Gibson Blog

EXPOSITION IN THE AGE OF GOOGLE

2010-04-16T11:37:00.000-07:00

Via my wonderful editor, Susan Allison, from a New York Magazine piece on David Simon:

"Fuck the exposition," he says gleefully, as we go back into the bar. "Just *be*. The exposition can come later." He describes a theory of television narrative. "If I can make you curious enough, there's this thing called Google. If you're curious about the New Orleans Indians, or 'second-line' musicians--you can look it up." The Internet, he suggests, can provide its own creative freedom, releasing writers from having to overexplain, allowing history to light the charaqcters from within

I THINK WE'VE HEARD THE CLICK

2010-04-11T20:17:00.000-07:00

Feels to me like a full cycle of Q&A. Very enjoyable, for me, but I'll take Anabel's thanks as the closer, now. You're all welcome, and thank you for turning up.

QUESTIONS...

2010-04-11T08:02:00.000-07:00

From Cederic:
Q Lets trivialise.
A You go first!

Q You obsess in your books about the desired objects of days past, contemporarily still desirable with the added patina of rarity.
- What's your favourite old world treasure?
A I'm more a wunderkammer guy than a big masterpiece guy. I'm with Manny Farber's termites, that way. Sir John Soane's house is probably my favorite London museum.

Q - Which watch do you wear?
A Today, an 80s Vostok, a Soviet watch. It has a certain pleasant melancholy about it.

Q - Do you seek current objects of desire: iPhone or Android?
A Not so much. I've never been an early adaptor. It's getting to the point, though, where I actually need to get something along iPhone lines. But that would be upgrading from a Nokia flip (chosen because it had very good reception, four years ago).

Q - On more philosophical and complicated themes. You are an artist, a creator, but more: you are through your writing an influencer, a shaper of technology, of society itself. Does that scare you?
A I don't actually buy that, the mighty thunderer and shaper of technology thing. I think I'm more of an interpreter of technologies, an amateur anthropologist. I'm a sort of Victorian weekend naturalist of technology, who somehow found a way to make a living doing that (and a bunch of other things at the same time).

QUESTIONS...

2010-04-11T07:37:00.000-07:00

Q How much steeping do you do in your locations while writing? Hotels, cities, transportation options?
A Where I happen to have gone tends to produce the locations. For Pattern Recognition. I went back to Tokyo to upgrade my 80s/90s version. Hadn't been to Moscow at all. Filtered that through writer friends who had (Eileen Gunn, Jack Womack). I do virtual steeping, though. Google Earth Street View is a spooky thing, that way.

Q Do you visualize some locations from first-hand experience or do you take notes to refresh your memory while re/experiencing them again?
A I have no way of knowing what'll reemerge from the hopper as a novel-unit, so no reason to take notes. Everything goes into the hopper. Relatively few things come out of it.

Q Does this research get expensive for you? Is there a way for you to be compensated for this type of research?
A I spend almost nothing on research. A Wired article took me to Tokyo, when I was writing Pattern Recognition. I used to buy lots of magazines. Magazines are novelty-aggregators. But the Web's taken that function over, and is free.

Q Do you find that "going there" actually helps you write?
A Having been *somewhere* helps me to write. Having a hopper full of "place" is a good thing, but that's a lifetime accumulation. And there's a certain amount of composting that goes on, in the hopper. It's not journalism, not reportage.

QUESTIONS...

2010-04-11T07:25:00.000-07:00

From Bravus:
Q In general, do you think the barriers (filters?) to publication for new authors of fiction are working well? (Are they letting the good stuff through, or do you think there are lots of people who have surmounted the barrier of writing and written good stuff but fail to surmount the publishing barriers?)
A I'm not postioned to know. Not sure who would be. Someone who has some overview of what's happening?

Q And, related, how do you see technology helping and harming with this? Charles Stross has written some interesting blog posts on the economics of a writing career in the days of Amazon, for example, that were quite doomy...
A I read that Stross. The thing to remember is that a look at the actual economics of the thing, that way, would always have been doomy for the unpublished. Most of whom have no idea. Not that I don't think Stross is accurate. I do, but there's a way in which it's not a new scary story. New installment of the old scary story.

QUESTIONS...

2010-04-10T22:40:00.000-07:00

Q What question would Lithos ask you, if he were one of your characters?

A "How is this possible?" And I would explain the Internet, etc.

QUESTIONS...

2010-04-10T14:27:00.000-07:00

From Bictaker:
Q I'm picking up on a thread that seems to pervade several of your previous responses, in so much as your writing gift comes at a heavy price. It's almost a suffering ...something you can't and wouldn't want to live without, yet a beast that requires a great deal of time and effort to harness? A living hell for the duration of the work, no?

A Yikes! I must've sounded awfully whiny. Nothing quite as dramatic as that. Every job has its costs, some of which aren't so evident to people who haven't done it. But my intention was more to convey, to people who might want to write fiction, that the process they arrive at may not quite line up with our cultural paradigm of what writing fiction is, and that the blisters may form in places other than expected. When I started trying to write fiction, I read writers-on-writing collections, and very little of that, in retrospect, sounded much like what I've wound up having to do to make it happen.

When Bruce Sterling and I were writing The Difference Engine, I'd moan sometimes about the labor required (as much fun as that was, and often it was lots of fun, but I'm basically lazy). He always had the same response: "Yeah, but it beats loading concrete blocks." Which is so obviously true, and has since become a mantra of mine.

I don't always like writing, but I very much like having written.

QUESTIONS...

2010-04-10T09:06:00.000-07:00

From Anabel:
Q There's a highly successful writer who lived in my town, who ran a writers workshop where he said he used real people for some of his characters. Have you used real people to springboard some characters in your work? Was it dicey to do so?

A I'd assume we (writers) all must do that some extent, but for me that all goes through some process of unconscious randomization. When my characters arrive, I don't know who they are, let alone who might have contributed DNA. There are exceptions, but usually only with characters who are more broadly parodic of particular attitudes.

I had no idea who Cayce was, why she felt that way on waking, whose flat it was, why London. For months. I was inhabiting a very partial construct, waiting to see what attached itself. Waiting to find a center of gravity.

QUESTIONS...

2010-04-09T22:49:00.000-07:00

From Bictaker

Q How much quicker do you think you would complete Zero History in a world without Twitter?

A Not faster, just differently. Twitter, or the Internet at large, feels to me like an automation of what I have to do, anyway, in order to write: Stare out window. Read a magazine. Gaze at shoe. Answer a letter. Think about something new (or newly). *Access random novelty.*

The writing worth keeping happens within a matrix of mysterious but crucially related activities. I might order myself to write for X number of hours per day (though in fact I never do) but the writing worth keeping can't be ordered to happen at all, let alone for X number of hours per day. It has to be teased out. Fed.

Q Do publishers place pressure on authors for X number of hours output per day, or are there just agreed, albeit flexible, deadlines?
A We do it from our homes, and we refuse to let them in, no matter how many times they knock. There's a contract, and a deadline for delivery of the completed manuscript. That's actually a really scary deal: a contract, and a deadline, and nobody there in the morning to tell you to get to work. Or to start gazing at your shoe.

Q I guess there's less pressure on established writers, whereas newbies are pushed harder? Time management: do you place yourself under a strict regime?

A The arrangement forces you to manage your own time. In the old days, in Hollywood, screenwriters in studio employ were contractually obligated to turn in a specific number of pages per day. There is nothing like that in the world of professional fiction-writing, and if there were, we wouldn't be having this conversation, because I'd never have been published.

I have to force myself to turn up every day, in case the writing also decides to. Often, it doesn't choose to. There is more of that at the start of a book than later, mercifully. The book builds its own momentum, though each one has a different momentum. That momentum is what calls the shots, imposes the regimen.

The part of me that's writing this, now, is utterly incapable of writing a novel. The part of me that just wrote a novel is profoundly unavailable, right now, and will remain so until the next time I have to go out and walk for miles, whistling for it, convinced its finally run away for good and all.

People don't ordinarily meet the part of me that writes novels, and when they do, they must assume I'm not not doing very well. Which as a human being, right then, I'm not. In direct proportion to how well I might be doing, right then, as a novelist.

QUESTIONS...

2010-04-08T22:49:00.000-07:00

From Sentinel400:
Q Have you ever wanted to wear a uniform?

A When was I last out of one? The extent to which we are are all of us usually in uniform brings to mind Eno's definition of culture: everything we do that we don't really need to. Pajama bottoms beneath a raincoat? Out of uniform. Jeans with one leg cut off? Out of uniform. Contracultural apparel disturbs us. Countercultures are intensely cultural. Bohemias have dress codes as rigid as those of merchant banks. We all read uniforms, constantly, whether we're aware of it or not.

My favorite science fiction film wardrobe is worn by David Bowie's alien, in The Man Who Fell To Earth. He turns up for his first terrestrial business meeting wearing a brand new $1.99 Chinese flannel workshirt, buttoned at the neck, its printed plaid fabric about half an inch thick, under a shiny, sleazy, striped business suit. The sense of the character's inability to read or articulate our cultural codes is perfect, and heartbreaking.

QUESTIONS...

2010-04-08T19:35:00.000-07:00

From Martin:
Q Do you think any influence from "The Wire" has leaked into your (this) writing? Would you necessarily aware of it, if it had?

A I first watched The Wire when I was writing Spook Country, because my friend Steve Brown told me that one of the seasons had the best stuff about shipping containers he'd seen anywhere, in any medium. But what I really got from that was a sense of the physicality of the containers: that the walls are actually quite thin, things like that.

But that's material. "Influence" is something else. Influence is more like weather, when you've been writing for a while. It blows in from somewhere. You can't say exactly where weather *is*, but you can say that it's present.

QUESTIONS...

2010-04-08T19:09:00.000-07:00

From Colin:
Q Seething, termite-like revising seems well suited to word processors, but how did it work out on that famous typewriter?

A Really, really *slowly*. Thick scabs of correction fluid. Then I discovered those rolls of self-adhesive white paper tape, that restaurants used to use to correct (this is amazing in itself, to me) the *typewritten* (or maybe mimeographed) parts of their menus. So I'd stick that over a whole sentence or three, a whole para, then type over it. But then the termites would seethe again, and I'd have to paint the white fluid over the *tape*, which didn't really work that well... The pages of the Neuromancer manuscript were *3D*, topographical...

Then Bruce Sterling's father gave him an Apple II. I guess he'd moved up to the first Mac. So there's Bruce on the phone from Austin: "This is *serious*, man. This thing *automates* the process." So I went down to Eaton's and bought a IIC and a dot-matrix printer, marked way down because the new Mac was the thing. So I never got the Selectric that had been the pro writer's awesomest tool when I'd started trying to write. I saw one of those for $29.95 in a charity shop, last year.

QUESTIONS...

2010-04-07T19:39:00.000-07:00

From Bravus:
Q In general, do you think the barriers (filters?) to publication for new authors of fiction are working well? (Are they letting the good stuff through, or do you think there are lots of people who have surmounted the barrier of writing and written good stuff but fail to surmount the publishing barriers?)

A I have no way of knowing, really. What your question reminds me of, though, is my having asked a couple of my literature profs at UBC, in the 70s, whether they thought there were important works of fiction that we didn't yet know of. This was greeted with a sort of amazed disgust. Of course there weren't. (Neither they nor I had ever heard of Cormac McCarthy, then, and he'd been published for over a decade.)

Q And, related, how do you see technology helping and harming with this? Charles Stross has written some interesting blog posts on the economics of a writing career in the days of Amazon, for example, that were quite doomy...
A The economics for the majority of writers, in my lifetime, have never been good at all. I suspect I imagined that the science fiction writers I read in the 60s were all doing rather well. Most of them, actually, were just scraping by, and moonlighting at other things. That was why, I'd guess, many of them seemed to write more often than was good for their writing.

QUESTIONS...

2010-04-07T16:38:00.000-07:00

From Twilite Minotaur:
Q You mentioned spending a year on that one sentence. I notice myself getting tar babied into a sort of perfectionist love-hate with my own sentences (and lyrics), and then find myself paying mental alimony to a work throughout the day, swapping and rearranging bits, more like a jigsaw puzzle engineer than an 'artist' with nouns and verbs fountaining eternal from some Creativity Cortex. Paul Valery's aphorism, that,"an artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it," comes to mind. Was there some point or process for you of learning the art of abandonment, to switch off the inner micromanager, at an appropriate time so as to allow sufficient rumination to be spent on a work, but without becoming lost in it?

A If an innumerate like myself can be allowed to say this, there's a feeling of equation, at the end. There's a *click*. When you hear the click, immediately down tools and exit the structure. Don't go back in until your mind's quit overclocking and you can afford some perspective. Chance's are, that *was* the click.

Q Also, if you had to live in a city other than Vancouver, what would it be and why?
A Berlin. For all the ways it disproves our ideas of psychogeography and haunting.

QUESTIONS...

2010-04-07T13:22:00.000-07:00

From Dawntreader :
Q Why do you seem obsessed with brand name apparel et al in Pattern Recognition and Spook Country?
A You ain't seen nothing, yet! Actually the new one may explain that, a bit. Or just further convince some people that I'm obsessed. It's one of the ways in which I feel I understand how the world works, and there aren't really that many of those. It's not about clothes, though, or branding; it's about code, subtext. I was really delighted, for instance, to learn who made George Bush's raincoats. A company in Little Rock (now extinct, alas) but they were made of Ventile, a British cotton so tightly woven that you can make fire hoses (and RAF ocean survival suits) out of it. Which exists because Churchill demanded it, because the Germans had all the flax production sewn up. No flax, no fire hoses for the Blitz. The cultural complexities that put that particular material on Bush's back delight me deeply; it's a kind of secret history (and not least because most people would find it fantastically boring, I imagine).

QUESTIONS...

2010-04-07T13:09:00.000-07:00

From: theminx
Q. I am always inordinately pleased when I find out that someone whose work I admire is also a fan of someone else I admire. Some artists I like (such as Douglas Coupland and Kim Gordon) are also William Gibson fans/appreciators. Whose appreciation of your work tickles or humbles you the most?
A. Enthusiastic celebrity readers make me bashful. I actually have a hard time believing them, if that makes any sense. "You *do*? Golly!" Works better for me with random strangers who I'd imagine have any number of better things to do than read me.

QUESTIONS...

2010-04-07T10:52:00.000-07:00

From Bictaker:
Q How long did it take you before you finally gained confidence to put pen to paper [i.e. attempt to write fiction] and what, if any, was your original inspiration to commit yourself?

A There was never any pen. It's all been typed. I didn't begin to experiment with writing fiction until 1976 or so (I'm not sure, really) and I was extremely secretive about commitment. Secretive about the whole thing, really. I don't know why I started doing it, or why my commitment to it, when it came, as deeply private as it was, startled me with its depth. The whole thing was deeper than I have access to. And remains so.

The first first fiction I ever wrote was this sentence: "Seated in the darkened screening room, Hollingsworth came to understand the targeted numerals of the Academy leader as hypnagogic sigils preceding the dreamstate of film." Except that it wasn't "Hollingsworth"; something more, er, Ballardian! This is a perfect clinical example of the new writer having failed to even begin to digest an influence, and I could never making it go any further, though I did know that the next image was of a fountain, in the courtyard of an academic research building, into which people had been tossing expensive Swiss watches rather than coins.

I think I worked on that sentence for a year or more. Long enough to never have forgotten it. I think I may have eventually decided that I should regard it as complete in itself.

QUESTIONS...

2010-04-07T08:12:00.000-07:00

From Martin:
Q What aspect of ZH are you most eager to talk about (that hasn't been mentioned yet) ?
A Actually I'm not that eager to talk about it. There's a gap, between completion and issuance of ARCs, during which I don't have to, and then I will have to, daily, for months. That's a function of the industry's needs, not mine. It feels slightly unseemly to me, to talk about my own work at any length.

QUESTIONS...

2010-04-06T19:27:00.000-07:00

From Digitalprimate:
Q What would you suggest as listening while reading Zero History?
A Not owls. Not the gentle lowing of cattle at dusk. Not dried corn rattling into a galvanized bucket.

QUESTIONS...

2010-04-06T11:39:00.000-07:00

From Buell:
Q More Bigend; is Hubertus your writer-self's alter ego?
A He seems to me like a sort of clay-footed demigod, the manifestation of something in our species that's unique to us (here, anyway, as far as we know) in ways both very good and very bad.

Q I'm under the impression that to take up the excruciating task of writing a novel requires Bigend-like megalomania.
A All sorts of things can warrant the taking up of the task, and do, but relatively few of the novels taken up, species-wide, are completed. A signed contract is a huge help on either end. And I don't mean that it's about money. Rather that there's a structure imposed, a commitment made, a timeline established.

There isn't anything that I think I know that would, in itself, warrant the writing of a novel.

...AND QUESTIONS

2010-04-06T09:53:00.000-07:00

From Fuldog:
Q Creator's block. If ever: how long, when/why it happened; or how was it avoided, palliated?
A "Creator's block" sounds like something afflicting a divinity, but writer's block is my default setting. Its opposite is miraculous. The process of learning to write fiction, for me, was one of learning to almost continually be doing it *through* the block, in spite of the block, the block becoming the accustomed place from which to work. Our traditional cultural models of creativity tend to involve the wrong sort of heroism, for me. "It sprang whole and perfect from my brow" as opposed to "I saw it mispelled, in mauve Krylon, on the side of a dumpster, and it haunted me". I was much encouraged, when I began to write, by Manny Farber's idea of "termite art".

Q During the journey from the Sprawl to the Bridge to Bigend's, ever thought about changing profession, something radical?
A Never seriously. Probably because doing this, for whatever reason, has to be more an avocation than a career. I like designers, of various things. More than "fine artists", generally.

...AND QUESTIONS

2010-04-05T18:47:00.000-07:00

From Bictaker:
Q If you had a chance to meet the author of your favorite book, who would it be and what would you ask them?
A Jorge Luis Borges. "How is this possible?"

Though I don't have a favorite book by Borges, or even a favorite book. It's unlikely that meeting a writer of fiction will get me any closer to the writer's work, in my experience. The opposite effect is sometimes noted. Writers of fiction, as I understand them, are writers because they can get closer to you *as marks on paper* than they can any other way. They cannot sit and tell you. If they could tell you, then why would they write? They cannot explain. They do not know, that way. They know transiently, at best, in the act of marking paper.

...AND QUESTIONS

2010-04-04T19:53:00.000-07:00

From Mean Old Man:
Q Essays. You're really, really good at those. I read a few of yours a while ago, and was lastingly impressed; Tokyo, watches, one about U2... How do those happen? Does Editor X in Gumbyville slap his forehead and cry, "Navel lint! William Gibson! It's a perfect fit! It'll fill an Entire! Page!! Miss Pertbottom, get New York on the line! What? I don't care if he's in Canada! GET NEW YORK ON THE LINE!", or is it more of an old school sub-rosa web ring kind of thing?

A Thank you. It was my first literary form. It was probably your first too. It can happen a number of ways. Ones that involve really expensive free plane tickets (Singapore, Tokyo, say). Ones that involve being asked to consider things I'm peculiarly interested in at the time (the eBay watch one). Ones where I feel honored to have been asked (the centenary of Orwell's birth) though in some cases I've declined out of feeling unworthy. (I declined to write an obituary for Wm. S. Burroughs, but mainly because he was still alive at the time, and believed in magic.) It's not an activity I actively seek out, much, and if asked (and I'm not asked, that often) I more often decline.

Q And who do you consider to be superior essayists, living or dead, worth reading?
A Orwell comes to mind, of course, but those are classic formal essays. The various parts of something like Iain Sinclair's Lights Out For The Territory *behave* in some ways like essays, and are brilliant, but do various un-essaylike things as well.

...AND QUESTIONS

2010-04-03T15:52:00.000-07:00

From Fashionpolioce:
Q Having written three trilogies, and approaching the age where some people choose to retire, do you think you'll keep writing into a ripe old age?
A There's evidence that some people are actually better at writing novels, over fifty. And it doesn't feel like a job, exactly. More like an ongoing experiment of some kind.

Q Or have you thought about doing something entirely different - like learning to sew?
A Or knit! Etsy beckons...

...AND QUESTIONS

2010-04-02T23:59:00.000-07:00

From Anabel :
Q How has being a father affected you? In the beginning and over the years?
A In the beginning, it allowed me to write. My wife worked, teaching ESL at UBC, and I was househusband, daytime single parent, and novelist. Not easy, but a surprisingly good fit in many ways.

Q Can you speak about the delights of getting to know your kids as they mature, without alienating your kids in public?
A I wouldn't want to. As parent, it would feel insufficiently respectful, and as writer, potentially cheesy.

From Colin:
Q So, about that terrifying process again. You have four or five people reading your daily output. Do you plow through the draft from beginning to end, or do these poor (and/or extremely lucky) souls have to read things out of order or the same page six times as you revise it?
A I show them the chapters as I write them, and I write them sequentially. If I don't get it right on the first try, I redo it and send it again. As I go along I revise the whole thing continually, piecemeal, but I don't update them on that. Finally I send them the manuscript. So they read it initially as a serial, every few days. I don't really do drafts, more a constant termite-like seething. I actually enjoy that aspect of the process. I feel like they're badly written but handsomely revised. Revision is largely stress-free. And they are, initially, in my opinion, not that well written. And while I know that they don't have to be, at that point, it still pains me.

Q Do you give them the first first draft of the pages, or the first draft after you've decided you're either not embarrassed or not going to worry about being embarrassed?
A I don't give them anything initially until I have what feels like a beginning. With Zero History, I think that was the first three chapters, which are longish, dense. That way, I feel like they know where we are. There's some kind of benchmark. Then we go on from there. Until recently, I could only have one outside first reader and my wife (and daughter, when she grew into it). Over the past decade or so, I've loosened up, found a greater degree of transparency, and I find that reduces the stress in some ways. For the past few months, writing daily, I found myself wondering what that would look like on a brain scan. I suspect there's some specific neurological activity, one that I can't necessarily produce at will. It's possible to get into a groove, though, and just do it, though at definite cost to everything else in one's life.

SPLITCOIL REMINDS ME...

2010-04-02T19:11:00.000-07:00

Re an earlier question, I have in fact considered writing a Western. Protagonist's job is to see a shipment of high-tone Vancouver-refined opium from here to the finest divans of Manhattan. I don't know whether that ever happened, but it certainly could have. Digging in Strathcona back yards (particularly where outside toilets were located) still turns up the tiny, distinctive, branded, made-in-China bottles the local product was issued in. The last I saw for sale (the bottles) were in a fancy antique shop on South Granville, for about $100 each. Like mold-blown perfume bottles, a thin greenish glass. The late Victorian equivalent of plastic crack vials, I suppose, but prettier.

...AND QUESTIONS

2010-04-02T18:19:00.000-07:00

From TwiliteMinotaur :
Q You have spoken previously about the ghostly cloud of hypertext in which your manuscripts are now shrouded, and the way that blogging morsels of your latest writing has helped to alleviate some of the solitude of the writing process.
A I sure have! And I've still got all of that going on, although until recently it's been mainly on Twitter. A platform Margaret Atwood and I find extremely agreeable (make of that what you will).
Q Are there any additional neological emergences to your works and/or writing process that you've noticed during Zero History?
A I am hoping that the phrase "the ugly t-shirt" (or simply "ugly t-shirt") will soon find its place in the jargon of security technology.

...AND QUESTIONS

2010-04-02T09:46:00.000-07:00

from Gromit :
Q Why 'GreatDismal'?
A I had no idea what Twitter was, when a friend joined. GD happened to be in line of sight, so I used it for what I thought would be a ten-minute experience. I did live near the Great Dismal Swamp when I was five or six.

From Wanderer :
Q Why did you choose to make Bigend Belgian?
A His full name was a found object. A Belgian one. And Belgians have a certain reputation, deservedly or not, for (1) globalism, (2) startling outbreaks of interesting perversity.
Q And would he be Flemmish, Wallonian or from Brussels?
A No idea.
Q Also, is it intentional that neither his nor his mother's name is typically Belgian, though they sound like they could?
A No, but it seems to fit.

Fom LillyLyle :
Q I just read this article about a scientist by the name of Milgrim: http://tinyurl.com/yhpg59u Is this the origin of the character Milgrim's name?
A No. "Milgrim" is an old surname in the part of Virginia I grew up in. (So is "Wintermute", though exponentially less common.)

From Trogdor :
A You write from 10AM til whenever. Is research a separate activity?
Q I don't regard research as a separate activity. From anything. Everything is research. Relatively little great stuff turns up for me as a result of deliberately looking. Life is crowd-sourcing. In a good way.
A The reason I ask is that research tends to wander off into the weeds so easily, especially on the internets.
Q But they hide the good stuff *in the weeds*!

WE GET QUESTIONS

2010-04-01T22:40:00.000-07:00

From Boogerhead :
Q Is there an actual person that inspired the Finn?
A No.

From ][mez][ :
Q Why novels?
A Make a living at home, writing fiction!

From digitalprimate :
Q What's the process like from a physical standpoint?
A Sedentary.
Q Where do you write? When? For how long?
A Most recently, in the library (which is really the dining room but who needs one?). 10AM til whenever, pretty much daily when it's happening.
Q What do you eat or drink while writing?
A Whatever's available.
Q Do you write in Word? With pen and paper?
A Word.
Q Do you read or avoid reading certain things while you write?
A I avoid reading most new fiction, while writing.

From the Hydra :
Q Why Ativan?
A Wanted my addict character to have no trace of literary drug romanticism. Which is difficult, but benzos proved perfect.

From Vesper :
Q Which literary world would you like to live in? (Doesn't have to be of your making)
A Not a fantasy I've ever had, actually.

Q What would you say if someone picked up some of the characters from Sprawl or Bridge trilogies and wrote a book(s) with them? (Not-for-profit ones, let's say some decent fan-fic e-books)
A Nothing. Mainly because I can't imagine being induced to read it. I don't even reread my own work, ordinarily.

Q A book that you wish you had written but someone else did?
A I don't understand the impulse. If someone else writes a book, I can't imagine writing it. My literary admiration never takes that form.

From Splitcoil :
Q What project have you considered seriously that your readers would probably find most surprising?
A A space opera, but in the style of Paul Scott's novel The Chinese Love Pavillion. I actually had a contract, but bailed on it, wrote Count Zero instead. Envisioned as early Delany meets Andrew Eldritch, sort of.

Q What do you think is the common thread (if there is one) between that project and your previous work?
A "Earth is the alien planet."
Q Why didn't you write it?
A First novel had better reception than I'd expected. Cyberstuff seam seemed promising. Contracted publisher had ugliest dustjackets in history of genre.

QUESTIONS FROM THE BOARD

2010-03-31T12:34:00.000-07:00

I can't answer all of these, owing to constraints of life-having, etc., but I will try to answer a few on a regular basis.

First up is member Trogdor:

Q: Logarithms. What the fuck is with logarithms? Also Toluene and Microfiber. WTF?

A: I'm basically innumerate, and "logarithms" sound sexy to me. Kind of dirty, actually. But in a good way. Toluene is carcinogenic and smells like it is. Microfiber seems kind of miraculous to me, probably because I am old.

Q: Have you ever thought about doing a western novel?

A: I have sometimes thought of a Civil War novel. But only vaguely.

Q: Which novels did you enjoy writing most?

A: Writing novels is a painful and anxiety-ridden process, for me. There are *moments* of enjoyment. I very much enjoy the state of having written.

Q: Least?

A: They're all equally if differently painful, and each one seems, at some point, to me, to be not only a very bad novel, but the worst novel ever written. That crisis, I've learned, indicates that I'll be finished soon, and that the worst is over. But knowing that doesn't seem to decrease that devastating and absolute conviction of utter failure.

Q: Seemed to me you enjoyed Spook Country. That so?

A: As usual, I was terrified throughout. The pace seemed utterly glacial, to me. The essential thing is to have at least one trusted daily first reader. Four or five, even better. But the keyword is "trusted". When it comes to evaluating my own work, truly, my head has a contract out on my ass.

WHEW. IT'S DUSTY IN HERE...

2010-03-30T22:43:00.000-07:00

I've turned in the manuscript of Zero History, my new novel. Publication date is September 7, 2010.

Just let me get a few windows open, get this place aired out, and we'll have a little blogging.

Meanwhile, I'm @GreatDismal on Twitter.

HAPPY HOLIDAYS

2009-12-24T18:44:00.000-08:00

"Mean what you say, but don't say somethin' mean. Have a blessed Solstice."

--Dr. John (known as the Night Tripper) on Twitter today

MY POOR OLD BLOG'S JUST SITTING HERE...

2009-07-30T21:48:00.000-07:00

While I write this book.

Meanwhile, however, try this:

@GreatDismal

I really do find microblogging congenial (not to mention collegial) and most of what I was doing here, before, was exactly that.

DUNCAN JONES' MOON

2009-07-20T18:39:00.000-07:00

My favorite sf on film usually consists of brief luminous moments in what are generally rather low-budget and often actually very bad movies. The outstanding big-budget exceptions of course being Alien and Blade Runner. Duncan Jones' Moon challenges my aesthetic of brilliant pebbles, though, because it's so tightly and consistently excellent. It does everything I want an sf film to do, and none of the things I don't want an sf film to do. How did *that* ever happen?

OUR QUOTIDIAN ALEPH

2009-07-17T07:56:00.000-07:00

"Aleph" as in the Borges story: the spot under the basement stairs from which can simultaneously be seen all things ever.

Simultaneously profoundly amazing and definitively boring:
PingWire

Because you can't step in the same river twice.

GOOD THING I'M NOT AN ACADEMIC

2009-07-15T16:41:00.000-07:00

Had planned to sort through all the responses to my Orwell quote query and lay the result out here, but it turns out that I am a working novelist (among other things). So here's what I would tell you if you ran into me on the street and asked me about it: I doubt Orwell wrote it. It may have been cobbled together from a line in his essay on nationalism, and another, quoting Kipling, in his essay on Kipling. Weirdly, the very nearest thing to it is an authentic Churchill quote. As to how it became widely accepted as an Orwell quote, your guess is as good as mine. A great many of the people who most enjoy quoting it, I imagine, would actually be happier with it if it were a Churchill quote.

QUERY: RE THE AUTHORITARIAN'S FAVORITE ORWELL QUOTE

2009-07-12T15:06:00.000-07:00

"People sleep peacefully in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf."

Often this is given as "Good people..."

I have been unable to source this back to a specific piece of GO's prose. Have encountered the opinion that it is not an actual GO quotation.

Can anyone help? Thanks.

WHOLE THEORY OF BEAUTIFUL LANGUAGE

2009-06-23T09:46:00.000-07:00

'My whole theory of beautiful language holds that it comes from nameless, groups of people looking for a more expressive way to say something. I'm always thankful to get a note where someone praises a sentence I wrote. But what I really want is the kind of genius that takes "I'm leaving" and turns it into "I'm ghost" and then takes "I'm ghost" and turns it into "I'm Swayze." Seriously, what kid decided to pull "Ducat" out of obscurity (at least obscurity for us 80s city kids) and use it as easy as bread, or ends, or greenbacks? Who decided that a gun should be called a "heater" and then a "toaster" and then finally a "biscuit"?'

-- Ta-Nehisi Coates

"LAWFUL INTERCEPT FUNCTIONALITY"

2009-06-21T19:03:00.001-07:00

Nokia Siemens Networks on the job in Iran.

FRANZ KAFKA, MEN'S OUTERWEAR DESIGNER

2009-06-18T20:45:00.000-07:00

He was slim but firmly built, his clothes were black and close-fitting, with many folds and pockets, buckles and buttons and a belt, all of which gave the impression of being very practical but without making it very clear what they were actually for.

"Who are you?" asked K., sitting half upright in his bed.

--The Trial

FESTO AIR JELLY

2009-06-10T22:06:00.001-07:00

I have become a huge fan of all things Festo .

CIVILIZATION

2009-06-05T08:55:00.001-07:00

Video mural art for the elevator in New York's new branch of The Standard . Stuff's finally starting to look like the 21st Century. Next, your shower curtain.

TRADITIONAL

2009-06-02T09:48:00.001-07:00

The License

HOME OF THE WHOPPER

2009-05-31T08:44:00.000-07:00

The most common human act that writing a novel resembles is lying. We lie daily, very complexly, and at great length. If not for our excessive vanity and our over-active imaginations, we would be quite difficult to deceive.

YES, THAT'S STILL REALLY ME

2009-05-30T21:24:00.000-07:00

On Twitter, as GreatDismal.

I will get it hooked up here, eventually. Too busy in the gomi-strewn book-building hangar at present to sort that out.

TRANSFORMINATORS

2009-05-27T11:35:00.000-07:00

No problemo.

WHAT'S IN A NAME?

2009-05-26T15:25:00.000-07:00

Zero History, a novel in progress, by William Gibson

image: Alan Nazarian, 2009

WHY MODERNISM WAS GOOD

2009-05-22T05:55:00.000-07:00

Джанг-Свинг

140 CHARACTERS

2009-05-15T00:09:00.000-07:00

MAQUETTE

2009-05-12T17:51:00.000-07:00

Bigend’s office, when Milgrim was finally ushered in, was windowless and surprisingly small. Perhaps it wasn’t that specifically his office, Milgrim thought. It didn’t look like an office anyone worked in.

The Swedish boy who’d brought Milgrim in put a gray folder on the teak desk and left silently. There was nothing else on the desk except for a stubby combat shotgun that appeared to have been made from solidified Pepto-Bismol.

TWITTER...

2009-05-03T07:42:00.000-07:00

Is one of those phenomena that don't easily yield to journalism. Its experiential nature is participatory. People tend to like things like that a lot, to the annoyance of journalists.

Random Twitter factoid: bbcbreaking has (this morning) 90023 followers, but is following only 1 (one).

TWITTERING

2009-05-01T21:34:00.000-07:00

I've been on Twitter for a little while now. Under the nom-de-twit GreatDismal (no space). I had not much of an idea what Twitter was, when I first went there, so signed in under a flag of convenience. Still have no idea what it is, or where it's going, but will hang on to GreatDismal for simplicity's sake. At some point I might figure out how to incorporate it here, but then again maybe not.

I feel a bit self-conscious, pausing in the course of my day to recommend a particular make and model (and color) of Swiss ballpoint, but it's how my mind works (and a great pen, for around $20). Browsing Twitter, I think it's how a lot of minds work. (Or recommending a brilliant Scientific Armerican piece on reverse-engineering the human penis. That's a good one. Deeper, as it were.)

Have never been attracted to "social networking" sites before. They all seemed too clunky, somehow.

THE REAL HISTORY OF SCIENCE FICTION

2009-04-30T16:44:00.001-07:00

Not the usual embarrassing small town boosterism, but the
true quill , as extracted from the shelves of the Womack Library. Ongoing. And sorely needed.

STAND BY ME

2009-04-29T08:08:00.000-07:00

Yes indeed.

DEEP THOUGHT

2009-04-28T19:16:00.000-07:00

"If you live in Scotland and you get swine flu, your life expectancy actually goes up."

--Warren Ellis, on Twitter

CAPTAIN TRIPS AND THE YEAR OF THE COUGHING PIG DEATH

2009-04-28T11:45:00.000-07:00

...and all that other exciting we-got-your-'pocalypse-right-here shit aside, Stephen Hume makes a case that reminds me strongly of how believing you can win the lottery and believing you'll be killed by terrorists have so very much in common.

THE DETAINEE...

2009-04-24T21:27:00.001-07:00

Song #109

DOES THIS HAT MAKE MY FINS LOOK BIG?

2009-04-23T13:30:00.000-07:00

Mr. Womack transfers his blogging skilz to his new workplace without losing any ludic edge .

I now have such a massive jones to revisit Barcelona. Few things are as delightful as a friend visiting a place you deeply love, and getting it, absolutely.

VALERIA SUSANINA BARCELONA

2009-04-23T04:05:00.000-07:00

[Guest-posted by Jack Womack]

Lovely city.

Lovely wife.

A perfect trip.

By and large.

Later today I'll have my first blog entry up at my new venue Orbit Books, exploring the wonderful world of science fiction and etcetera.

And, back to Barcelona at the first opportunity.
For now, it's been a pleasure and as always, gracious thanks to Mr. G.

LA BOQUERIA

2009-04-22T17:04:00.000-07:00

[Guest-blogged by Jack Womack]

The greatest market in Europe.

The ham what am.

C'THULHU P'TAGHN!!!! IAAAAAA!!!!!!

23 kinds of eggs.

"Hey hey" said Johan Kugelberg, "all four stomachs!"

Our first lunch, at the market: morcilla with sweet onions, baby octopi in olive oil, Damm dark beer.

Not in picture (eaten): sardines (delicious).

A LITTLE STRING, A LITTLE GLUE, THE BONES OF 32,000 PLAGUE VICTIMS

2009-04-21T16:23:00.001-07:00

[Guest-posted by Jack Womack]

This is what we were seeing in Kutna Hora, Czech Republic, by the way.

We'll return to Barcelona shortly.

"GAUDI IS KITSCH" PROCLAIMED THE CZECH TOUR GUIDE

2009-04-21T15:53:00.000-07:00

[Guest-posted by Jack Womack]

When we were outside Prague in 2007, visiting the little town of Kutna Hora.

We demurred.

Work on Sagrada Familia has continued during the near-ninety years since Gaudi stepped into the path of a streetcar, and is planned to continue for many more years to come.

Unfortunately.

THE OLD WEIRD CATALONIA

2009-04-20T04:19:00.000-07:00

[Guest-blogged by Jack Womack]

ABANDONED SWIMMING POOLS

2009-04-19T14:17:00.000-07:00

Click on "Absence Of Water"

A CULT I'VE BEEN A MEMBER OF SINCE AGE THIRTEEN

2009-04-19T13:48:00.000-07:00

"Cult author"

J.G.BALLARD 1930-2009

2009-04-19T13:31:00.000-07:00

[Guest-posted by Jack Womack]

"Was my husband a doctor, or a patient?"

Ave atque vale.

NO, NEW YORK CITY DOESN'T HAVE IT ALL, NOT EVEN CLOSE

2009-04-19T05:32:00.000-07:00

[Guest-blogged by Jack Womack]

Athletically-inspired fashion tends not to catch my eye, but now these are sneakers.

Note that of course a gentleman's socks should always match his oriental carpets.

The shoes I found at a delightful design and clothing store named Suspect, in the Passatge del credit, in the Barrio. I also much liked their coathangers.

The store that stood out most for me, however, was Caelum, which sells only products produced by monasteries: fine sheep's cheeses, tonics to alleviate menstrual cramps, liqueurs made from eucalyptus or gold.

And, sugared egg yolks. They taste better than you'd expect.

And, weirder.

So far as I know, you can get them no other place in the world.

YES PLEASE, I'D LIKE 200,000 SLIPS OF PAPER READING 'THIS IS NOT A HOT DOG STAND' AND A PIPE

2009-04-18T13:56:00.001-07:00

[Guest-posted by Jack Womack]

NOW LET ME GET THIS STRAIGHT, YOU PUT THE LARD IN THE COCONUT AND DRINK IT ALL UP

2009-04-18T13:50:00.001-07:00

[Guest-blogged by Jack Womack]

Coconut-lard bread.

Two great tastes that taste great together.

NO, I'M A NUMISMATIST BUT WOULD YOU SELL ME THE FRONT OF YOUR STORE?

2009-04-18T13:47:00.000-07:00

[Guest-blogged by Jack Womack]

THE UNICORNS ARE TAKING A SHORT CUT, SAID THEY'D SEE US ON THE BOAT

2009-04-18T13:41:00.000-07:00

[Guest-blogged by Jack Womack]

"GO FORTH AND SHOP"

2009-04-18T10:30:00.000-07:00

[Guest-blogged by Jack Womack]

As Baby Jesus would be the first to tell you, anything can be found in Barcelona.

The cultural heritage of the Western World!

Those one-of-a-kind items that really pull the room together!

Astoundingly expensive whips!

"No, honey, I don't think it'll be a snap to sneak him past those beagles at JFK."

BARCELONA VS. PROVIDENCE IAAAAAAAAA

2009-04-18T05:16:00.000-07:00

[Guest-blogged by Jack Womack]

How eldritch would H.P. Lovecraft have found Barcelona?

Let's run down the list.

Rugose? Check.

Squamous? Check.

Batrachian? Check.

"Bupkis. I got bupkis."

Ghoul-haunted? Check.

Cephalapodian? Check.

Possible human-fish hybrids in recent past? Check.

Innsmouth look? Check.

Forms reminiscent of horrors even more terrifying than the purely Cthulhoid? Check.

How eldritch would HPL have found Barcelona?

1) Enough so to prompt the writing of a short 78,000 word letter to Clark Ashton Smith.
2) Worse than Iggy's Clam Shack, just outside Warwick, RI.
3) "Howard Lovecraft awoke one morning to find himself transformed into a resident of Brooklyn."

TWO BARACK BURGERS HEAVY ON THE UNGAWAH SAUCE, POR FAVOR

2009-04-17T16:52:00.000-07:00

[Guest-blogged by Jack Womack]

IT'S THE LITTLE DIFFERENCES

2009-04-17T14:46:00.001-07:00

[Guest-blogged by Jack Womack]

UQBARCELONA

2009-04-17T13:15:00.000-07:00

[Guest-blogged by Jack Womack]

A city dreamed into existence by lovers of cities.

Take one part Viriconium.

A big dash of Interzone.

A big handful of New York City c.1982.

Mix.

The topless chihuahuas of Barcelona welcome you with open arms.

Now let's get down to business.

MR. WOMACK RETURNS

2009-04-17T12:24:00.000-07:00

From abroad, and my favorite continental city.

As seen by Mr. Womack.

Coming soon.

SMOKE ON THE WATER

2009-04-16T21:30:00.000-07:00

Señor Coconut and his Orchestra

FLORA

2009-04-15T07:33:00.000-07:00

Plus telekenetic fauna. Sublimely Fortean Gucci commercial from Chris Cunningham.

I USE IT TO FIND LOST TREASURE

2009-04-14T17:58:00.001-07:00

Mom always swore by the stuff .

FUN IN THE PARK, FUN AT THE BEACH!

2009-04-10T17:16:00.000-07:00

"Fly that shit around." --Boomzilla

INUIT THROAT SINGING

2009-04-02T20:50:00.000-07:00

Kathy Keknek and Janet Aglukkaq

FULLY POSABLE, GORGEOUSLY DETAILED, OTAKU-GRADE...

2009-04-01T18:47:00.000-07:00

Obama Action Figure

The Japanese never let me down. Never.

FUCKING HELL

2009-03-31T14:17:00.000-07:00

I met these guys once, over a decade ago. The nicest, least pretentious, most down-to-earth mega-successful gallery artists I've ever met. They build all this stuff out of plastic bits from the hobby shop, melting and destroying it as they go along.

Basically they've been doing it since they were eight or nine years old.

EXTREME SHEEP

2009-03-23T19:26:00.000-07:00

LED Art .

[thanks to Sal]

I FEEL AS THOUGH THE CARNIVAL HAS LEFT TOWN...

2009-03-23T06:44:00.000-07:00

If you go out to the field where they set up, there's trampled grass, crumpled programs, pieces of popcorn, empty Lung-Kuro bottles, and, mysteriously, a paisely ascot, stained with some unspeakable and possibly reptilian ichor.

Mr. Womack and his fabulous Borgesian Book Show have moved on, taking the girl gangs of New York, the flat earthers, and the sex aliens with them.

Dang.

That was awesome. Thank you, Jack.

But we've made him his own set of keys, and look forward to him dropping in again, at the earliest opportunity..

Mr. Womack's Neighborhood: "This is your mind on books."

AND NOW WE RETURN TO THE STARLIGHT ROOM

2009-03-22T14:10:00.000-07:00

[Guest-blogged by Jack Womack]

I'd like to thank our generous host once again for giving me access to the keys to the place this past week. Having barely begun to even touch the surface of what is out there (or rather: in here), I shall return from time to time to proffer items and images from the Old Weird America and et alia.

Let us remember the eternal watchwords for our times:

"Once again, we have graphically illustrated the fact that we know very little about some aspects of human behavior."

--J.C.Rupp, M.D.
Journal of Forensic Sciences, Vol 18, No. 3
July 1973
"The Love Bug"

IF I HAD A RAZOR I'D CUT YOUR THROAT JUST TO SEE WHAT RAN OUT OF IT

2009-03-22T09:31:00.000-07:00

[Guest-blogged by Jack Womack]

It was late morning in early May, with the sun shining and the foothills fading in and out along the horizon. I parked the car.

The place was one of those big old houses with a coach house in the back surrounded by eucalyptus trees and white acacias. All I knew about my caller was that he needed to find out something about a redheaded woman, and did something in the Valley with aerojets. The woman's name was Thelema, as near as I could make out. Okie version of Thelma, I guessed. I’d made a couple of phone calls and found out the owner seemed to have established some kind of Bohemian Grove in the heart of Pasadena, where bohemians could gather, sit with their legs in their laps, and sip absinthe through lumps of sugar. It didn't sound like rocket science.

A stubby fellow opened the door when I rang. His hair color looked as natural as oranges in a Hollywood grocery. He wore an ascot that appeared to have been tied around 1880. It didn't quite succeed in holding up his jowls. His face was hard and white as cold mutton fat and he didn’t look healthy.

“Marlowe’s the name,” I said. "Here to see Jack Parsons."

“Clearly.”

BUT...

2009-03-21T22:38:00.000-07:00

Guy's Guide To The Flipside, that's the old weird Vancouver.

Virtually all of that is gone, now, in the Regooding.

I know this, increasingly, as an old weird Vancouverite.

NEW YORK VS. VANCOUVER: LET'S LOOK AT THE RECORD

2009-03-21T18:13:00.000-07:00

[Guest-blogged by Jack Womack]

On the left: Women of New York, 1869, a study of the naughty women of Manhattan between Fulton and 59th Streets, as well as the criminal behavior of their associates, between the years of 1868 and 1869.

On the right: Guy's Guide to the Flipside, 1993, a full accounting of all naughty places and doings in Vancouver, B.C., greater British Columbia, no doubt a large part of Alberta, and possibly bits of Saschatchewan[SIC].

Resolved: that the Boston Tea Party brought results.

WELL???!??

2009-03-21T17:54:00.000-07:00

[Guest-blogged by Jack Womack]

A correspondent writes:

>>Before your guest stint ends, allow me to make a specific request. You can't forget one of my personal favorites:

>>Menstruation: Its Cause and Cure by Raymond Bernard, Ph.D.

Well, while somehow I don't have that particular work by the author of (naturally) The Hollow Earth (1964)....

THE OLD WEIRD AMERICA, PT. 2

2009-03-21T17:48:00.000-07:00

[Guest-posted by Jack Womack]

SCOOBY DON'T!!!

AND YOU THOUGHT THE INTERN SHOULD DO THE COVER BECAUSE?

2009-03-21T17:38:00.000-07:00

[Guest-posted by Jack Womack]

YOU GOT DAMES? WE GOT SLABS!

2009-03-21T17:19:00.000-07:00

[Guest-posted by Jack Womack]

AND THE LORD DID GROAN

2009-03-21T16:55:00.000-07:00

[Guest-posted by Jack Womack]

Resolved: that the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel were, in fact, dinosaurs.

THERE'LL ALWAYS BE AN ENGLAND

2009-03-21T16:47:00.001-07:00

[Guest-blogged by Jack Womack]

Special bonus point: Ms. McKinney is the evident owner of the world's first cloned dog, so-called.

WELL, IF YOU MUST

2009-03-21T16:41:00.001-07:00

[Guest-blogged by Jack Womack]

GEAR

2009-03-21T16:01:00.001-07:00

[Guest-blogged by Jack Womack]

Pete Best's career took considerably different turns following his departure from the Beatles.

THE OLD WEIRD AMERICA

2009-03-21T15:32:00.000-07:00

[Guest-blogged by Jack Womack]

Why Batman's antisocial tendencies grew, over the years.

I'LL ZIG, YOU'LL ZAG, WE'LL SWIRL

2009-03-21T13:06:00.000-07:00

[Guest-posted by Jack Womack]

Uh, er, well now then there...

Oh. Ohhhhh. Well, sure. Of course.

For further information, google A) Alfred Lawson; B) the Zig-Zag and Swirl Theory.