Tell us about your newest book Amphisbaena?Amphisbaena is a book I was nervous about. It was my second through
Cauliay, and my first novel,
Tatterdemalion had been well-received by reviewers and readers, and there was some weight to reproduce that. I had a horrid quote (I don’t know who it’s attributed to) stuck in my head for the duration of writing
Amphisbaena. It went something like “Anyone can write a good book. Only an author can write a good second book.” Or something similar. I put myself under a lot of pressure while writing that book, and I paced much after sending it off to
Cauliay. There was a part of me that was certain my publisher would contact me and say “Sorry Ray. I just can’t print this.”
I started on
Amphisbaena with the notion I wanted to write a romance novel, though more geared for men than women, and with room for some exposition on modern dating and occupation, some tangents on gender and history. These things came out in spades, though I’ve found that both men and women alike seem fond of it. The thing that made me nervous was what an incredibly hard sell the book would be. A romance novel from a male perspective, in which a man dates two women, by their rule, and who happen to each be the human-incarnate head of an ancient, black, two-headed snake. Who would read it? I didn’t know any men that I thought would be interested in a book designated ‘romance’, and I didn’t know any women who I thought might enjoy reading about a giant snake. I didn’t think a man-dates-snake story would be favorable to most people. I was wrong, however. Quite a few journals and individuals have now contacted me about the book, and seem to love the way it’s put together.
There was a heavy dose of surreality in the story, and some upsetting themes at play, but the style I kept to contains more humor than one would find in
Tatterdemalion, and the characters are more worldly and real. Less whimsy, more grain of salt. The main character, Bill Sherman, is much smarter than the nameless protagonist in
Tatterdemalion, though less driven.
I managed to find ‘The Formula’ online, which supposedly outlines the rules of romance fiction, the legend being that writing for certain romance publishing companies is done by a formula given to the writer when they sign on for a book. The one I found was touted as being legitimate (though I have my doubts), and did seem quite capable of producing the usual romance novels I researched while writing
Amphisbaena, so I used it. Just for fun, to see if I could write a romance novel according to The Formula, and still make it original and my own. I think the experiment paid off in the end, and worked well. I used The Formula for the second 2/3rd of the book, as I’d already written the first third when I found it. I felt a little ridiculous looking at this sheet of paper and saying to myself, “Okay, Chapter 17… apparently, it’s time to introduce the Black Moment”. I followed that formula, but made everything around it my own.
The basic story of
Amphisbaena involves Bill Sherman, a struggling calendarist in his early thirties who’s career is dissolving through his hands. He lives in his older brother’s garage and daily babysits his nephews and a niece in repayment. He has abstained from women for several years, having been burnt too many times in the past. Through a series of conversations with his divorced brother, Bill is talked into attending a speed-dating event. He meets Amy, to much spark. The two of them establish their fondness for each other quite early, but Bill is let in on a rather strange predicament. Amy will not date any man unless the man also agrees to date her roommate, Janine. It’s both, or none. Bill is reluctant, but agrees, and soon finds himself entangled in a bizarre series of rules predicating what he can and can not expect from each woman. The two women treat this relationship almost as an experiment, waiting for certain results and introducing variables here and there. Amy is intelligent and supportive, and seems to legitimately care for Bill, though he is not allowed to touch her, ever. Janine, deceitful, seems incapable of doing anything outside of physical pleasure and a sort of ongoing pillow-talk that Bill only enjoys at first. We discover shortly that Amy and Janine are not human. They’re a two-headed snake, one with a long history of poisoning and devouring men for sustenance. One head lures, the other delivers the poison. Having dined on men through history, they have made the decision to abandon this nature to attempt feeling human, to understand their once-prey through the adoption of human forms and compassion. Amy has an obsession with the human notions of love and beauty, which she does not understand. Janine seems more a limb of Amy than a true person, and her motives are unclear.
The real meat of the story begins when Bill starts to rebel against the rules of their relationship, which culminates into an internal odyssey of doubt, resentment, and aggression, as the three characters tumble into one another, resisting and at times giving in to their natures all.
Each chapter is preceded by an excerpt from another romance novel, an excerpt that plays a bit of a shadow game with the chapter it heads. I wrote these as well, with the exception of the first, which was taken from
Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
All the feedback I’ve received from readers thus far has been highly complementary, so I feel like I’ve held up my end of the book.
How about your book Tatterdemalion?Tatterdemalion was my first published novel. I grew up reading all sorts of books, but my favorites usually had a touch of the quest/adventure theme to them.
Watership Down, Of Mice and Men, Treasure Island, James and the Giant Peach, a good portion of
Poe’s stories, hell, a lot of the
Stephen King tales like
The Dead Zone or
Thinner (I started out a horror writer). Many of these books held a touch of mythology in them as well, whether made up by the author, or taken directly from known myth. Having enjoyed these sorts of stories so much, I knew I’d want to write one sooner or later.
Tatterdemalion represents the first novel I wrote that I was proud of. I worked hard on it. The story begins with a man who long before page one has lost a good portion of his mind. The book is inherently about his ‘waking up’, getting his sanity back. This is an ugly and humorous process, because his rousing sanity begins to unearth a lot of odd troubles he’s had, and attempts to make sense of them. Because the book is from his perspective, in 1st, and because our descriptions and scenes are as given by this troubled individual, we’re along for his ride, not ours. He can’t discern fantasy from reality, or even if there are such things anymore, and due to this, we are never certain if the protagonist is actually sane, back to reality, to discover he’s living in a bizarre and unbalanced world, or if he’s off his rocker and we’re just seeing his take on the somewhat domestic world around him. I wrote him as if he were sane, and instead the world had gone mad. It takes place in a fictionalized Boston, a place where one can get just about any job without experience through the employment office, like astronaut, protester, police officer, surgeon… He quickly undergoes a quest for a certain object, the Jar, which he feels holds great treasure, possibly his sanity, and much of the book is his dealing with the world in disturbing and sometimes whimsical ways to get to this bit of fortune. His apartment is haunted by mythical creatures, which he calls ‘dragons’, but represent something far more internal and destructive. They’re guides, really. Oracle creatures. One lives in his oven. One in the refrigerator. And there is another that arrives later to herald in the truth of the story.
So there is a quest element to the tale, and much in the way of mythological reference, some grotesque, comedic scenes and quite a few saddening points in the book. I suppose one calls this tragicomedy, but I dislike that word. Bad humor can ruin a scene faster than bad writing, so I put a lot of blood through that particular vein. It helps that the protagonist is a confused wreck and a real dumb-ass with certain things, and we get the story through his mind, which both obfuscates and embellishes everything around him. The dragons force him to write and submit his work to publication, effectively making him a struggling writer, though unlike most struggling writer characters, he detests writing, and doesn’t want to do it at all. It’s simply a feat he has to surpass to get to the Jar. He winds up the subject of a protest, as well, for inadvertently killing the city’s mascot at the zoo. It was fun for me to throw things at this character and watch what he’d do.
Madness tales have been told before in great abundance, so the larger challenge in writing Tatterdemalion was seeing if I could do this without falling back on cliché and common device. I began personifying metaphor in the book, as a way of curling my scenes around the character, and it let me tie certain themes to specific objects, so that I could let the story loose to have fun with itself. This is something that I’ve gotten a lot of complements about, as well as some thoughtful attempts to take it apart by a few people, so I’m apt to believe it does its trick well enough.
How
Tatterdemalion came to be published at all is a good story, too, but I’ll save that for another time.
Are you a full time writer? If not, what is your day job?I write whenever I can, and thanks to an understanding family, I’m pretty good at getting time to do this daily, but there has been as yet no pay. It’s full-time in the sense that I write incessantly, and when I’m not writing, I’m revising. Usually I do both each day.
As for a day job, I am in the peculiar position of staying home to raise my son. My wife works and wins the bread. I raise the boy and try not to spend the bread. ‘Writer’ and ‘monetary gain’ long ago separated in my mind. I don’t really connect the one with the other anymore. Doing so is too damaging for me. If I count on money to gauge my success, I’m already dead in the water and have wasted a good portion of my life.
The truth is that I’m going to do this until I’m dead. For me, writing is a place, not a thing. I store much of me there and I don’t like to stay away for long. I do hope someone pays me at some point, but I have books to write and they won’t wait for green permission. I’m going to write them with or without bankable reward. It’s not vigilance, but what I am. Though, if enough people decided to start reading them, something could happen regarding my bills being paid, maybe, and it would certainly take some of the financial strain off my wife. That would be wonderful for the both of us, and is something I would very much like to do for her.
What other careers have you had? What's the worst job you've ever had?Well, in no particular order, I’ve been:
A medical transcriptionist (paid well and I was good at it).
A burger flipper (paid badly and I was good at it).
A street-beggar (paid just enough to keep me alive, but I was bad at it).
A dishwasher (several times, some paying badly, some fairly, and I was good at it).
I spent several months writing poems on napkins for 25 cents a piece, on the fly for whoever had a quarter to spare, and would write at least three of these in a sitting to pay for a cup of coffee (this was some pretty bad pay, but I was good at it, and I grew better as a writer from it. I’d write them in duplicate, to keep a copy, and have books and books of these old things).
Babysitter (for four kids (one my own), and the pay was good once we were done potty training, bad before that. I was an unconventional babysitter, but good at it).
I was also the cook in a German restaurant for many years (paid well, and I was good at it, and free schnitzel, and there was the benefit of my being the sole employee besides the owner, which was damn near perfect).
A newspaper boy for a week (never got paid for it, and my inability to wake up to an alarm made me predictably bad at this job).
A “sandwich artist” (paid like shit, and I was good at it).
A pizza delivery boy (bad pay but good tips, and I was swift behind the wheel).
A pre-soldier in Basic Military Training (fair pay but stressful, and I developed the awful problem of not being able to sleep while there, which had them usher me off pretty quickly under the heading ‘Failure to Adjust’).
A filer of microfiche slips containing schematics of mining equipment (paid quite well, and I was horrible at it).
A tech support representative (fair pay, good at it).
A customer service representative (bad pay, bad at it).
A telemarketer selling extremely awful, scam-caliber credit cards (for horrid pay, and I hated myself for the sliminess one develops when being quite good at it, which I was).
A gummi bear delivery boy on a bicycle (I was paid in gummi bears, and I was awesome at it).
A community-college student (great pay, good at it until I became too tired from also working full-time).
And finally, a stay-home dad (payment is not monetary, and I’ll find out if I’m good at it in a couple of decades).
As for the worst job I’ve had… this was likely the telemarketing gig. It was a bit soul-crushing. I repeatedly scored top sales for the day because I could sell well to grandmothers by preying on their love for their grandchildren and fear of isolation. 29% APR, anyone? Like I said, I hated myself, but some towns can be rough and they were the only place hiring at the time. I worked with gangstas and pissed-off old drunks and the place was run by an ever-changing gaggle of kids similar to that character Ryan on
The Office. The day I quit was a great day. But I couldn’t find another job in time to make the bills, and so I shortly thereafter sold my guitar for some money. I used it to buy a duffel bag I could put all my manuscripts in, and spent the rest on a bus-ride back to my home town. That might sound a little romantic. It was not.
Why do you create? Do you have any particular goals in regards to your writing?Why do I create? Because I’m loyal and when something has been good to me, I’ll dedicate myself to bettering it in whatever way I can. I was given a lot of attention when I was a child for stories and poems I wrote. It was about all the positive attention I ever received back then, because we moved around non-stop and I had no real tether to any particular place or people. When you’re an attention-starved kid and someone gives you attention, you’ll fucking impale yourself for more of it. This is fairly staple in building up writers and painters and musicians and whatnot. It’s a pretty common story.
In short, it bit me and I have to have it out. I like to run with things and see what can be done with them.
My goals with writing are usual. Write each thing better than the last. Publish if I can. Maybe one day make a little money, even. But overall, write the next thing and the next and keep getting better until I shut off.
Do you consider yourself an underground artist?More of a
Morlock than a C.H.U.D. Let’s be honest, a C.H.U.D. just shambles about making foul odors and leaving odd, gelatinous residues behind like a grotesque mollusk. I’ve read their poems; they’re not so good. A C.H.U.D. is just a mutated mess, and only wants to gurgle and eat you and get fat.
Morlocks can climb walls and operate machines. They know what a pen is for. A
Morlock takes care of you for awhile first, gives you nice things and does a lot of work for you, then he lures your weakest compatriots down below for the annual troglodyte feast. It’s much more organized and considerate.
How do you feel about corporate media versus small press? If the opportunity came along, would you allow a large corporation to publish one of your books?Large scale media is generally about money. Argue it all you want, but these are huge businesses in a capitalist nation we’re talking about. Tab A will be designed for whatever Slot B asks for, and Slot B will usually ask for Tabs that resemble the ones they’ve had before, or that are slightly modified from a previous Tab. There’s a reason words like ‘franchise’ and ‘demographic’ run so strongly in the media industries, and why so many small press writers are obsessed with marketing, and it’s the same reason so many sub-sub-sub-genres exist. When people enter a restaurant, they generally order what they know or have heard is good, not what they’ve never tried. Restaurants adjust for this, and for good reason. A large company does the same with its product, regardless of what that is. It’s good business sense, however good business can at times damage the overall quality of a given market.
I love the small press. It holds hands and tells you about itself. It asks how you’re doing and what you’ve been up to. There’s little in the way of money, but there is gratitude. There’s not much acclaim, but there are thanks and many friends. Some writers view the small press as a personal sort of Basic Training. As if one graduates from there into the three-book deal at BigHouse Publishing with a series en route to major retail. They see the SP as an escalator they need to ride to access a higher floor. That could happen, here and there, but it’s not usually how things work. The small press has been kind to me, and I feel I have a substantial debt to try and offer it better and better work. This is good for me. Good for it. And every journal and writer need these sorts of compulsions to keep afloat and have a bearing anymore.
The large publishing companies are businesses that promote and distribute books they feel will bring a profit beyond a prospective margin. The small press is more of an actual, open press. Because money is scarce, it is sometimes removed from the goals of small press publications. Not all, but some. There are real, true labors of love out there.
If a massive publishing company had an interest in one of my novels, I’d be more than pleased to offer it, provided my friendship with
Cauliay was not at risk and so long as the promise to publish was contractually stated. An actual cross-nation distribution setup would be wondrous. Like I said, large scale media is about money and demographic. I’d love to have some of either. I’ve been practicing having money my whole life.
Where does your voice come from? Influences?I write everything I can get my mind around. I have a few plays, short stories, children’s books, novels, tons of poetry, and certain things I have to place in a ‘Miscellaneous’ folder, like the rap novels I wrote when I was younger.
My influences come from all of these places, but effect the whole sundry of what I write. My novels are certainly effected by my early reading, so there’s a little
Stephen King in there, some
Steinbeck, Melville, and an awful lot of fodder taken from the
Edith Hamilton mythology books I saturated myself in as a kid. But in truth, my novels are more influenced by poets than other novelists.
Milton, Spenser, Dante, and certainly newer blood like
Dylan Thomas and
Carl Sandburg. My poetry is heavily influenced by those same poets, but there’s some
Kafka and
DeLillo and
Burroughs and
Tennessee Williams in there. Anything I read is taken up. I’ve a head that mimics and I can’t shut it off.
Voice is a tricky thing to talk about. Let me fall back on some chronology and spin it this way: After some serious trouble in my early twenties, I stopped writing fiction entirely. It just wasn’t in me anymore. I loved reading horror, but didn’t enjoy writing it, which is in contrast to how I felt about poetry at the time; I didn’t enjoy reading poetry at all, but I loved writing it. After I gave up fiction, I began writing poetry. It was a natural shift for me, into something that catered more to my sense of the page. I did this for ten years, and toward the end of this span, I started publishing. Through all of this, however, I began feeling that the novel had beaten me in some way.
It was a somewhat random day when I sat down to write some poetry, and instead wrote twelve pages of story. It had been a decade and I was scabby, but that roughed off quick. I called those twelve pages a chapter, and the following day, wrote a second. Six weeks later I had 41 chapters and a finished book (which grew to 50 chapters during subsequent revisions). I had no idea I could write like that. The sheer quantity. I’d been writing poems for ten years, the usual length being between 50 and 200 words. Suddenly I’m staring at this large book, around 170,000 words. And stranger still, there was nothing in it that I would describe as inherently ‘my kind of writing’. How hadn’t I written a horror novel? It’s what I wanted to write. That book,
The Bridge to Camas Swale, was a long family drama with about eight major characters, dozens of minor characters, all with their own arcs and whatnot. It was more like
Gone with the Wind than
The Shining. And I wasn’t sure what that was supposed to mean with regards my writing.
So, my ‘voice’ is an entirely intangible thing to me. I assume it’s in there rattling around and bouncing in the blood and bone, but whatever it is, I think it’s gradual and changes often. It lets me write fantasy, horror, drama, romance, psychological-this-and-that, poetry, and all sorts of other things I’ll likely never show anyone. A good portion of it is likely replaced by whatever I’m reading at the time, usually some particular poet’s book I’ve made my new friend for the month. Right now I’m reading
Brodsky, Rilke, a compilation of some of
Rod Serling’s morality teleplays, and a couple of old
Rinehart collections. There will be some of those mannerisms in me until I move on, when my filters weed out certain things and keep others.
How do you approach a write? Believe in writer's block?Writer’s block, to me, isn’t so much a ‘block’ in the mental sense, but more that your brain just doesn’t want to write at a given moment, or for a certain period of time. It’s like trying to have sex when you’re exhausted and not into it. Yeah, they make pills for that now, but not for when you want to write. For some, this kind of deadening to the artistic sense can be quite severe and damaging. I usually write through it, and have a variety of mental tricks I use to get me where I need to be to start moving work along. It doesn’t take long to excite me on a page. If I sit down to write and I’m just not in it, there are things I can do to introduce myself into lines pretty quickly. Switching to a different color of pen. Changing where I write for a short while. Storming off other writing. And then there are all the crash-course tricks that I won’t discuss here because I’m hoarding them. I have tons of sneaky little things I do to get my engine running, and even more of them to get it running hotter. Some might call these eccentricities, but I think they’re more like those mostly invisible details in a good work ethic. It doesn’t come naturally; I’ve had to train myself much over the years.
I approach a piece of writing in the same way I prepare for a meal. Sit down. Get out fork. Pick a spot. Adjust plate. Stab. I improvise with poetry, usually having little notion of what I’m going to write until I begin to see it taking shape on page. Then I am quite controlling with it. I start novels in a similar way, with a gravid idea and a sense of theme, and a few specific scenes in my head, maybe a device or two, but never a whole story. I don’t want to force Character B into Plotline A if it turns out that’d be reaching, or not a good fit. Character B needs to do his/her own thing, and that evolves as they go, and as I get to know Character B with more scrutiny. I don’t outline until the second half of the book. By then, I know everything that’s going to happen, why, and how I want to write it. This is when I put together a loose but still accountable outline and try to keep somewhat near it. I try to form it loose so I can stray here and there. If I like what I’m working on, I’ll need to stray pretty often.
With the novels, I write a chapter a day until the first draft is complete. I miss very few days, but as I’m a husband and father, there are short, unavoidable durations wherein I won’t have time to get to a page. These are rare, and I accept them. It boils in my head until I’m alone with a page.
With poetry, I write around two poems a day until the book is complete, at around 80 poems. I write by hand. Ink. I then type them and begin the revisions. Calling this a book is subjective however, as I generally then take the poems in small batches and try sending them around the small press. I don’t usually attempt to publish the cache as a book, itself, though each has a title and cover art and certainly resembles a book when I’m done.
All of these things, it should be noted, are regiment and after-effect. The actual mental purpose of writing for me is far more internal and personal, and I care for it much. I won’t talk about that, however. That’s mine.
Listen to music while you write? Who?I write everything in public. Can’t write at home (I’ve never been able to do this). So I inhabit restaurants and coffee shops and wherever else I can take up a space for a few hours without paying an exorbitant amount of money. During the day. Middle of the night. Whenever I can get the time. This is a small town, and due to the public nature of my workspace, music is oftentimes provided by the establishment in question. The coffee shop downtown I’ve been haunting lately plays a couple of Christian music CDs all day long. It’s pretty contrived and not my kind of music, but I can tune it out without problem. The restaurants I frequent usually have the radio on and set to the oldies station, so there are countless poems of mine floating around that were written with
Runaround Sue or
Magic Carpet Ride in the backdrop.
For those rare moments when I remember to bring headphones and can set my own music, I have a variety of things I use to work under. It depends on my mood, but usually we’re talking metal.
Metallica’s Ride the Lightning and
Kill ‘em All,
Peace Sells by
Megadeth, a healthy dose of
Slayer, Lamb of God, and others.
System of a Down. There are some newer bands in there, too. Beyond metal, I’m also a big
Pixies fan, love the composer M
odesto Mussorgski, Ministry, Gene Pitney, Mr. Bungle, and a few kick-ass things I throw in for nostalgia’s sake, like the
Dead Kennedys, Revolting Cocks, and old
Front 242. I go back and forth between metal and classical often. Those would certainly be my mainstays.
Have you won any awards? Do accolades matter to you?Accolades are nice. They matter some, yes, so long as the accolade in question is something you, yourself respect. I don’t mean to diminish the power they might have over someone, but in being honest I’d have to say that I get more momentum and joy out of receiving an email from another writer telling me they liked something I wrote, than I do out of
Pushcart nominations and featurings. I kind of value camaraderie more than prizes. Don’t get me wrong, I like those things plenty, but they more effect status than the actual you.
I did win the
Adroitly Placed Word Award, for spoken word, and I’ve had a few feature spots in various publications, you know, special author of the issue, that sort of thing. Some nominations for other work I’ve put out. They’ve been kickshaws, and I enjoy them, but what does it for me most is getting a compliment from another writer or an editor. I feel liked, and that I’m on the right track when that happens. Fuck, I need that like crazy; writing is a lonely art.
Are you prolific?Prolific (adjective)
1. Intellectually productive
2. Bearing in abundance
Well, in the last three years I’ve written twelve books of poetry and four complete novels. Throw in those interviews I did with dead writers (
Interviews with the Dead), or the articles I wrote for
Blood and Ink and a few other journals that solicited articles from me online, and I’d have to say that yes, I’ve definitely been around town a few times. I write like a machine and much of it finds itself published, so okay, yes. I will here conclude myself officially prolific.
What advice do you have for other writers whether new or seasoned?They are thin lines that separate the titles of ‘Successful Writer’, ‘Struggling Writer’, and ‘Failing Writer’. Finding yourself under one of these monickers is often self-contrived, but sometimes nurture. I go back and forth between these nearly to the day, and I think most do. You fail on Wednesday, struggle on Thursday and Friday, succeed on Saturday, and then fail again on Sunday. I’d advise any other writer to just get used to it.
It’s okay for certain areas in a piece of writing to be arrogant, or assuming, or even vain, but not you. Like memory, all writing, with regards to tone and mood, is inherently fictional. Even your diary.
Don’t live in the outline unless it’s imperative.
That reading you did where no one showed up and you sat there alone feeling like a complete failure? Set up another one.
There are still mistakes in the tenth draft. If you haven’t found them, look harder.
What you want to write and what you can are not often the same.
Don’t feel sorry for yourself. Let others do that for you.
People will often parrot that you need to show, and not tell. They are misinformed. Show is for development. Tell is for everything else. Tell. Tell your ass off.
Don’t introduce an antagonist. They’re born from situation. Introduce that.
If someone asks you what your novel is about, and you can quickly tell them in an exacting way, you’ve probably written generic. But good news!: They’ll probably buy a copy.
At many points in your writing life, you will become overwhelmed in dismay. You’ll think “No one cares”, which is mostly true, and you’ll ask “Why am I doing this?”, which is a very good question. In the end, it’s just dismay. You’re a grown up; you can handle a little dismay from time to time.
You’ll write like shit if you don’t enjoy it.
Your dialogue needs work.
Write a play. Write poetry. Write an article. Write a novel. Write a script. Write a letter. Any of these increases your skill with the others.
Sleep on it. Once.
Write your next book better.
You’ll get better even when you don’t write, just not nearly so fast or reliably.
Don’t chase the Great American Novel. This is figurative, hindsight-driven, and Great American Novels are decided upon by a future public. Those previous writers who created them were actually writing regular novels.
There will come a time when someone will compliment your work who has no reason to. For this, you’ll be tempted to believe them. Refrain. The work is still terrible. You’ll decide this in a year or so, anyway, but it’s better if you don’t wait that long.
Giving your raw manuscript to anyone outside the publishing realm is an act of friendship. Understanding when they don’t read it is another.
There won’t be any money. Start from there.
The more time you spend telling people what you’re going to write, the less chance there is of you writing it. This is a direct ratio.
To the end. To the end. To the end. Plus a step.
You will often hear that anything worth writing has already been written, or in general statement, “Everything has been done”. This is utter bullshit, often said by people without ideas. So long as there are people, and so long as they have opinions, there will always be all sorts of new things to write about.
People are more interested in knowing a writer than they are in reading his/her work.
Ignore blurbs. They’re the literary equivalent of sea monkey ads. However, if you’re required to have them stamped over your work, honor your friends.
Write with someone else every now and then. One of you will get better, and there’s even a chance both of you will.
Taking a piece of writing to a workshop is like taking your cat to an anatomy class. This is fine, so long as you weren’t planning on enjoying the cat later.
The smaller magazines need your work far more than the larger, and you need to be needed.
You don’t have to like what they like. This irritates them. Irritated people pay attention.
Lastly, get over yourself; everyone else has.
Do you have an 'ideal reader'?Yes. One who gets a copy of a book, reads it, and then decides to maybe try another one.
What's next for Ray Succre? I have a book of poetry,
Other Cruel Things, coming out through
Differentia Press, as an ebook, free to all. It compiles what I feel to be some of my better works in poetry from 2008 and 2009. I have another novel due out in Summer of 2010,
A Fine Young Day, which is somewhat of a departure from what I’ve previously written, which tended to be levitous and a little whimsical in tone.
A Fine Young Day is my tinkering with horror writing, in the way
Tatterdemalion was my sort of an adventure/quest tale, and
Amphisbaena was my way of having some fun with romance writing.
A Fine Young Day attempts to be disturbing and enchanting at the same time. As with previous books, there is a hearty arrangement of surreality present. I can’t fight what I am when it comes to story. Abstraction gets a hold of me and I have to have it out.
Also on the plate is a new book of poetry,
Throw Here All Your Freaked Enamel Limbs, which should be finished in a few weeks. I’m thinking of self-publishing it as a thing to pass around friends, but have no plans as yet on attempting to take it larger than that.
I’ve begun schooling again, rather late but not too late, and will be attending college for the next few years to procure a teaching degree and start off an actual, paycheck-oriented career. This would also be something I would enjoy much, and have given it a great amount of thought over the past few years. Doing that and writing books, being a father and a husband… well, that’s pretty general, but like I said, I prefer a loose outline, and I have no doubt that working hard with those things is a good way to spend a life.
