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Steve Chats, you say? Really? This is the guy who updated his website once in 17 months!
Yep, I admit it, I am useless, but between you and me, here's the plan: this little bit here, Steve Chats, is where I will come (once in a while) and get whatever's on my chest off it. It might be essays about writing, day to day blather about the new book, gossip about sales, signings, or just 'stuff'. Most likely it'll be stuff. I'm a writer, that's what we call our work, 'stuff'. So anyway, this is where you'll find the Word of Steve.

September 23, 2009 -
Ever noticed how sometimes your background music sets the entire mood for the day? Bopping my way down the street the voice in my ears was merrily encouraging me to ‘open the window and jump into the blue...’ because things could be marvelous. Couldn’t agree more. The next one up, no more than five minutes down the road said ‘Tell the truth and the whole world understands.’ Lessons to live by I reckon.

The beauty of Steve Chats is that’s basically nothing more than whatever seems to cross my mind at any given time, and if I’ve got the time to tap out a few words about it, then tap away I shall. Let’s just say, cards on the table, I’m starting to think about how I do what I do, as well as why... So, jumping into the blue...

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about time and memories and people and those boxes from childhood that I’ve hidden under the bed. Way back somewhere I explained the boxes under the bed, you see what I really mean is even though there are a lot of people out there like Charles, who I haven’t spoken to in 28 years, he’s still my friend, he just doesn’t know it. I’ve boxed that friendship up and hidden it away under the bed and can bring it out whenever I want to remember playing Football Manager and winning the FA Cup for the first time, or building forts on top of the old air raid shelter or throwing bread buns at some guy’s lillywhite arse as he has sex in the grounds of the mental hospital. All of those memories are just there, waiting to be remembered. I’m lucky, I’ve got great recall. It used to really bug my friend Didge, because he’d study his arse off and I’d be able to remember what the teacher said word for word 5 months before. It really was an unfair advantage back then, but now it’s a gift. It means those boxes under my bed are filled to bursting with stuff.

I also tend to think a lot, by which I mean internalising, taking those memories and turning them over in my head, wondering why they are the ones that remain. Some are great, some are tragic, some visceral, and I always wonder why some people just slip away and no matter how much I might want to zoom back and remember, the entire period of time is gone. I remember more about girl from Saturday’s entry than I do about a woman I lived with. Perhaps it’s the brain’s way of protecting me?

Anyway, Sunday morning, crappy hotel, lace curtains held together by the dirt staining them, I lay in this narrow single bed and had a realisation that was really important to me, and yet it is so flippin’ obvious it should have been slapping me around the head for years. I’m slow like that sometimes.

What was this great moment of enlightenment? Had I solved the age old mystery, the riddle behind life, the universe and everything? Maybe...

Time can’t spool backwards. It can’t take away the look in the eye of the girl who’s your first kiss while you’re cuddled up in a hotel corridor, close and frightened and excited. It can’t change the meaning of the first love letter that landed on your doormat, the necklace that broke 3 years later, or weaken the thrill of the first Valentines card. Stuff can happen in the here and now, that girl could have grown into something ordinary or ornery and just not be someone I could connect with now, but it just can’t diminish the brilliance of the memories and experiences I need to tap into every now and again. Like I said, obvious to you, a revelation to me. The day will always be the day, the night will always be the night and yesterday will always be back there, unchanging, locked in time. That momentary glimpse of reason helped me process a lot of stuff. I joke regularly about my impending midlife crisis (20 days now, if you are counting,) and about how finally life and its events seem to be shaping me into the man I was always meant to be. It’s an interesting process - and a dissociative part of my brain, the bit where Steve the Writer lurks, is watching everything with something akin to voyeuristic glee.

So, anyway, this morning as I was waking up muggy headed and in need of caffeine, a rogue thought slipped in unchallenged and I figured, "hmm log it, and if you get time, use it here." I’m changing as a person and I’m changing as a writer. I can feel it happening every day. Now, it could simply be that my midlife crisis is approaching full steam ahead (but I think not), but it could be something else as well. It could be that I am finally connecting with my own life and this thing they call talent and my ability to write what is inside me at any given time.

This, I think is more to the point. I’ve been trading a lot of letters with friends recently, and I’ve gone looking for a lot of old friends like Karen, Elaine, Elliot, and Katie who all put up with me age 11, then there’s Didge who I have to call Sid now, and Tris and Mike who were all there when I was 15 and hopelessly in love with girl, and remember all these other aspects of me I never really knew. Didge sat telling me stories in a restaurant behind Waterloo Station that had tears rolling down my face because the moment he started telling them, the more I remembered them and heard the ring of truth over the years clear as a bell. Boy did I do *stuff* back then. Poor old Mr Coles... What Didge could never work out was how I’d do stuff, and not just get away with it, but be almost praised at times. He used to sit next to me Maths. It was like the blind copying from the dumb. So, one day Mr Coles (whose full name I still don’t know) is on This is Your Life with Eamon Andrews, because he was Oliver Reid’s teacher and it was Ollie’s episode. Of course, there was a picture in the Radio Times so I snuck out of school, bought a copy... and glued it to the blackboard. So Didge decides he’s not going to sit next to me that lesson and abandons me to my fate. Coles comes in, sees the wanton vandalism, looks around the class, sees me on my own, sees my erstwhile partner in crime hiding at the back and says ‘Dijani, who did this?’ knowing Didge would blab, the bastard. So, old man Coles comes up all menacing. This was back in the day when teachers didn’t just hit kids, they dreamed up cruel and unusual ways to do it. He comes and sits next to me at the desk, and everyone is just waiting for him to explode. Instead he leans across and says: “Oliver Reid was an absolute pleasure to teach. In fact, you remind me a lot of him, Savile. You’ve got that same blatant disregard for authority and a sense of humour that helps you get away with it. You’re cocky but people can’t help but like you.’ And that was it, instead of beating me or banishing me to detention for a month, Coles spent the next 80 minutes reminiscing about Oliver Reid and the way the school used to be. It was one of the best 80 minutes of my life because I got to understand the man. And he never mentioned the magazine glued to the board. Hell, he made Didge clean it off afterwards, which just about summed everything up.

I’d forgotten it completely, but he only had to say ‘Oliver Reid’ and it all came crashing back, but thankfully I had a friend to paint in all the details where I was hazy.

It’s been a really wonderful experience this whole process of reconnection. I’ve been learning about me through the eyes of long forgotten friends.

Some of the old gang are going through tough times, some proving to me that in fact they are exceptionally strong people, some just being good people.

I’ve been writing. Not stories, not essays, but proper traditional letters. I’ve been connecting with these old friends in a way I haven’t in my life. And I just took a few hours to look back at a few of these and realised for the first time that I really can write. And it’s not about thrillers or fantasies or sf or any genre, it’s about people, about mining my own thoughts and emotions and being brave enough to lay my soul bare to be judged. You’ll notice Steve Chats is getting a lot more personal than it ever used to be, or than anything I ever put out on the net was, and that’s because I’m changing as a person and a writer, and now I want to connect with the world around me rather than simply look on with a vague feeling of smug superiority.

If I had to pick an inciting moment it would be earlier in the year, when I heard about Vicky’s death, and wrote the essay Catharsis for Storytellers Unplugged. That essay took a lot out of me personally, but so many people (and I mean hundreds) actually wrote to me about their own Vicky’s, or about being someone else’s Vicky, or just about friendship and grief and losing people, that I realised something fundamental that I had never actually believed - I like people. Go figure.

Not a bad midlife crisis, then.

So after a lot of ramble (and I’m not getting paid by the word for once) here it is...

Following on from boy girl, I thought it could be interesting to sit down and actually think logically about relationships in stories, after all, it’d be my contention that the emotional core is by far the most important aspect of a novel, the heart of it, if you will. Of course that’s going to mean different things to different people, but in my head that means it’s all about the Story People - the characters with stories important enough to be told. In the 'which came first, the characters or the plot' conundrum, it’s not much of a conundrum in my case. It’s all about the characters. Boy meets girl, remember? I guess I am a romantic old fool at heart.

Now, let’s play ‘let’s pretend’ for a while.

Lets say I’ve decided to write a crime series with a duel male/female lead, like the X Files’ Mulder and Sculley. You want that frission between them. You want him to be every so often hot under the collar, challenged by her intelligence every bit as much as her beauty and just plain attracted to her. She shouldn’t be ‘perfect’ because no one is. I like broken characters in some way. Ones who can grow and heal and develop as the arc of the story progresses. So, female lead... You want her to be worth the chase. Which means she has to be worth the chase to you the writer, but not in this princess in her tower waiting to let down her hair way. So, for that I delve into my own life and mine that box under the bed marked girls I chased for whatever reason, and look at what made me hot under the collar at different times in my life. I want to say it was always something different, to make myself seem deeper, but it wasn’t, ever. It was always the same thing. So with that in mind I know my weakness. It could be, say, that our boy has a weakness for stomach muscles, the kind that could scrub wet laundry off... or it could be something about the eyes. See that’s my Achilles Heal, it’s the challenging fierce intelligence and sometimes the cheekiness or some play around that. I guess it’s body language of a sort, in that your eyes are talking long before your mouth ever is, so, for our boy, let’s give him my fatal flaw. He’s an eye man. Why would I make such a choice? Because I know it. I know what it feels like. I know how it enflames and frightens and how visceral its connections can be. I’m not an ass man, I’m not a boob boy, so giving those characteristics to a lead can be very problematic for me as a writer. So, when I write our boy, I am always going to plumb bits of me, even if it is subconsciously. What does that mean? Our girl needs to be modern, not something stepped out of Jane Austin. So, quite capable of chewing bubble gum, kicking ass and taking names. Feisty. Fiery. Fierce. Hmm, how many more F’s can I come up with?

And you should be able to guess why already... because they’re the things that I respond to, meaning they’re the traits I recognise and admire and can hope to capture.

This kind of thing is relatively easy to do in a visual medium, sly glances, body language, that kind of thing, and a good actor can layer in all of these subtle undertones where the scriptwriter has just left the potential for them in the lines he wants you to read between. You get Stana Katic to play the lead, or Jamie Ray Newman, who both have that certain something in the way they look at their romantically inclined male counterparts... and of course, me, through the screen.

But how about as a novelist? How do you do it then. After all you’ve ‘only’ got the words.

You’re going to need a whole new bag of tricks. You want to engage your readers, you want them to be sympathetic and willing to take the journey rooting for the characters right along with you... so again it’s back into that box... what engaged YOU about those girls. With Flame Jane, who I’ll talk about in a minute in relation to Primeval, it was just how damned difficult she was to ‘get’, if that makes sense? The easy part is falling, the hard part is staying fallen.

I’ve got a line in Silver where Sir Charles, the leader of the Ogmios Team, basically says ‘For christ sake don’t tell Noah, I don’t want him doing anything stupid...’ it’s a hint of unmined potential. I mean, it’s about a girl, and the fact that this misfit psychological screw up of a guy would break the laws of space and time for this girl if it came to it, but he’s never once said a word to her about it, he’s never once looked at her in a way that says ‘I want you in ways that go beyond meat.’ Is it love? Absolutely. Is it carnal? Physical? Reciprocated. Nope. Not for a minute, but that doesn’t remove it as a weakness for Noah, and it’s one that the old man knows all about.

So it’s there, it’s alive inside my creation of Noah. Unrequited love is a strong love. At least for me.

The thought this morning though was, when this is all gestating in my head, how do I actually go about showing it? That’s the old adage isn’t it, show don’t tell. What works? What makes the characters live and breathe? What out-right doesn’t? Is there such a thing as telling too much? Can a show actually be a tell?

Okay, thinking about the last one, in my Primeval novel Shadow of the Jaguar I have a scene were Connor (the kid I could always identify with in the show, in love with Abby, who has no clue, sound familiar?) and Abby, are walking through the city in Peru and Connor’s trying to be cool because he wants her to like him instead of the Action Man Stephen. I’ve done this, more than once, though not in Peru, but the one that sticks in my mind is Flame Red Jane G., a brilliant beautiful redhead I convinced to go out on a series of dates when I was 18, who was older, politically aware, funny and fabulous (she was in my math class at college and basically we were the only two not in our 40s so it was inevitable we’d bond at least in some way) and I was just three levels below her on the evolutionary scale. So, one night we walk through Newcastle and I start to talk. I’m terrified of the silence so I try to fill it. I’ve been studying local history, Richard Grainger, John Dobson and the like, and the collapse of the shipping and coal industries and all this, so suddenly I’m talking about all of it like a bloody tour guide. I’m enthused - which is actually blinding fear and absolutely crippling nerves - and she’s bored but cheerfully playing along.

I remembered this vividly when I sat down to write the Connor-Abby scene.

This was me and Flame Red Jane circa 1988, the names changed to protect the innocent. But it was us walking. It was me jabbering. I read a comment recently that the book was great apart from the info-dump scene, meaning the nervous nerd-boy out trying impress the hot girl and just talking too much about everything. It made me smile in retrospect (though initially I was staring at the screen going but but but...it’s my life!) because it is my life. Heh, my life is an info-dump. It’s a shocking revelation... In the same situation I’d do the same thing again. So in trying to ‘show’ my own version of nerves I ‘told’ too much? Or is it that people expect Hollywood brevity in scenes, ala 3 page chapter novelists for the short attention span generation? I don’t honestly know, but I am thinking... I know I’d do the scene the same way again if I were tackling it now, two or three years on from when I wrote it because my inspiration would be the same - I’d be dipping back into that childhood box under the bed and coming up with Flame Red Jane.

So do you go for a more introverted approach then? Dip inside the character’s head and simply ‘tell’ some of their discomfort? Do you push for more of that body language and write visually? Have him fiddling with his collar, licking his dry lips? They’re all good signs of nervousness, but those obvious ticks also have the disadvantage of (lick lipping equals furtive) double entendre, and not the fun sort.

Is there a simple check box to tick that says this is humanity? This is how we do it?

Is there a formula that a writer can follow that will help him mine that emotional core and manipulate the reader?

The answer is almost assuredly yes - but if you sit down and actively think ‘I am going to tick these boxes to make the reader love me and engage with my world’ what you’re actually doing is stilling that emotional heart because you’re transforming it into formula. You’re making it predictable. It’s the RomCom where boy meets girl, boy falls for girl, all is good til boy stuffs it up doing something dumb, boy can’t live without girl, something happens, boy runs to the airport/does something amazingly romantic and girl can’t help but love him all over again. Yawn. See that’s never ever happened to me. Normally by the ‘boy does something stupid and stuffs it up’ stage that’s it, the dagger through the heart of it. Sometimes it is girl does something stupid as well. My life’s an equal opportunities clusterfucker at times. Our emotional responses are automatic, like body language cues, we can’t really control them, so when I am trying to do something ‘right’ I’ll go back and look in the box for things that make me think ‘ahhh that’s why I did this...’ I know certain songs evince unwanted memories and take me places I don’t want to go, I know certain songs take me right back to my favourite place. Audible cues are really strong, they’ve got their teeth in memory. But again, it’s a different cue for a different reader, so I can’t sit and think ooh I’ll drop this in to make YOU think/feel/remember, all I can do is make myself think/feel/ remember and trust that the depth of my reaction, and through it, the character’s reaction, will touch you.

And I’d always rather it was that way than me trying to trick you into feeling...

Remember the second of those two songs I mentioned three and a half thousand words ago? “Tell the truth and the whole world understands”.

There isn’t a cheat sheet for a good writer to check off looking for ways to tap that emotional core, not without damaging it. I believe that. I believe that each and every writer should focus completely on writing the books only he or she can create - that means opening their own Pandora’s Boxes of childhood and teenage and that collection of experiences we call life, and interpreting them for us. Transforming them into glorious lies we can lose ourselves in.

In the Catharsis essay I wrote a little about this feeling of guilt I had that my second thought after losing my friend was ‘this is why he goes home’. The writer part of my brain doesn’t ever switch completely off, it exploits my life for the gain of story. I know that and have come to terms with it. A friend wrote to me after that and explained how watching his father die in hospital had given him his most emotional story ever, and sent the story along for me to look at. It was brilliant because of the raw honesty of the piece. You knew the writer was telling you the truth even as he was lying to you. He wasn’t just pulling your strings to get a reaction. That story of Russell’s was an important story for him, but it was also an important story for ME because it helped me realise it wasn’t wrong that I mined my own life. That’s what writers do. We collect experiences, we process emotional highs and lows, and we find ways to interpret them for other people so that they can be transported to (A) the place we want to take them in our stories, and (B), to the places they’ve left behind in their lives.

September 19, 2009 -
There are days, and then there are days, and the last forty-eight hours would count double in both senses. I’m going to tell you a story, it’s what I do after all. It’s an old old story (quarter of a century in this instance, to be precise, but funnily enough the details are all crystal clear despite the fact I can barely remember my own birthday): boy meets girl, boy falls hopelessly for girl (down a flight of stairs, nothing beats a bit of slapstick humour), and girl hasn’t got a clue.

Ahh, is that Hollywood I hear knocking at my door? Did I just hit on the formula for the next RomCom runaway success? Hmm, the story of my life. Not sure I want it on the silver screen. Still, the show must go on...

Boy was a little younger, a little less worldly-wise. Girl said, ‘Have you heard this? It’s amazing... my favourite song,’ and put Icicle Works’ Love is a Wonderful Colour on the turntable (oh yes, so so long ago, back when men were men and mp3s were vinyl). And then it was Camel’s Stationary Traveller, and the haunting West Berlin (which became one of boy’s anthems for youth). Remiss in his musical education boy rectifies this the minute he gets home so he can pretend to be less uncool the next time they meet, as boys are wont to do. He’s not quite as dumb as a bag of nails. He’s got the beginnings of a personality as well as the beginnings of a crush to squeeze a planet into a nice Marilyn Monroe hourglass. For a little while, a snatch of time in the river of life, it’s bright and brilliant and fun and all consuming, and then it’s gone. That’s another one of life’s lessons boy learned from girl. Everyone leaves you in the end.

Of course it is natural, boy and girl are hopelessly young, they drift, boy moves north, to his roots in Northumberland, girl in a wonderful quirk of fate moves south, and the both end up within thirty minutes of where the other had been, their orbits forever out of sync after that... but as Roddy Frame told us back then ‘We Could Send Letters’ and boy and girl did. Boy had never written letters before that didn’t say ‘thank you so much for the Christmas present.’ Now boy found he could write and write and write for pages, putting the pen down and coming back to the paper hours or even days later, because he wanted to share it all with girl. He’d never done that before. His form of expression had been kicking a football. In one of those letters girl mentioned a ‘poet’ whose music she loved, Martin Stephenson, and his band The Daintees. She’d bought a book of his poetry so he had to be good.

Now, and here’s an amusing little side bar, girl - woman - today has no recollection of who Martin Stephenson and the Daintees were (or are, because they’ve yet to go the way of all flesh and are happily in better form than ever), but boy cradles those songs, Wholly Humble Heart, Slaughterman, Little Red Bottle, Crocodile Cryer, Running Waters, Nancy, they all mean something to boy because they are a link back to a different time when life was simple and he had yet to make all those hard choices about who he was going to grow up to be. And don’t believe it if you hear boy ever say they weren’t tough. He’s like that, this boy, he breezes through life and makes like everything is bright and shiny and it all just washes off him like the ‘running water coming down off a thundering cloud’.

He’s got secrets, one of them is how much he still connects to that part of his life, back to when Aztec Camera, Love and Money and Martin Stephenson and the Daintees were the be all and end all of his insular little world. They were the fanfares of his strut into adulthood, meaning they are a root (yep, like a tree) back to when they were a connection to girl, or that life around the time of girl, to be more precise, and boy’s itunes selection is still filled with those old songs, but like the singers he’s grown with them and followed them down the river to their new stuff, and instead of Aztec Camera it’s Roddy Frame he listens to, instead of Love and Money it’s James Grant, and of course, right now, writing this, boy is back listening to Crocodile Cryer by Martin Stephenson.

Sometimes boy thinks living back in this other place isn’t so wise, but other times boy thinks back there where he’s 16 and the world is just waiting for him to do something brilliant is the best place to be. It’s a hard balance.

Sure, he’s let people down by then, but he hasn’t walked away from his first degree to spite his father and lay claim to his own life, he hasn’t walked out on the most ‘important job of his life’ to likewise fence it off and say no, this isn’t what boy wants to do, boy wants to tell stories and the rest of reality can go to hell. He’s still 16. He’s got a full head of hair and an infectious energy that just says ‘I could be somebody’.

The last two days have been about man visiting with boy, kicking back and saying ‘hey kid, do I disappoint you?’

That’s a really tough question for man to address, and coming face to face with boy, like some arrogant ghost kicking back on his couch, feet up by the fire, that sneer that says ‘you were going to be somebody cool now look at you’ on his lips, is a shock, and it’s weird but it is a good weird and a pleasant shock. Man isn’t such a bad man, he may not be the same ‘somebody’ the boy thought he’d be, but he’s climbed mountains, physical and metaphorical, to become who he is.

Okay, back to the story... bad narrative voice... bad. Tell the story...

Six months ago I happened across an advert for Martin Stephenson and the Daintees playing at the Borderline on Friday 18th of September, and I just knew I had to go. I couldn’t tell you why. I just had this ‘feeling’ that it was important I go. I’d seen them once, around 1989 I guess, back when I was at University, doing the accounts degree, not the politics one, so before the ‘big break for independence’. I remember it pretty well. The peculiar thing that stood out in my mind was that this guy who wrote these melancholic songs had such an incredible stage presence and the most barmy sense of humour ever. He’s a talker. He talks during the songs. And he’s funny as fuck. I mean he’s cracking jokes with the audience, going on walkabout and leaving the bass player alone on stage riffing for far too long while the rest of the band hide upstairs, he’s playing spot the look-a-like with the crowd (Ted Nugent, Michelle Shocked, Sting, Bono, the stars were really out) but like boy, he’s changed - and for the better. He’s more accomplished, his playing is tighter, his humour is sharper, but why shouldn’t it be? He’s been doing this a long time, he can entertain.

So, tickets bought, flights booked, boy wondered, as boys do (even ones who are trying desperately not to make Batman and Robin references), whether girl would be in the audience? After all how many Martin Stephenson fans can there be left in the world, boy thinks. Maybe that’s why he’s meant to go. You can never know how the world works. I don’t believe in fate. I don’t believe in destiny. Then again I don’t believe in chance. I’m an enigma wrapped up in a conundrum and tied off with a nice ribbon of mystery. I don’t have to make sense. But I know this... boy hoped. Man let boy have his moment in the sun.

Boy couldn’t have banked on girl’s absolutely dreadful memory and the fact that girl had lost all recollection of Martin and the Dainty Ones... but, wait, you heckle from the back, how do you know this oh great narrator on the screen?

I’m telling you this story, so ‘had yer horses’ as my granddad would have said. You have to imagine the broad Geordie accent transforming the word hold.

Last month, just before man goes off to LA for a jolly a name pops up in his in box. Man does double-take for comedic effect. It’s like a voice echoing down (or up) all the way from childhood. It’s girl. Considering over the last quarter of a century boy in the process of growing into man had probably tried a dozen times to track down girl just to catch up and say ‘whether you realised it or not, you had a hand in making boy the man he became,’ ‘you were awesome and I was a kid and couldn’t find the words to say you were awesome’ and all of those things boy would have said to girl back then if boy had been able to put one word in front of another and make a sensible sentence. But she had a knack of making it difficult for boy to frame his thoughts so lots of things went unsaid.

See even back when boy knew girl was going to be somebody. She had the ‘it factor’. Turns out she’d been living in eleven countries making it pretty darn difficult for boy to find, when he’d been sending out words into the ether. Forget needle in the proverbial haystack, the damned haystack kept moving a few thousand miles at a time...

So, when the name popped up man smiled and boy inside thought ‘holy crap! What a coincidence... a woman with the same name as girl!’ Yeah, man is no smarter than boy sometimes.

The story rolls on... via a slight detour. Bear with me.

On Thursday Man and Woman connected for the first time in twenty five years, getting a glimpse of the finished article they’d each become. It was like finding that gull-winged silver Delorian, firing up the flux capacitor to 1.21 jiggawatts and punching down on the accelerator and ending up in the mid-80s. But it was more than that. Man doesn’t have the words, so it seems man is no better at this than boy was. More people should have one of these time machines, I reckon. It’s really quite incredible to meet up with lost loves and best friends and just the ephemera of life that we’re so quick to jettison. I think ephemera is underrated. I’ve had a really bad habit during my life of compartmentalising it and burning the bridges between stage one and stage two and three and four... There’s no one in man’s life from more than a decade ago. Five years is a decent demarkation line. Three. Clip clip clip, just move away and on. So this link back to then was frightening. Who had boy become? Had he lived up to what girl imagined for him?

It’s really quite peculiar just how easy it is to fall back into conversation patterns of back then while leaping through the nineties and naughties looking for amusing anecdotes to try and raise a smile, dodging the difficult conversations and not wanting silence to ever get a toe-hold in.

Boy was very glad to get that few hours to see all of the stuff he imagined for girl worn into the creases of her smile and then realise that girl had changed, grown into woman with all of those experiences and heartbreaks, but girl was still in there the minute she laughed. And she was every bit as awesome as boy had thought girl would become. The voice is an interesting thing, man understands, because the face might change, the hair might fall out, (boy’s not girl’s, silly,) the wrinkles might thicken, but the voice remains. The voice is the key that unlocks the door to all of those memories and moments that boy still heard in the songs (see we haven’t abandoned the music yet).

Of course, the fact that scatterbrained woman had forgotten the band he’d come all this way to see made man laugh, but then this was all about boy and connecting with this boy’s life. It wasn’t about girl really. Girl was a part of it. A nice memory to take out of the box under the bed marked childhood. But it was all about this boy’s life... it wasn’t the Hollywood RomCom in which man declared undying stalkerish love and woman swooned with a ‘Why Mister Darcy....I never knew you wanted little old me...’ and they all lived happily ever after in a tent with their two daughters living off beans. Man has got a pretty good life right now and the grass isn’t greener. Woman’s life fits her like a glove. They’ve grown into them. Own them. Are defined by them.

It was good. Now was the right time, and the grown man who lives his life thinking all of those old friends are out there living brilliantly has some proof at last that his imagination isn’t wrong. At least one of them is doing just that. So man put girl from twenty five years ago back in the box and went to listen to the music of his youth with a smile on his face. Girl hadn’t wasted his hopes.

And the next sidetrack:

There are defining moments in our lives. Yesterday was one of those for this man. The morning after the day before... was spent walking down Charing Cross Road browsing the old second hand book stores and the modern behemoths of Foyles, Blackwells and Borders, digging around in the stacks looking for buried treasure, breathing in that wonderful musty smell of old words, and out of the blue coming across a copy of Douglas Coupland’s Generation A.

Coupland’s a special writer for me.

I was reading Generation X for the first time when I emigrated to Sweden. A lot of the ‘me’ decisions were made during the days I immersed myself in it. Finding a sequel I didn’t know was coming was a treat. The internet might have made it wonderful for boy and girl to connect across time and for a few hours pretend to be 15 or 16 or 17,  but it has made the High Street a really dull place. I know everything my favourite authors and musicians are up to. I ‘itunes’ (if that can be applied as a verb) my favourite cds weeks before the physical cd could make it to Stockholm and my stereo. So, yes, very peculiar to stumble across Generation A. I then sashayed (yes a boy can sashay, damn it, swagger even, if a boy wants to,) around the corner to a Costa’s and ordered the biggest latte known to man, and sat reading for the next two hours.

The best part of the experience, I confess, was the fact that Coupland cracks me up and at least a dozen times in those two hours saw (heard?) me burst out into full-bellied shoulder-shaking laughter. The cute crusty-student girls beside me started smiling and then eventually laughing as well, because I mean, who wouldn’t laugh at the nutter giggling at a book in the middle of London?

I’ve since been told that ‘men reading in public is sexy’. This disturbs me on a bazillion levels because surely men reading in public shouldn’t be that rare, should it?

After that little indulgence, it was back to the hotel to relax and write some. One of the two got done. Man sat and wrote a nice ‘thank you for the christmas present’ letter to woman, the present being time, and hoped she had a fantastic weekend. Man also apologised for talking way too much and not listening enough. Twenty five years of stuff needed to get said. Then freshen up. When I’m overseas I forget to eat. Or, no, that’s not right, I suffer potential entree envy. It’s an opportunity cost thing. I know if I have X, I won’t be able to have Y, and Z and A and R are really tempting as well, so I wind up having nothing.  Yesterday was no exception.

Crossed the city to The Borderline, which is this brilliant little subterranean venue like something out of the 20s Prohibition Era transported over continents just for obscure bands to come and do their thing. Ordered my bottle of Dog and leaned against the bar listening to Helen and the Horns kick off the evening’s entertainment. Then before things crowded up I moved across to lean against the sound booth and get myself a good view of the stage. Being all hip and modern I Facebooked a few updates because pics of the Silver arcs came through right then, and I really wanted to share them (it looks purdee). Zipped off a few texts back home.

Then Martin Stephenson came on stage cracking jokes about his ‘size 28 trousers from TK Maxx’ and how he couldn’t get into a pair of bloody 38’s now, letting us all into the secret that we’re older than dirt. That was an odd thing about the crowd. Normally concerts these days are these alien landscapes where the entire place has a collective age of about 17. The crowd was filled with Mitchell Brothers look-a-likes. I suspect, like me, most if not all of the crowd had found Martin back when they were at college or uni and the evening was all about connecting with their inner boys and girls. The rest of them were drag alongs.

Then the first song strummed off and I was 17 again.

That’s the only way to describe it. It was as simple as that. Martin’s guitar was my very own Delorian.

In the RomCom girl would have been there, transported back on the same chord, but sometimes real life just isn’t about the perfection of detail it’s about the imagined detail. In boy’s head she was there and dancing with every fibre of her being, full of life and saying again ‘You have to listen to this guy, he’s a poet.’

It was pretty easy to tell who the drag alongs were because they were the who looked like rabbits caught in the headlights when Martin decided to do the last 30 mins of the concert with the house lights up, seeing us in all of our middle aged pimply glory.

Beside me this vivacious brilliant bright shiny thirty-something and her drag along were the perfect example. She hit every note and made my concert experience twice what it might have been simply because in her white and black top and librarian glasses she was rocking out and having a blast. I was back at uni... actually I could have been. I realised my clothing taste has pretty much gone full circle and I’m right back wearing jeans, tee shirts and shirts hanging loose and open like I was then. So cute librarian rocked out, dancing with her whole body. That kind of stuff is infectious. I think we were the only two at the back (at the Borderline the back means touching distance of the stage) who knew every word. Much smiling, some laughing and a lot of singing went on and for two hours we were Martin Stephenson mates, bonded by something stronger than life.

That’s why I like gigs. Proper gigs in dark dingy halls where the musicians just cut loose and have fun.

After two hours he’s apologising they’ve got to finish because there’s a disco starting upstairs but invites us all to hang out with the band, so I took a wander down to the front and had a little chat with a guy who’d been one of my constant companions for quarter of a century. And it was great. I have this inbuilt dread of meeting my heroes because what if they’re not cool? What if they’re arseholes and it changes the way I think of them forever? I was invited onto the tour bus with Mike Peters of the Alarm about 15 years ago and didn’t go because I was terrified he’d be a drunken idiot and I wouldn’t be able to listen to Walk Forever By My Side and We Are the Light and Sixty Guns and and and all of those again without seeing that. Kevin J Anderson called me an idiot a couple of weeks ago when I told the story, so with his chastisement in my ear, I swallowed my fear and decided I had to go and say thank you for quarter of a century of musical accompaniment.

In the end I stuck out my hand and thanked Martin for helping boy remember being 17. And he turned around and said something to me that now, older, wiser, and wrestling my own demons, I ‘get’ in ways I could not have at any other time (that’s what it is all about sometimes, about it just not being the right time, but this weekend was the right time). ‘This is what it’s all about, Big Man. Back then it was all music industry and crap, but now it is just about playing music and having a good time. Coming out here and connecting with the people out in the crowd who love this music, and none of the rest of it matters.’ And I get it, I can apply it to my own life and realise that I’ve done a lot of stuff I had to do (in my head at least) to get into the ‘industry’ and only now am I just beginning to do the stuff inside that matters, the stuff that feeds the soul... it’s the reason I struggle when people say ‘what book would you recommend we start with...?’

And here’s a hard admission, but maybe boy would be disappointed because man might be writing books, but those books haven’t all been the books boy would have approved of.  Boy was a brilliant dreamer. He wouldn’t think much of telling other people’s stories. But that’s changing, because boy is kicking and punching inside man, and man’s wise enough to listen (in between wincing) because boy’s not had that determination sapped out of him yet and still dreams big.

Over the next year some important books (for me, for boy and man) are coming out.

There’s Silver, of course, which is the first real novel that’s all me (and the very sexy arcs are in Variance Towers and I am a little bit in love with them, I admit) but there’s The Odalisque and Other Strange Stories which could well be the first thing I’ve done ‘as a whole’ that I am entirely proud of, love stories, peculiar fantasies and little pieces of me laid bare.

So, like I said right up there three and a half thousand words ago, there are days and there are days. These two days were important for so many reasons, not just about the boy, as well, other reasons, too. I got the contract for Gold, the follow up to Silver, so I know that will be happening now, set for January 2011 release, which sounds so long away but is just around the corner really, and out of the blue I got an offer to co-write a book with a new friend who worked on one of the most successful tv shows of all time, whose tell all will hit the heights, and I signed contracts on a new series of novellas I’m co-writing with a friend, Aaron Rosenberg, who was born on the same day as me, in New York, about three hours after I came out kicking and screaming in the Princess Mary’s in Jesmond, 4,000 miles away, and a new Monster Town story, the Blues Singer, for Halloween next year, with my mate Brian M. Logan... work work work.

This, of course, will worry my friend Barry, because whenever I sign a new deal three celebrities die.

So if you are famous... I’m really sorry. Actually I’m a little worried about Leonard Cohen, looking at the news.

Right, where were we? Oh yes, girl.

You knew her part of the story wasn’t over didn’t you? Back in that other time and other place, she gave boy a keepsake, a sea bean that boy took in to his exams and on planes and places because it was ‘lucky’. Woman had told man about her dream to write kids books, and how she wanted to ask all these questions and had this stuff bursting out inside. In between all the talking and catching up on life they talked about what it took to write. She had a lot of the familiar comments about time and fear and what if it wasn’t meant to be? Man confessed to some hard and possibly wrong decisions he’d believed necessary along the way, but tried to say how the only way it happened was if the words were given a chance to live. Inside they’re not telling anyone any stories. Woman got it. Of course she did.
But it was always about more than the words. It was about determination, faith, strength, about not being ordinary. Man tried to find one word to sum it up, to say this is what you have to do.... And he’d had a while to think about it, because she’d warned him she wanted to pick his brains, so he’d found an answer. There was one big thing man had going for him, he’d never forgotten the one thing boy was really good at: dreaming.

So man had a little keepsake of his own for woman, mirroring girl’s gift for boy, something to put on her desk when she sits down to write the first words of her book, something she can hold and remember boy with, and something she can draw from like he did the sea bean of all those years ago, a stone with the simplest message: dream.

Sometimes boy can be a genius. Man’s not too shabby either.

You want to live, you need to dream. You want to live brilliantly, you need to dream brilliantly. You want to reach people, to connect, you need to remember what it is all about: an old old story about a boy and a girl. You know the one, you’ve heard it before. Just don’t make the mistake of forgetting your own boy or girl. Don’t keep them in a box under the bed, let them talk to you, listen to them and remember the things they were filled with and the dreams they had before life came along and knocked the sharp edges off them and offered an alternative called ‘settling’. And then, take it one step further, don’t just dream it... do it. If man can, you can.

SEPTEMBER 12, 2009 -
Another day another coffeeshop. Well, okay, the same coffeeshop, but it sounds like I have more of a life if I pretend to visit more than one. So, this afternoon I walk in to my home from home, sit down and Sandy and Jacob call me over to the bank of old imacs to show me their new homepage: http://www.cafebrasco.se and just as I am about to complain 'well that's no good, I'm not in the pictures!' I see myself hidden behind one of the plants hunched over the macbook air, and judging by the thick sweater it was around March, meaning deep in the throes of writing Silver. It made me smile to see the photos, and to realise just how much weight I've lost in the last few months, having shed 30lbs/14kg. No one tells you being a full time writer will effect your health. They don't mention the bad back pains from the compressed vertebrae caused by sitting hunched over the keyboard for 6 to 10 hours a day. They don't mention the damage to your eye sight squinting at a screen for that long does long term. They don't mention the fact that being so sedentary having been a fairly active guy will play havoc with your BMI. So, this summer, having finally realised exactly all the other costs of being a writer, I decided to fix the ones in my control... but, in the meantime, got to love the guys who bring me coffee and keep the books on track. Without caffeine it could take months longer to write the same stuff, I am sure!

SEPTEMBER 3, 2009 -
LA, the Roosevelt Hotel, to be precise, holds a special place in my heart. In 2003 I spent a week there attending a workshop run by Tim Powers and KD Wentworth. It was the week that changed my life. The one that convinced me I might have a career here. Kevin J Anderson, David Carradine, Bill Widder, and Charles Brown came to talk to us and convince us to quit (well in Charles' case). Bill gave us a great talk about pulps. Carradine rambled incoherently and was a salutary lesson of the ills of celebrity, and KJA talked business. It was an inspirational talk. Powers gave so graciously of his time and craft, and as a counterpoint Kevin essentially said 'you want to survive, know these things...'

I went into that workshop believing every single story I wrote had to be *important*, I came out realising I had a duty to entertain and tell the stories only I could tell. But more, I made some lasting friendships, not only among the winners, but in Sean Williams, KJA, Powers, KD and my fellow professionals. These guys have been there constantly for the last 6 years offering advice and serving as mentors every step of the way. So, now I get invited back to share my experiences with the new crop of winners, and it's the most amazing experience all round. This year, for instance, Powers and I had dinner with Dion Griffith of The Wire, chatted to Nancy Cartwright (the voice of Bart Simpson), was dwarfed by Kevin Sorbo (Hercules is one tall dude), and chatted books with the Dean of Canadian SF, Robert J. Sawyer. WotF is a family. That's the only way I can describe it. Writing is such a solo endeavour that this kind of camaraderie is vital.

For the first time in 6 years the event was back at the Roosevelt, so it felt like homecoming. KJA invented new careers for us all in the adult film industry, scaring the poor waitress. Sean and I are like long lost brothers, to such an extent that people thought I was on stage when he was. Rob Sawyer is convinced I am a Sontaran. And Powers re-taught me everything I'd forgotten over the last six years.
Highlights, definitely Tim saying he was proud of me when he heard I'd blown off a deadline for the first time and signing my copy of Three Days To Never with the best inscription ever. Sean's room party. The book signing in Pasadena and Burbank, or more specifically the mexican restaurant, dumping the check on David Wolverton and running to the signing, then signing the 400 odd copies of the Writers of the Future anthology as well as a nice pile of Primevals.

First thing I thought when I landed was god I can't wait til next year. So, if you are a budding writer, what are you waiting for, submit to wotf, it'll change your life. It certainly did mine.

AUGUST 17, 2009 -
Life’s returning back to normal after a jolly down in North Africa and a brief stop over at Carthage. Carthage was a peculiar disappointment in that it was a city, and an influential one historically, but it was just so small in comparison to other ruined cities like, for instance Pompeii, which just seems endless. I was left with the impression that it wouldn’t have taken more than a few hours to sack the place, which was just wrong on so many levels. Heck, growing up in Northumberland I wasn’t far from the Roman Wall and places like Vindolanda, and to be honest (and memory may well be playing tricks), I think the fort was actually considerably more impressive. Then again a few years ago I left Rome thinking we had more impressive Roman ruins in England, so I guess I am biased.

Life’s changed a lot over the last few years. This trip I had my trusty Nokia N97 with me, meaning I was never more than a couple of clicks away from the rest of the world. I don’t know about you but I find it more and more difficult to break from the connectivity of the modern world. I got annoyed in Sidi Bou Said, the ‘art’ city in Tunis because I lost my connection on the hillside and knew an ‘important’ email was on its way. Silly silly silly. It’s getting more and more difficult to drop out as Leary urged us to.

And what was so important? Well I was busy negotiating a couple of contracts for Silver into uncharted territories which will be announced soon, and deciding what my new life goals were going to be for ‘after 40’. I got ‘facebooked’ by a friend from a long long time ago in that proverbial galaxy far far away the other day and she mentioned she was busy reinventing herself yet again and I realized that I do that. I suspect we all do. Back when I was 21 I set myself a goal for 40. I wanted to be ‘as big as Clive Barker was back then. Obviously the Books of Blood and Damnation Game were out and Weaveworld was just debuting in hardcover. I hit 40 on October the 12th. I spent a little while on one particularly hot and stifling coach journey through Tunisia trying to gauge where I was in terms of that goal. See, I don’t consider myself a success. Not remotely. I still feel like the impostor who went up to pick up his Writers of the Future Award six years ago. So I started to run numbers. I’ve sold books into 14 languages now, though not all are out yet. I’ve sold over 250,000 copies of my books since winning WotF (that one shocked me, I don’t mind admitting, I mean it feels like such a substantial number) and I’ve written a dozen novels and a non-fiction monster that feeds my love of genre tv, edited some stuff (or co-edited mainly) and, well, enjoyed the hell out of this writer’s life. But I still don’t feel like a success.

So, anyway, heat beating down through those coach windows, I decided to believe I hadn’t failed the gauge young Steve set me. I might not have met it in the same fashion, but I’d not *failed* and that was an important distinction. The question then was what does the next decade hold in store? What goals were reasonable? I mean, did I want to be the next Clive Cussler? The next Steve Berry? The thing is, I am rather happy just being the first me, you know? So the goals were shifting. I’ve managed to live as a full time writer with no other source of income for 6 years now. It’s been tight. Difficult. Hell, almost impossible during dry spells, but for the help of good people, I’m still here, still kicking and the bills are paid. You can’t ask for more. At least I can’t. I turned my back on a lucrative career years ago and decided not to trade on my degrees for business but rather aim for quality of life, and that’s what the new goals are: quality of life goals. My plan, 10 years from now, is to be living in a nice villa in the Andalusian mountains with my own orange trees. It’s not about books or words, it’s about the *doing* instead of the *amassing* of life and its experiences. Wish me luck, and check back in 2019 to see how I’m doing.

JULY 16, 2009 -
I enjoy the collaborative process. I make no secret of it. I enjoy the bouncing of ideas and riffing off someone else's creativity to see what weird and wonderful thing we can create between us - because that's what it is, it is something that is neither me nor them, but something uniquely 'us' that wouldn't have happened otherwise. So...

Time, I think, to mention the red-headed stepchild of my writing career, my partner in crime for the Monster Town series which is slowly coming together, Brian M. Logan. Bri's a top bloke, bit of a thespian in his closet, and a rather good screenwriter who happened to win the Nicholl Award, which is a pretty big deal in screenwriting cirlces. A couple of years ago I came up with an idea for Nyxon, a monster town in the middle of Amerca, and got a lot of great writers onboard for an anthology that never happened. Or hasn't quite happened yet. Or might happen one day. Or might never, given the costs of pulling off such a massive book and the horrible state of publishing right now. Anyway, Brian and I loved the core concept and decided we'd like to play around and really recreate everything so while Monster Town bears some fleeting resemblance to the world I envisaged for the Nyxon book, the only real similarity is it's a town peopled by monsters. We've done two novellas which Bad Moon Books will be releasing some time toward the end of this year, I believe, in an old style Ace-Double flip book hardcover. Monster Town and The Beast of Box Hill, which are gum-shoe wise-cracking noirs laced with vampires, werewolves, hydes, harpies, and every other mythological creature imaginable. In the mean time we're about 100 pages into the first novel, based loosely on the Monster Town novella (just to cause real problems for people wanting to catalogue their books, obviously) and beginning to shop it around. I suspect you'll hear more about MT over the coming 12 months or so, and certainly more about the red-headed stepchild Logan.

We've got another short balls-to-the-wall horror novel in development as well, Desolation Cove.

At Latitude: 42° 0' 0 S, Longitude: 147° 0' 0 E lies the fishing village of Desolation Cove, Tasmania. With a population of 162 Christian souls, it is the southern most tip of the Commonwealth of Australia. Half a mile off the coast of Desolation Cove, South by South East, there is a tiny, cancerous outcrop of land known as ‘Devil’s Island’. So named because of aboriginal cave paintings of the Tasmanian Devil found by white settlers when the island was discovered, in 1812. Devil’s Island is home to an automated lighthouse, a long abandoned whaling station, and precious little else. And beyond it lies 2,000 miles of frigid ocean and the continent of Antarctica. It is quite literally, the end of the world.
On the bluff overlooking Desolation Cove sits the monastery of St.
Anthony of Padua, Patron Saint of Lost Souls. Long in decline, the monastery is now empty for most of the year – save for the six monks charged with maintaining the property - and is only visited by the occasional church group, seeking both history and solitude.

Late on August 24th, an internationally recognised Christian acapella group known as the ‘The Boston 12’, arrives at the monastery. Led by FatherO’Brien – the group’s musical director and spiritual leader – they have been touring Australia on behalf of the St. Anthony of Padua Society of Boston, and have timed their visit to the Desolation Cove monastery to both celebrate the Feast of St. Anthony of Padua (on August 25th), and because Father O’Brien is actually a distant blood relative of the monastery’s founder. The Boston 12 are famous in church circles not only because they are exceptional singers, but because they are all recovering addicts mentored by Father O'Brien in his parish’s various non-denominational ’12 step’ sel f-help programs.
These are all broken people, and trapped on the Island they're quickly going to learn just why the godforsaken piece of rock has been claimed by the devil...

Desolation Cove is another Bad Moon Books project which will, like Monster Town and The Beast of Box Hill double bubble, come out under the name Logan Savile... doesn't he just sound like someone you want to trek out into the middle of the Sahara with?

JULY 13th 2009 -
So, last night I was browsing the interweb wasting time at almost 3am, tired but not quite ready to sleep, when I came across a blurb from China Mieville for Hugh Cook that stopped me dead in my cyber-tracks:

"2009 might be when Hugh Cook, who died tragically young this year, begins to get the credit he deserves, with the reissue of his The Walrus and the Warwolf (full disclosure -- I wrote the new introduction). Cook was a fantasy writer whose 1980s and early 90s decology Chronicles of an Age of Darkness, though hidden from the attentions of the middlebrow lit-snob by their wizards, dragons and high-kitsch covers, are intensely clever, humane, witty, meta-textually adventurous and pulp-avant-garde works. I read and loved several this year -- The Wishstone and the Wonderworkers and The Walrus and the Warwolf in particular." - China Mieville, author of Perdido Street Station, Iron Council, and The City & The City.

More full disclosure, mine this time - the second fantasy novel I ever read and the one that made me a fantasy fan for life was Hugh Cook's The Wizards and the Warriors. I guess it was 1986, my parents were away on vacation and I had the place to myself. Instead of wild parties like a 'normal' teenager, I watched the Test Match and read this life changing novel - life changing because I am pretty sure without it I would never have gone on to read all of the stuff that in turn transformed me from a reader to a writer. Cook was ahead of his time in terms of the big fat fantasy - he imagined a 10 novel series which revolved around the key events leading up to the Age of Darkness, bringing in all of the major players in the first novel, then telling their individual tales in the following books. I remember several of the series very very well indeed, like the Walrus and the Warwulf, which was a stunning adventure and a delicious stand alone novel for all that it linked in with these bigger chronicles. I remember a few years ago I was asked to give a blurb for Cook's website, I don't remember exactly what I said, but I am pretty sure it was something along the lines of 'Thank God for writers like Hugh Cook.' I stand by that sentiment right now. Having read China's post I hit Abe and ordered the old Colin Smythe hardcovers of the series (or at least all of them that I could find) to replace my tattered paperbacks.

One of my favourite writing memories, or career milestones, came back with the magazine Sackcloth & Ashes in the UK, when one of my earliest stories was published in the same issue as a new Hugh Cook tale. There was something brilliant about being side by side with this guy I had read for so long.

Then I stumbled across Cook's website, and read about his struggle with brain cancer, and the struggles he had with declining sales and how the Age of Darkness should have run 20 novels, not 10, and how he was creating this entirely new series, The Oceans of Light, and man did I want to read those books. I feel like I just lost an old friend, despite never having talked to Cook, or even writing him a fan letter. Strange considering how influential he was on shaping my career. And like China says up there, I hope the release of his series brings Hugh Cook the praise in death he most surely deserved in life.

JULY 13th, 2009 -
It comes in threes, or so they say. I just did my daily drop in to Locus to see the gossip and instead saw the obituary for the publisher Charles N. Brown. I'm at a loss for words. I remember the first time I met Charles, back when I won the Writers of the Future. It was late night in the Roosevelt hotel and all the other winners had gone to bed, serious, consciensious and all that, but Sean Williams and I stayed up late into the morning chatting with Charles. I think I tried to blag him into letting me write some reviews for Locus, but he very sensibly told me to concentrate on the fiction. The next day he gave us the 'you might as well quite because you're never going to make it speech' which was the highlight of WotF for me. He was right, of course, in that if his speech could put you off you really shouldn't be looking at writing as a career path. Over the next 6 years he was a regular visitor to the WotF bashes, even picked up a lifetime acheivement award for all of his services to science fiction and fantasy going back over all those years when there was no internet, just a sense of community. He traded stories and gossip about every writer I could imagine, having a personal relationship with all of them. And he was such a geniunely nice, funny guy.

He was always determined to give the new winners a proper induction into the 'con' experience, hosting a room party that went on pretty much all night if they had the legs for it, and poolside would smuggle in a silver hipflask with the good stuff.

It's going to be really strange not seeing him there in August for the 25th anniversary, but in his honour I will attempt to convince Sean Williams and a few others to join me smuggling in silver hipflasks filled with the good stuff in Charles' honour.

JULY 6, 2009 -
Gary is one of my favourite 'new' writers, and this is by far my favourite of the few interviews I have done. Gary's gracious, thoughtful and lets us into places a lot of writers might hold back, if you only read one Steve Chats this is the one I urge you to read.
The interview originally appeared in Apex Digest a few years ago.

SS: Could you explain a little about how you became a writer? Your background and what drove you to choose horror?

GB: I was born and raised in Newark, Ohio (the city on which a lot of Cedar Hill, Ohio is based), in a lower middle-class blue collar family; I was baptised a Catholic – now a recovering Catholic – and once briefly studied for the priesthood until I was asked not to by several priests and monsignors at the seminary; I have no college education (I was lucky to graduate from high school); and I was not a very social person until I got involved in theatre and debate in high school.

I don’t know that I so much “chose” to be a writer of dark fiction; I simply gravitated toward it because it is the type of fiction that best allows me to explore and express my worldview.  I know that both my father and I had a special affection for old horror movies – when I was a child, we’d watch them together every Friday night when he got home from work; Frankenstein, the Wolfman, the Mummy, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, Dracula, all the classics.  My love for all things dark and scary began there.

They say write what you know, but sometimes it strikes me as terrifying to read something like 'In Silent Graves' and contemplate that the author might know such things – how much of the process is cathartic to you as opposed to pure fiction, story for story's sake?

Only one scene in In Silent Graves was taken from my own life, and even then it had be re-structured quite a bit – fiction doesn’t give a damn about how something really happened, it’s only interested in how that something can be re-formed to suit the story being told.  In the case of Graves, it was the death of the newborn.  My first wife and I had a daughter who only lived 6 days, and because we were experiencing some serious problems in our marriage at the time, I was never allowed to see my daughter until after she died – even then, it was only through the good will of a sympathetic 1st-year intern who helped sneak me into the morgue – and this was well after my daughter had been opened up and her organs removed.  Since the body was to be incinerated and not buried (at my then-wife’s insistence), no one had bothered to close her up afterward.  I had about two minutes to say good-bye to this infant whom I’d never even had the chance to say hello to.  Hold a dead baby in your arms for 120 seconds and then see how long you carry that feeling with you.

That moment – revised and re-shaped – found its way into In Silent Graves, and many people who’ve read the novel say it’s one of the most heart-rending scenes they’ve ever encountered in a horror novel, and I suppose it’s because I decided going in that, even though I was restructuring the sequence of events and adding a few things that didn’t actually happen, I was in no way going to whitewash the remembered feelings.  You can’t do that in a story—be it a horror or not; readers can tell when a writer is trying to manipulate their emotions, and once that happens, the story’s ruined.

I can’t separate the “cathartic” element of your question from the “story for story’s sake” element, because when one employs and reshapes an incident from one’s own life in order to serve the story, the two things walk hand-in-hand.  Yes, there is an element of self-exorcism to everything I write, but it has to take place through the story’s sensibilities and structural requirements.  For as much of the grief as I was able to release by writing that scene in Graves, I still carry a lot around with me, and I’ll never be rid of it.  I don’t want to be rid of it.  But at least now I can live with it better than I could before I wrote Graves.

SS: You tackle some incredibly difficult subjects in your work, ones that run very close to the truly horrific in human terms instead of the monstrous outsiders we can band up against and defeat – how much of this is conscious? Does it reflect a world view, dare one suggest, of a pessimistic variety?

GB: The simple answer – it is a conscious decision to deal with internal horrors instead of external bogies and beasties.  There are at least a dozen writers out there who can give you a ripping good yarn about zombies or vampires or serial killers or demons summoned from Hell or what-have-you…the safe kind of horror that is meant to keep your stomach in knots for a few hours or days, however long it takes for you to read the novel.  Brian Keene’s zombie novels are great fun – they’re fast-paced, suspenseful, entertaining (I mean that as a compliment), easily accessible to hundreds of thousands of readers, and don’t really force the reader to confront anything deeper than the shambling horror clawing to get through the door – but they’re not intended to, and that’s what makes them safe and fun and popular.  They’re what Joe Lansdale calls “popcorn” books (not meant as an insult).  I wish to hell I had it in me to write “fun” novels, but my particular worldview can’t be filtered through such bogies and beasties.  I have to have the greatest and most dangerous darkness come from within the human heart, because in my worldview that is precisely where it lies.  The monsters aren’t “out there,” stumbling from the midnight mist of graveyards, they come from inside us.

Bear in mind, I’m speaking only for myself.  I begin each story or novel with an impulse, and a subject, image, or particular theme I want to explore, and, of course, an area of experience that I can draw upon.  I have never been in the armed services (I was 4F by the time I was 10) so I wouldn’t dare try to write about a career soldier as a central character.  Someone like Weston Oches, who’s had a military career, can write about such a character with a great deal of knowledge, authority, and unimpeachable authenticity.  I’d be a poseur, taking of affectations that most readers would see through before they reached page 10.

If you’re going to truly disturb a reader, if you want to give them a reading experience that they’re going to carry around for them for days after they’ve finished a book or story, then you have to be absolutely merciless when it comes to portraying the inner darkness we all carry around.  That darkness can be as obvious as the impulse to torture and kill, or it can be as subtle as the denial of grief or the habitual inclination to turn away from the suffering of strangers.

Look – all of my work shares the same central concern:  it grapples (or tries to, anyway) with the connections between violence, suffering, and grief, and how we try to reconcile those things with the concept of a Just universe watched over by a benevolent God wherein even the most insignificant and trivial of our daily actions have some greater meaning.  I don’t think I have a pessimistic worldview; I think it’s more a pragmatic one that’s been run through a pessimistic filter and then presented to you by a cautious optimist.
I look upon my stories and novels – and, God, I hope this doesn’t sound self-serving or pretentious – as being cautionary tales.
There’s a line from one of my Cedar Hill stories where a character says, “We must love one another or die,” and there’s another line from another Cedar Hill story that goes something like, “The mystery isn’t that there is so much darkness; the mystery is that there is any light at all.”  There is, somewhere, a bridge uniting those two thoughts, and I’m stumbling my across it, trying to make that final connection so that my definitive worldview will at last show itself to me.  But I know this is where it lies, somewhere between those two thoughts; there is something that links them, and I’ll find it one day.

Now, after hearing all that, are you still shocked that nothing I’ve written has ever turned up in The Year’s Best Humour Writing?

SS: A lot of your writing strikes me as being intensely personal, intimate even, especially when dealing with subjects like death, which is a staple of bad horror (the theme not the intimacy), now given your own health problems, and the loss of loved ones, has it become harder to be shallow? After all the world loves a monster romp, giant crabs, Godzilla vs. Mothra, and all that jazz – or have you never felt the urge.

GB: In other words, “Why the hell don’t you lighten up, Braunbeck?”
Thanks, Steve – coming from the guy who wrote Laughing Boy’s Shadow – otherwise known as The Great Light-hearted Slapstick Romantic Chuckle-fest of 2007, that makes me feel so good about myself.

Seriously, though, I have been trying to lighten the mood in my work – “The Ballad of Road Mama and Daddy Bliss” from my collection Destinations Unknown was the first time I’d ever attempted to write a story that was intended to be funny, to show what my sense of humour is like…and to prove that I do, indeed, have a sense of humor.

Health problems and the loss of loved ones…concentrating on the last 7 years, those go together.  I lost too many people over too short a time when my own life was swirling the drain, and I acted very stupidly and flung myself head-first toward self-destruction, and now I’m paying for it, as I damned well ought to be.

So, yes, I flunked Shallow 101, but have hopes that one day I, too, can learn to be as vacuous, inane, and empty-headed as any well-toned sun-bather/body-builder on a Southern California beach in July  -- you know, the type of person who finds Jackie Collins’s work to be deep and challenging – although I suspect Ms. Collins’s work deals with a different type of crabs than what you’re talking about.

Goddamn – that was almost a joke, wasn’t it?  Quick – to quote one of my favourite songs by The Who – “Tell me some bad news before I laugh and act like a fool.”

SS: For a long time you were primarily known as a great short story writer – this is changing now, with more novels coming from Leisure, the latest of which Mr Hands started out life as a short story in Cemetery Dance a few years ago. Your short stories are nothing if not intense - how easy has it been to carry that same intensity into your novels, or do you find yourself consciously writing differently in the different forms?

GB: I’d like to think that my novels share many of the characteristics that readers have come to associate with my short work, but the truth is that the level of intensity one tries infusing into a short story simply cannot be maintained over the course of a 300-plus page novel.
The closest I’ve come to doing that, I think, was with the final third of In Silent Graves and the entirety of Prodigal Blues.  Those two are forever linked in my mind not only because they share similar moral concerns, but because the first draft of each was written in an almost feverish burst.  The final third of In Silent Graves was written in one marathon, non-stop sitting that lasted nearly 3 solid days…with the occasional bathroom and I’ve-got-to-eat-something-before-I-pass-out break.  The first draft of Prodigal Blues was written over the course of 2 weeks of similar marathon sessions, because I knew that if I took a break, if I backed off for more than a few hours at a time, I’d lose the immediacy that was needed to maintain the story’s momentum – and when you’re writing something like Prodigal Blues, a novel where the events take place over a less than 72-hour period, maintaining that momentum is vital.
I don’t care what other writers say; for me, in order to infuse a novel with that sort of intensity, I have to work myself into something not unlike an emotional frenzy, jam it into a vial, and then do all I can to remain in that state until the first draft is done, releasing it bit by bit as needed when the story calls for it.  Call it “Method Writing,” if you want.  But for me, it works – it kicks my ass like you wouldn’t believe – I was down for the count, emotionally and physically, for about 10 days after finishing the first draft of Prodigal Blues, but it was worth it.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying that no, I don’t write differently when switching between novels and short fiction.  Each is an endurance test, the former lasting much longer than the latter, but if you’re not going to fling yourself head-first into something, there’s no point in even starting.  For me, it’s all or nothing one the main character speaks his or her first line of dialogue.

SS: I've read a lot of your stuff, including the incredible Fear in a Handful of Dust which ought to be required reading for young writers, how did that one come about? And on that personal side again, did you intend to lay your soul bare or was that just part of the process that happened naturally as you moved on with the writing of it?

GB: Fear in a Handful of Dust:  Horror As a Way of Life came about because Alan Rodgers – who used to edit Twilight Zone’s NIGHT CRY magazine (where I made my first professional sales) was working with Wildside Press and contacted me about doing a couple of books for them.  He thought it might be interesting for readers if I wrote a non-fiction book about horror.  Initially, I think we both were expecting it to be something along the lines of Danse Macabre, but the more I began looking at the themes that were emerging, the more I realized that it wasn’t going to be the same kind of book as King’s – and no way was it going to be anywhere in the same league.  (I had some fun with that in the first part of the book, when the writer – me – is trying to write the non-fiction book and keeps getting distracted because his edition of Danse Macabre keeps talking to him, asking him why he’s even bothering.)

The further into the writing of Fear that I got, the more I realized that, if I was going to make any salient points about writing horror fiction – and by that I mean points that hadn’t already been made a hundred times before by other, better writers – then I had to do more than explain the “how” and “when” and “why” of writing a short story or novel.  I mean, c’mon, Steve—you’ve had to have sat on panels at cons before and had someone in the audience ask “Where do you get your ideas?”

That oft-heard question gets a lot of undeserved mockery within the writing community.  For a long while, until I wrote Fear, I was one of the writers who made fun of it.  But as Fear really started to take shape, it finally dawned on me that that question –Where do you get your ideas?—is actually more astute than it’s given credit for (okay, maybe it’s astuteness is accidental, but I’m not going to nitpick); ideas do come from a place within the writer; they comes from what burns brightest in his or her burning core.  So I decided, Fuck the nuts-and-bolts approach; if someone wants to know where the ideas for my stories “Union Dues” and “Duty” came from, then they were going to get the full, unfiltered answer; how the impulse to write the piece found its central image and how I, as the writer, drew upon my areas of experience to give each story what I hope is emotional honesty.  I can’t be blasé about explaining where an impulse/idea comes from – to me, that puts a lot of distance between the writer and the reader, and the act of one person reading the words of another is far too intimate and holy to take lightly.  A reader has to know they’re plunking down their hard-earned money for, and investing their time in, a writer whose work they can trust.  Fear in a Handful of Dust was my attempt to convince readers that they can trust me.

SS: Characters don't tend to fare well in your stories, emerging scarred mentally, emotionally or physically more often than not, why do you put them through so much grief?

GB: Because, for me, the closer horror fiction – or any fiction – is to real life, the more immediate and identifiable its characters are to readers.  And let’s face it, no one emerges from a crisis unscarred, be it one in real-life or a character in a story.  I am not a believer in the traditional “happy ending” in either fiction or life.  Sure, things may work out, but there’s often a heavy price to pay for ending up in a place of safety.  I get a lot of shocked stares when I tell people that, in my eyes, In Silent Graves, Keepers, and Prodigal Blues all have happy endings – “happy” by my personal worldview definition of the word, which is basically, Death has been postponed, what misery that could have been avoided has been, and you have been given a reprieve; now you’d damned well need to make the best of what time you have left, unknown quantity that it is.  Again:
a cautionary tale; love one another or die, and wonder why there is any light at all.

SS: Following on from this could you describe the writing process for you, in terms of a path from initial idea to execution, perhaps using Mr. Hands as a template without giving any major spoilers?

GB: You just reminded me – Mr. Hands is another novel of mine that I think has a happy ending; two, actually.  One is pretty obvious, the other you may have to think about.

Most of my stories usually come to me in pieces, like finding sections of a jigsaw puzzle that aren’t immediately recognizable as being parts of the same whole.  But the one thing that is a constant is a central image; nearly all my stories have begun, in my head, with the appearance of a single image that is so compelling and enigmatic that I have to figure out what it means, where it came from, and who the person or persons in it are, how they came to be there at that place at that time.

Mr. Hands was a bit easier because I wasn’t starting from scratch.
Alan Clark had asked me to try and write a story around his beautiful painting Fossil Hands.  He had tried to come up with a story for the painting but didn’t like any of them, and then a few of his friends had given it a shot but Alan still felt it wasn’t right.  So he asked me to give it a shot.

I’m looking at this painting, and it occurs to me that this will have to be the central image of the story, only in this case, the central image carries with it the promise of something epic and complex and easily reduced to a one-sentence sound-byte synopsis.  There was much, much more going on in that painting than the image itself suggested.
So I look at this mountain climber, and I look at this thing he’s come upon, and eventually I asked myself:  Was this an accidental discovery?  Did he just happen to come upon this thing?  And the answer was a resounding no.

Okay, so he didn’t just happen to find this, this is something that he intentionally went in search of.  Next question:  why?  Then I notice how the climber’s free hand seemed to be reaching toward this thing, and that’s when it dawned on me that I was wrong about the central image; it wasn’t the moment depicted in the painting – that would be one of, if not the, final image.  No, the central image of the story was hidden in the reason the mountain climber was reaching toward this horrible monster.

Keep in mind, I’d never written a story with a “traditional” monster in it before, and having a monster in there for its own sake just wasn’t good enough.  There were two stories here – one that of the climber, the other, that of the monster itself.  And that’s where the novella “Mr. Hands” came from – searching for those missing connections.

Now because Cemetery Dance wanted this to be their first serialized novella, I was working with a definite word-count limit for each instalment.  Rich Chizmar wanted something with cliff-hangers – this was a serial, after all, and what’s a good serial without cliff-hangers?  So once the novella was finished, I set about finding two strong stopping points, and it was published as 3-part serial.
But in the process, I’d cut something like 15,000 words from it.  When Alan Clark and I later collaborated on Escaping Purgatory, I restored those missing 15, 000 words.  A few years later, while re-reading it on a whim, I realized that I still hadn’t told the entire story, that the novella people are familiar with actually came in two-thirds of the way.

And so I set about telling the story of everything that had happened leading up to the birth of Mr. Hands, and wound up adding over 50, 000 words of new material (bringing the novel’s grand total to just under
80k) that I now realize should have been there in the first place.

Sometimes you get it right the first time.  Sometimes it takes years before the story that was trying to be told actually emerges.

SS: As a writer of some often wild fantasies do you ever worry that the reader just won’t ‘get’ it?

GB: Oh, hell, yes.  I’ve lost count of how many hate e-mails I’ve gotten from readers who didn’t understand the ending of Keepers, or gotten blasted by people on message boards who thought that the real story in Prodigal Blues was what took place in Grendel’s house before the kids escaped.  I’ve stopped both explaining these things or trying to justify them; sometimes people look for the story they want, rather than see the one I’m telling.  I don’t like it, either as a reader or a writer, when everything is tied up in a nice, neat, easy-to-understand little package, its lovely bow intact.  As both a reader and a writer, I want stories that are going to make me have to think about things, both during the tale and after it’s over.

SS: We're not supposed to ask a writer about his favourites, but if you could be remembered for a single piece of writing that you've done, which would it be?

GB: The reason you’re not supposed to ask a writer what his or her favourite piece of their own work is, is because they’ll always tell you it’s the one that just came out or the one they’re working on right now – doesn’t matter, they’d be wrong either way.  The writer is the last person you want to ask about judging the quality of his or her work.  They’re always wrong.

That said, if I had to choose a single piece of my work that I think is still going to be around and being read 25 years after I’m worm-food, then it would have to be In Silent Graves.

SS: You're heavily involved in online marketing, with podcasts, messageboards, rants etc, do you see a visible return for the effort?
Does it make you more a part of the nebulous community that is often spoken about?

GB: I do know that being more active on-line has raised my visibility with some readers who otherwise would not have noticed my work.  I’m hoping that the newly-designed website and upcoming premiere of the podcast program will turn even more readers in the direction of my work.

SS: Likewise you are heavily involved in the small press, how important is a small press presence to an up and coming horror writer's career?

GB: It can be invaluable to a new writer, if he or she understands that the readers/collectors who buy small press books do not represent the majority of the book-buyers out there.  I’ve seen way too many writers get very full of themselves after seeing a lot of success in the small press, and you have got to avoid thinking that as goes the small press, so goes the mass-market.

What makes the small press experience invaluable to a new writer is that he or she will get a first-hand look into everything that goes into the production of a single book.  They will also have the pleasure of seeing a version of their book that is infinitely more beautiful and well-crafted than anything they’ll get from the mass-market.  Yes, there are exceptions, few and far between, and this is in no way meant as a slam against mass-market packaging, but small presses such as CD, Subterranean, PS Publishing, Necessary Evil, Earthling. HW Press, Gauntlet, and many others, are concerned with offering readers a first-class physical production, complete with interior art, signatures, Smythe-sewn binding, slipcases, traycases – in short, they’re offering not only a fine story for you to read, but also a book that can be, in itself, a work of art from just a production standpoint.  That can get a new writer noticed very quickly.

SS: Who influenced you most as a man, and as a writer – and why?

GB: My parents.  They showed me what genuinely constituted unselfish love, they always supported me in any of endeavours, they never failed to express their pride in my accomplishments, and they were always there.  I learned about sacrifice from them, saw the toll a lifetime of hard labor took on each of them, and realized that, for them, their dreams were realized in the accomplishments of their children.

SS: Desert Island Discs time – five books you would HAVE to have with you if you were being marooned for a year, no tv, etc. What and why?

GB: I’m going to cheat with the first one:  it would have to be Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series (I consider all seven volumes to be a single book, so, yeah, it counts) because it’s one of the most wondrous literary achievements I’ve seen in my lifetime, and I find something new to admire in the story every time I re-read it; my second book would have to Carson McCullers’ The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, because it was the first novel to really, deeply move me, and experiencing her prose over and over again never gets old; the third would be The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury – and do you really need to ask why?  Didn’t think so; the fourth would be Dan Simmons’
The Terror, because it’s the only novel I’ve ever read that made me feel cold in the middle of summer, plus it’s brilliantly written and compelling and scary as hell; and the last would be a book about the plants, fauna, and geography of the particular island where I’m going to be stranded.

SS: I always think you can tell a lot about the man by the company he keeps, if you could have dinner with five people, living or dead, who would you invite and why? What would you cook these venerable folk?

GB: I would cook my lasagna, which, if I may say with no humility, is the best you’ll ever taste.  As to the five guests:  Rod Serling, because he more than any other writer had a profound influence on my own work; director John Frankenheimer, whose films were always infused with a cynical anger tempered with dark humor; Buster Keaton, because he was, in my opinion, the funniest man who ever lived; and my parents, Frank and Mary Braunbeck, because I miss them and would like one final opportunity to tell them how much their love and support meant to me, and so they could see what their son has made of himself.

SS: Recently you collaborated with your wife, Lucy Snyder, on Fable Fusion, a story for the ever popular Dr Who franchise – what was it like working on such a well known and much loved character, and more pertinently, what was it like collaborating with Lucy?

GB: Lucy was the Dr. Who fan in the household – I’d probably seen half a dozen episodes, at best.  But when the invite came (which I was originally going to decline, believe it or not), Lucy threw herself head-first into educating me about the good Doctor, and I soon found myself becoming enthralled by his adventures and his ever-evolving character.  Working on the story with her was wonderful, because if there was an element of the Doctor’s background I was unfamiliar with, she was there to fill in the blanks.  But as the story (and my
education) progressed, I became more and more of an enthusiast, and would cherish the opportunity to write something about the good Doctor again.

SS: Is there any other franchise you'd be interested in writing for?

GB: Hellboy, absolutely, Hellboy.  I can say that with great conviction because I know it’s never going to happen, but I think I’d do a pretty damned good job with a story in the series.  Next to that, I’d love to do something with Batman.

SS: Do you have any particular advice you’d care to give to young writers embarking upon the path the young Braunbeck decided to tread?

GB: Take the work seriously, but not yourself—never yourself, and don’t be afraid to go too deep into those places in the human heart that most people would rather never be mentioned.  Also, have a well-paying job outside of writing, or marry someone who does, and whose job offers great health insurance.  And read outside the genre,
goddammit.   Nothing can grow in a vacuum, least of all a
story-teller’s abilities if they have only a single point of reference.

SS: What question do you wish people would ask you that they never do?

GB: “Are you really as dark, depressing, and sad as your work would lead one to think?”  (You didn’t say I had to answer to that question, just tell you the question itself.  Specificity is important at moments like this.)

SS: What does the future hold for Gary Braunbeck?

GB: Sadness, grief, loneliness, misery, emptiness, and a slow, agonizing, inconsequential, wretched death in some dirty little room in a shit-hole flophouse, my mind filled with endless regrets and my soul crippled by decades of self-loathing.  But before that, lunch with chocolate pie for dessert, and Disc Three of The Adventures of Danger Mouse.  Plus there are litter boxes to be changed.  It’s a rich existence, but someone has to live it.

JULY 5, 2009 -
Frequently asked Question #1

Part of the Steve Chats section is going to be used to answer some of those frequently asked questions. One in particular comes up with a surprising amount of regularity, and that's about the third book in the Slaine trilogy, or more precisely when is it going to happen.
There's no satisfactory way of answering this one. To the best of my knowledge it won't. You see Slaine as a character belongs to Rebellion, a publisher in the UK but when I wrote the novels they were under the umbrella of Black Flame, a division of Games Workshop. Black Flame bought the license to do a lot of 2000AD novels, Judge Dredd, Fiends on the Western Front, Slaine and others, and at the same time published movie tie-ins under license to New Line Cinema, but with the New Line license lapsing and Games Workshop launching their own independent publishing arm, Solaris, they closed down Black Flame. At the time they still owned the license to the final Slaine novel. The last time I spoke with the good people at Rebellion they intimated at the license still had not reverted to them, but that was a considerable time ago now and by my estimate it ought to be back with them now. What that means is any final Slaine novel rests solely in their hands. So if you are hungry for the final adventure you'll need to let Rebellion know there's a demand for it, though in all honesty it is very unlikely I'll be putting words into Ukko's mouth any time soon. That's the joy of licensed fiction. It isn't that the books weren't liked, they sold out their print runs fairly quickly, and I believe world wide were Black Flame's best selling titles, but sometimes other things get in the way.

Frequently asked Question #2

The other one that turns up in my mail box fairly regularly is 'when is your next vampire novel coming out?' and the answer is no less cheery. When I wrote the Vampire Wars trilogy for Black Library I played with every conceivable bit of vampire mythology I could find. I had fun with it but one thing I never want to do is repeat myself. The idea of investing a good portion of my life writing the same thing over and over doesn't appeal, that's why Curse of the Necrarch was more about one old man's folly than it was about these creepy messed up vampires. I knew when I typed The End on Necrach that I had pretty much finished not only the book but that chapter of my writing life. I write in all these different properties like Doctor Who and Torchwood and Stargate because they are fun, but when they cease being fun, well I have worlds of my own I want to explore and I know the book will be so much better if I am having fun with it than if I am slogging through it ought of some warped sense of duty... So in the process of knocking about an outline for a Lahmian series to follow the von Carstein and Necrach vampires I came to the realisation that my heart wasn't in it and told the editors at Black Library they would be better off looking for a new 'vampire guy' because I'd said all I had to say on the subject.

That doesn't mean there won't be anymore traditional fantasy novels though - my next project is actually a Guild Wars MMO novel all about the Inquest and Elder Dragons which is being published by Simon & Schuster in 2010. Matt Forbeck and Robert King are doing the two other books in the series, though they are each standalone novels.

JULY 2, 2009 -
I just dug this one up because I've been feeling a little nostalgic, it's an interview I was lucky enough to conduct with one of my absolutely favourite authors, David Gemmell, just before he died a few years ago. There's a question in there, or at least an answer, that feels horribly prescient, given what happed to him so soon after, which still gives me a bit of a chill. The interview originally appeared on SFRevu.com.

Savile: David, Lord of the Silver Bow is a marked step in a new direction, or so it is being marketed by your publisher - a historical novel as opposed to a fantasy - how did your approach to this project differ from say a Drenai novel? Were you hesitant of writing Troy following the recent movie?

Gemmell: As you say Silver Bow is being marketed as a historical, despite the fact that its main characters are from one of the worlds'
most famous fantasy stories. However, the research into Bronze Age Greece, and the attempt to create a historical base for the Trojan War probably makes the historical tag accurate. How did the approach differ? It didn't. I give all my novels the same amount of heart and passion. Lord of the Silver Bow has been tougher to write, but I've been helped enormously by my wife, Stella, with the research and some of the descriptive writing. As to the movie - I haven't seen it.
Stella did, and quite enjoyed it.

Savile: I've been talking to a number of Gemmell fans, asking what one question they would like you to answer and almost to a man (or woman) they came back with a sequel question, so... for them: have you any plans to write a book centring around 'the two twins'?

Gemmell: The question of the Twins haunts me at every signing or talk.
I can't say what the future holds, past completing the second and third Troy novels, Shield of Thunder and Fall of Kings. I am in my sixth decade. I smoke heavily, drink more alcohol than is considered good for me, and have a passion for chocolate and foods full of animal fats. In short, in health terms, I am a walking disaster waiting to happen. However, if luck and a powerful constitution hold up I may get round to the story of the Twins one day.

Savile: Would you care to give a few hints as to what the future holds after the Troy trilogy is done?

Gemmell: A good long rest, incorporating words like cruise, alcohol, sleep, sun, sand and fun. Two weeks later I'll start another book.

Savile: Ah well, you can't blame a guy for trying to wheedle out some top secret info! When I look at my bookshelves they are weighed down with Gemmell novels, Drenai, Jon Shannow, Athurian, Macedonian, tales of heroes waging war to save what they love. The sheer number of novels is daunting to a relatively new writer like myself, may I ask if you are still as motivated/driven to write as you were 20 years ago?

Gemmell: Probably more motivated. I love this job with a deep and perfect passion. I yearn to be better at it, and I struggle constantly to learn new tricks of the trade. I feel a great responsibility to my fans, to deliver the very best that I can.

Savile: That's gratifying to hear. Slightly different tack now, an off the wall question - which superhero would you most like to be?

Gemmell: I've never, as an adult, wanted to be anyone but me. I can't even visualize being anyone else. As a child I wanted to be Aragorn or Conan. My comic book heroes were Spiderman [because he got to date the gorgeous Gwen] and Dr. Strange, Master of the Mystic Arts. I longed to have those silver sideburns and that cool moustache.

Savile: I've read that you have an axe collection, or at least a weapons collection, and use the weapons to choreograph your fight scenes - so I have to ask have you been buying in new weapons for Troy?

Gemmell: I don't have an axe collection. I have Snaga, and a long handled Spear and a Jackson axe I use for chopping winter logs. For Troy I bought a Corinthian helm, crafted by the amazing Bill Radford. I sit and look at it sometimes, lost in wonder at the man's skill. It is quite the most beautiful piece, crafted from a single sheet of bronze.

Savile: In this day and age of gadgets and google, how come there is no official David Gemmell website?

Gemmell: I don't have the time to service it. Several people have approached me to run an official site, but even though they'd set it up I'd still have to put time aside to say what I was doing and to answer queries. I don't have that kind of time. I work long hours, six days a week. The seventh day I spend talking about writing with an author pal.

Savile: I'm sidetracking myself here, but did you ever finish the Legend computer game? I must confess that Druss kept hitting me with his axe at random so I never actually managed it myself, but my failure was not for the want of trying!

Gemmell: Yeah, I finished it. Best bit was on side two as you tried to hold the walls. By the end there was only Druss left, and he was hacking away, and then the reinforcements arrived. Nice moment.

Savile: Indeed, it must be a wonderful experience when other people develop your work and ideas. Now, Stan Nicholls and Fangorn did two wonderful graphic novels based on your work - with writers like Tad Williams and George RR Martin now moving into the graphic novel arena are there any plans to adapt or create more original Gemmell graphic novels?

Gemmell: The graphic novel experience was not a good one, on several fronts. The publishers totally screwed the marketing, having done wonderfully well with the production quality. Working with a team was not always pleasant, and there were massive disappointments along the way. Would I do it again? Only if the artist was John Bolton. I think his work is awesome. John and I have talked about working together, but we both have so many commitments at present that such a project is probably years away.

Savile: With spending so much of your time creating stories for us to lose ourselves in, how do you relax? Which other writers do you most enjoy reading?

Gemmell: I don't get the chance to read for pleasure these days.
Mostly publishers bombard me with new novels, looking for cover quotes. Occasionally I'll oblige, if the book hits me where I live. A few years back I remember being bowled over by Stephen Pressfield's novel, Gates of Fire. I now have a signed copy, which I treasure.
Mostly these days I watch movies for relaxation. Last night I sat back with a good vodka and watched Bernard Hill exhorting the Rohirrim to 'Ride to ruin and the world's ending!' Brilliant!

Savile: Really can't argue with that one! So, final one, what is the best question you've ever been asked in an interview?

Gemmell: "In the novel Legend, which has a medieval setting, why does Druss order the archers to 'fire'. Surely fire comes from the days of matchlock rifles, where the full instruction is 'Take aim. Apply fire.'?"

Savile: Thanks for taking the time to field a fan-boy's questions, and good luck with Lord of the Silver Bow!

JUNE 29, 2009 -
I've been wondering what should be my kick-off for this section, and today it came to me.
Publisher's Weekly just reviewed my old friend Gene O'Neill's new collection. Gene and I shared many a late night phone call way back when, and it really pleases me to see PW pick his new collection out and give it a starred review. The Gene Genie is one of a kind, you like dark gritty, on the edge writing, do yourself a favour, read the review then head over to your friendly bookdealer and sort yourself something out to read for the summer.

Taste of the Tenderloin Gene O'Neill. Apex (www.apexbookcompany.com),
$13.95 paper
(164p) ISBN 978-0-9816390-0-0

Haunting, lyrical and often uncomfortably realistic, this slim collection of eight short stories plunges the reader into the darker side of San Francisco. Altered states of consciousness-minds changed by grief, chemistry or too much hard living-are everywhere. In "Magic Words," an advertising executive pays a homeless woman a high price for transient success. Poignant and plausible almost to a fault, "Tombstones in His Eyes" twists the horrors of drug addiction into something harder, sharper and scarier. In "The Apotheosis of Nathan McKee," a brokenhearted father's descent into insanity-or is it merely invisibility?-makes normalcy seem all too tenuous. The best story of the bunch, "5150," documents the final moments of a worn-out cop about to retire. O'Neill's deft, authentic prose resonates with the weight of sad reality, erasing the line between knowledge and fear. (Aug.)

S.