Rendezvous With Ramblings
T-8 days and counting till Vellum hits the shelves.
I had my interview this morning with the Major SF Magazine (which I'm still not naming due to jinxophobia; I'll say they're planning a 2 page feature, and then it'll all go tits-up, and I'll cry, I will, I'm sure of it!). Nice feature writer phoned me up at the pre-arranged time of 10:00 am. I, of course, being an inveterate slackabed had to stumble out of slumber and beg indulgence ("Five more minutes, Mum.") to go fix meself a cup of coffee and a cigarette (coffee and cigarettes, O, Jim Jarmusch, you are so right, go so well together it cannot be put into words) and straighten out my thoughts. Not that my thoughts are ever really straight (You know those gayboi t-shirts that say "I can't even think straight"... that's me. I remember my old tutor at Uni, Professor Philip Hobsbawm (a great man, who I was shocked to hear had died) , I remember him thinking I was completely unsuited to the academic world -- "Perhaps you should have gone to Art School", he said -- for six months until I finally handed in an essay whereupon he told me that my febrile firing-on-all-cylinders approach to conversation was to do with "thinking too fast". Since then I just decided, fuck it, run with it)...
Anyway... so I got to ramble and rant and rave incoherently for a while and can only hope to hell Our Man At The Magazine can actually slice and dice my disjointed meanderings into some semblance of sense. Hell, if I was good at answering direct questions like "What's the novel about" with clarity and concision I probably wouldn't be a writer. It's great this writing malarky, for letting you cut and paste those random acts of explication into something that starts at A and goes to C by way of B. I don't have a stream of consciousness, you know. I have a lake with a wee fisherman in a boat dropping grenades over the sea, holding on for dear life as they go boom and then gathering the dead fishies that float to the surface. So I pity the poor man trying to deal with my conversational gear-shifts and sharp-turns and dead-ends and constant bloody back-tracking. Oh, yes. If you're reading this blog, you'll probably know by know that one of my most oft-used words is anyway.
Anyway... one nice example of how I can kinda sorta keep to the point if you email me a list of questions (and then wait a few weeks for me to edit my own blatherings into linearity (and then do a bit more editing yerself to cut it down to something shorter than War And Peace)) is now online at The Ottakars Website. Here you'll find an interview almost entirely free of tangential explorations of Sumerian mythology and Modernist techniques. Hurrah! And a corker of a review for Vellum, which is, according to Steve Birt...
"... an extraordinary feat that combines a rush of ideas with a style that produces gems of language and scene on every other page..."
And -- ooh! ooh! -- it's also in their rejigged-for-this-very-issue, full colour, glossy in-store newsletter, Outland with my name on the cover and the review and interview taking up the first two pages after the Editorial. Peachy keen!
Me likee Ottakars lots!
T-8 days and counting.
I had my interview this morning with the Major SF Magazine (which I'm still not naming due to jinxophobia; I'll say they're planning a 2 page feature, and then it'll all go tits-up, and I'll cry, I will, I'm sure of it!). Nice feature writer phoned me up at the pre-arranged time of 10:00 am. I, of course, being an inveterate slackabed had to stumble out of slumber and beg indulgence ("Five more minutes, Mum.") to go fix meself a cup of coffee and a cigarette (coffee and cigarettes, O, Jim Jarmusch, you are so right, go so well together it cannot be put into words) and straighten out my thoughts. Not that my thoughts are ever really straight (You know those gayboi t-shirts that say "I can't even think straight"... that's me. I remember my old tutor at Uni, Professor Philip Hobsbawm (a great man, who I was shocked to hear had died) , I remember him thinking I was completely unsuited to the academic world -- "Perhaps you should have gone to Art School", he said -- for six months until I finally handed in an essay whereupon he told me that my febrile firing-on-all-cylinders approach to conversation was to do with "thinking too fast". Since then I just decided, fuck it, run with it)...
Anyway... so I got to ramble and rant and rave incoherently for a while and can only hope to hell Our Man At The Magazine can actually slice and dice my disjointed meanderings into some semblance of sense. Hell, if I was good at answering direct questions like "What's the novel about" with clarity and concision I probably wouldn't be a writer. It's great this writing malarky, for letting you cut and paste those random acts of explication into something that starts at A and goes to C by way of B. I don't have a stream of consciousness, you know. I have a lake with a wee fisherman in a boat dropping grenades over the sea, holding on for dear life as they go boom and then gathering the dead fishies that float to the surface. So I pity the poor man trying to deal with my conversational gear-shifts and sharp-turns and dead-ends and constant bloody back-tracking. Oh, yes. If you're reading this blog, you'll probably know by know that one of my most oft-used words is anyway.
Anyway... one nice example of how I can kinda sorta keep to the point if you email me a list of questions (and then wait a few weeks for me to edit my own blatherings into linearity (and then do a bit more editing yerself to cut it down to something shorter than War And Peace)) is now online at The Ottakars Website. Here you'll find an interview almost entirely free of tangential explorations of Sumerian mythology and Modernist techniques. Hurrah! And a corker of a review for Vellum, which is, according to Steve Birt...
"... an extraordinary feat that combines a rush of ideas with a style that produces gems of language and scene on every other page..."
And -- ooh! ooh! -- it's also in their rejigged-for-this-very-issue, full colour, glossy in-store newsletter, Outland with my name on the cover and the review and interview taking up the first two pages after the Editorial. Peachy keen!
Me likee Ottakars lots!
T-8 days and counting.
posted by Hal Duncan | 3:27 pm
2 Comments:
What, no T-7 until Vellum launch entry?
Just read the ottaker interview.
al certainly knows how to end an interview. what a great last sentence.
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