can check him out on Twitter – @SteveAylett – or wherever.
There are many other writers who are also my friends – so the person and
their work can seem blended, in the way they’ve shaped your life. They’re
mostly poets. Look out for some of the band names in Invocation – they’re mostly poetry chapbook Easter eggs!
Prose I have been reading recently and really enjoying include Stevie
Smith’s Over the Frontier, Steve
Aylett’s Rebel at the End of Time,
Iain M. Banks’s The Hydrogen Sonata, John
le Carré’s A Most Wanted Man, and
Samuel Beckett’s Collected Shorter Prose.
Any of Beckett’s plays or fiction can be resolved by positing a final
scene, on the cutting room floor perhaps, or unlockable with the correct codes,
exposing the whole thing as an experiment conducted by a malign futuristic
Mega-Corp. “FailBetter Cola is . . . people!” etc. I believe this to be
pertinent in some way.
How did you deal with rejection letters?
Nobody would ever reject anything that I’ve written.
What tools do you feel are must-haves for
writers?
The pussycats that I’ve mentioned. They imply quite a lot of secondary
gear.
It would be good to have a sort of space blaster you could point at
events and things and textualise them. Take that, sidewalk! ZAP. There would be
a snailshell-esque dial on the side where you could set genre parameters. ZAP
ZAP ZOP.
Which takes us neatly back to genre, which I said I’d come back to. I
said it was a tricky question, so the following is going to be even more
fragmentary and bewildered than usual.
Obviously genre isn’t the same thing as the marketing categories dreamed up
by publishers, although the two things are dialectically linked. I think maybe
a dose of negative capability is required: we have to try to be comfortable in
genre’s presence without knowing exactly what it is, without constantly trying
to catch it in an empty honey jar.
Part of what appeals about indie publishing is that you hope you can free
your writing from rigid commercial categories, but it’s not always that easy.
Readers rely heavily on genre labels to navigate (like “I ONLY am interested in
Paranormal Romance (NO Vampires Over Six Foot Tall! Xena must have cameo) and
Middle Grade Historical (Regency Period ONLY) Erotica (Gay is Fine for Snarky Anchorites;
Heartfelt Ingénues Must Be Straight / Bi / heteroromantic asexual)” or
whatever), so choosing your genre is kind of like guessing who you want to talk
to. It’s kind of like your first day at a new school guessing who you can have
lunch with.
I’ve heard it said that the internet is influencing contemporary fiction
– slightly confusingly – by creating both (a) more flurried cross-pollination
and finer-grained mixing of genres, and (b) a greater reliance on genre
conventions and genre literacy to carry meaning. I wonder if this is true, and
if so, what it means for the prospects of solidarity, commonality, publicness?
Particularly considering the approximate continuity of “genre” vis-Ã -vis
fiction and “genre” vis-Ã -vis, you know, media, current affairs, political
debate, water-cooler chat, breeze-shooting, cud-chewing.
I’m kind of fascinated – probably trivially fascinated, but anyway – by
the idea of very gently resettling genre tropes, so that while they are
completely separated from their genre of origin, they never go native within
the target genre, and instead they seem – or really become – something new. For
instance, imagine listening to an R&B song as though it were a death metal song – obviously, a kind of exotic
and experimental death metal song, but that’s why it might be so great – or a
Cannibal Corpse track as if it really were Robert Johnson or Joanna Newsome
doing that, or whatever. My friend Ian Heames simulates ants’ egg caviar by
taking a small, low-sided porcelain cup or bowl, tipping in some olive oil and
mixing with a little anchovy paste; he then adds pine nuts and tosses the
concoction with a small spoon. I don’t know; is this the kind of thing that is
sometimes achieved in fiction? What do you think?
These kinds of remediations and mutabilities seem pretty zeitgeisty. I
dunno if we’re due a backlash or about to splay into even more intense
territory of the same zeitgeist.
What's the weirdest thing you've ever
done in the name of research?
I don’t think I’ve ever done any research.
Any pets that you would like to tell us
about, share a pic?
Fishy. You can see his profile pic on his author page. Right now he is
staring at me from the very centre of his tank, like a long golden pit in a
large transluscent cuboid plum.
White wine or red?
White.
Coffee or tea?
Coffee.
Vanilla or chocolate ice-cream?
Chocolate.
What do you normally eat for breakfast,
or do you skip it and get straight to work?
Two different types of cereal mixed together. I have three types to
choose from.
Is your book in print, ebook or both?
Just Kindle so far – print coming soon!
Where can your readers stalk you?
Other:
Short fiction:
Poetry links:
- Interview as Jeremy Beardmore for The Other Room
- Jo Crot, “Poetsplain” excerpt in Dear World & Everyone In It,
ed. Nathan Hamilton (Bloodaxe,
2013)
- Harvey Joseph and Lindsay James, Sea
Adventures, or, Pond Life (RunAmok Press ,
2012) – co-authored with James Harvey
- Francis Crot, Hax (Punch Press ,
2011)
- Francis Crot and Nrou Mrobaak, The Seven
Curses (Critical
Documents , 2008/2012) – co-authored with Nour Mobarak
- Francis Crot, Pressure in Cheshire (Veer Books ,
2009)
- Colleen Hind and Pocahontas Mildew, We
Are Real (Critical Documents ,
2012) – co-authored with Pocahontas Mildew
